Frances Palmer’s work has been featured in numerous design publications such as T, The New York Times style magazine, Elle Decor, Martha Stewart Living, and others. Bergdorf Goodman, Barney’s of New York and other high end have carried her pieces. This month, Artisan published her lavishly illustrated memoir, Life in the Studio: Inspiration and Lessons in Creativity.
I love to read memoirs, especially memoirs of potters and gardeners. This is both. Palmer, who lives in a rural town in what we in Connecticut call the Gold Coast, home to many affluent residents with jobsin New York City, has a beautiful purpose-built barn for a studio. Actually, she and her husband did not initially build it with the intention that she take over the whole thing, but you know how potters are. She makes her pots, mostly vases, on the first floor. She uses the second floor to pack and ship them and more importantly photograph them. She stores her dahlia tubers in the cool basement.
Outside the studio, on an old fenced-in tennis court, she grows masses of flowers in raised beds. She cuts and gathers the flowers and uses them to create extravagant arrangements in her vases. She photographs these tableaus in the natural light of an east window of the barn in the morning and a west window in the afternoon.
Palmer thinks of herself as primarily a potter, and it is pots that she sells. However, it’s her dramatic photos that have brought her 72,100 followers on Instagram. She also has a horticultural reputation and teaches a class on growing dahlias at the New York Botanical Garden.
In addition to vases, Palmer makes cake stands, fruit bowls with pedestals, pitchers, and planters embellished with fluting, sprigs, and beading. She works on the wheel, hand builds and uses her own drape molds. She works primarily with porcelain but also uses a red earthenware clay which she glazes only on the inside. Recently she added a wood burning kiln to her studio.
In Life in the Studio, Palmer shares her methods of making, tips on growing flowers, and a few favorite recipes. She tells us how she and her work have grown and evolved through the years, how she came to photography, and what her hopes are for the future. If that isn’t enough, the book is nicely laid out and seductively pretty.
978-1-57965-905-9
Before the holidays, my good friend NIkki Mutch gave me a copy of Leonard Everett Fisher’s The Pottersthat she rediscovered amidst the many children’s books in her collection. Lucky for me, she thought it belonged in my book collection. And belong it does. What a little treasure!
Fisher, born in 1924, has illustrated over 250 children’s books, 88 of which he wrote. He studied with such luminaries as Reginald Marsh and Serge Chermayeff, and has won numerous awards. After the series on American crafts workers, he illustrated most of his books with vibrant paintings yet his scratch board illustrations, even in this age of color, still speak to us.
to make a Cyclops costume based on his book of that name. Nevertheless, somehow, I knew nothing of this delightful early book, The Potters. How wonderful to have it in my hands now.