Beaux Arts potter goes back to nature
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Elisa Petersen/QUAD-CITY TIMES Bill Robbins will be selling pottery like this small stoneware vase this weekend at the Beaux Arts Fair in Davenport. To create the texture, Robbins gave it a shino glaze and sprinkled it with ashes before firing it. Buy this Photo
From his potter’s studio at the top of a hill in northern Scott County, Bill Robbins can look out the window in all four directions.
“A lot of potters live out in the country,” he said. “For a lot of potters, I think the lifestyle is as important as working the clay.”
Robbins put his love of nature into his career when he worked as a seasonal park ranger at national parks in South Dakota, Montana and Utah. And he continues that with his property between Donahue and Dixon, Iowa.
The hilltop site looks out for miles, including land that he is slowly turning into a wildlife refuge, planting 3,000 seedlings on a former hog farm.
“I think it’s a pretty special area, rolling hills, isolated,” he said. “I like the lifestyle. I like being my own boss. I always wanted to live out in the country and turn an abused piece of land into a wildlife refuge.”
Robbins is one of the artists whose work will be on display and for sale in downtown Davenport this weekend during the 55th Beaux Arts Fair, a fundraiser for the Figge Art Museum.
Beaux Arts chairman Tom Magers said there are new activities this year, including spin art and a sidewalk chalk mural in the children’s area.
There are about a dozen first-time presenters, he said, adding, “We’ve got a lot of new artists who have come for the first time.”
A former social worker, Robbins got into pottery after taking classes at the former Davenport Museum of Art from Carl Christiansen, a well-known area potter.
Robbins stopped making pottery for about 10 years and then returned to find a potters guild had formed in the Quad-Cities.
Although he eventually may use the clay in the ground around him, Robbins now gets his clay shipped from a business in Minneapolis. His work is mostly on display at festivals, including Beaux Arts and Riverssance, which is held annually in the Village of East Davenport.
The 62-year-old said he enjoys playing with the idea of typical pottery works.
“Mostly what I do is functional, but I like to throw things on the wheel and then I like to alter them,” he explained.
He has a smaller kiln, the size of a single-unit deep freeze, and he built a larger, propane-fueled kiln nearby that a car could fit inside. The smaller kiln reaches 1,700 degrees while the larger unit can heat up to 2,300 degrees.
His wife, Lucia Dryanski, is a psychiatric nurse at Genesis Medical Center-West Central Park Avenue in Davenport, as well as a musician in her spare time.
Working with clay, Robbins said, gets him both literally and figuratively closer in touch with the earth.
“I’m really centered in nature. I really love nature,” he added. “Earth, wind, fire and water — all those elements are involved in pottery.”
David Burke can be contacted at (563) 383-2400 or dburke@qctimes.com.
IF YOU GO
What: Beaux Arts Fair
When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. today and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday
Where: 2nd Street, between Brady and Iowa streets, downtown Davenport
How much: Free, with donations accepted
Information: BeauxArtsFair.com on the Web
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