A New Way to Price Work | Danny Meisinger | Episode 466

Danny Meisinger | Episode 466

Danny Meisinger have been a potter now for about 30 years. Danny has taken a few college classes but is mostly self taught. Once Danny began making work worth keeping, he has had about 4 evolutions of work, with the forth being pretty new right now. Danny is married and has four children and two grandchildren.

SPONSORS

You can help support the show!

diamondcoretools.com

Use Promo Code: PAUL for $5 off

Number 1 brand in America for a reason. Skutt.com

For all your ceramic needs go to Georgies.com

How important is testing and exploring for keeping your interest in clay?

If I didn’t have it I would be done in a couple of weeks. It’s not that I consciously do it, it’s just who I am. Every pot is leading to the next pot. I have forms that I have held onto for a decade and they have moved slightly over the years. I had a guy ask me something on Facebook about: How do I develop form? and I said, Well, you make one pot first and then you step back and you look at it and then it starts to talk to you. It is like a distillation process. You start out vast and wide where the potential is infinite and you keep refining and refining and refining down to a single point.

How much testing do you usually have in each load, percentage wise is it maybe 5 percent?

Joe Zeller in that glaze calc class said always have 2 glazes in every single kiln. 2 tests. I think about it almost every time I close the kiln door because I am usually tired and I want to go home and so I try to get that done. I have so many mystery glazes in my studio from doing massive amounts of test over the years.

How important are handles to a mug?

People will tell you that your lips touching the mug are the most intimate portion but you don’t touch your lips to a mug nearly as much as you touch your fingers to the handle. I find so many people, oh I am going to get in trouble here, it feels so good when you are pulling a handle to stick your finger down the middle of it and pull. That is the wrong way to make a handle and I will say that emphatically. There you go, anyone out there who does that just hit me. The problem is if you look at the finger it is either going to be the first or the second finger in which the weight of the mug sits on, the shape of that bone is concave, the shape of that mug handle now is also concave, and so it rests on the two knuckles of the point on your finger rather than being…, that handle is convex, it rests in the shape of the bone between the two knuckles. To me that is super important. That is the biggest issue right there. I spend a lot of time working on handles. I like them to fit well.

You have been doing pottery as a career for quite a while. How do you keep your body healthy?

I don’t work out as much as I used to or should. I used to run triathlons until my early thirties. I love running. I don’t cycle as much as I used to. People text and drive to the point, even a colleague was killed on a bicycle, a potter that a lot of us know from NCECA, I am really leery of being on a bicycle anymore. It is a constant battle with me to not feel guilty about not being in the studio and go exercise. It is actually one of the most important things I can do. I am working on it.

How often do you re-evaluate the pricing on your work?

Everyday. There isn’t like a point where I sit down at the end of the year and I need to re-evaluate. That is something I should be doing, but I don’t think like that. I just go with it as it comes to me. Some times I just get pissed off and I think, you know I won’t take less for that pot and I don’t care if I don’t ever sell it. I still have those pots, okay. They are sitting right here behind me and I don’t care. I am not selling them for less.

What tools do you use now for bookkeeping?

I have a 6 column ledger book and a pencil. And I do use a calculator.

When you take time off do you every go on pottery vacations where you go look at other people’s work or do you unplug 100 percent?

I never thought of doing that as a vacation. I have never heard of a rich potter, okay. I have a wife and four kids and I am getting better at being away from home. I used to be I was gone for a day and a half and I would be like it’s time to get back to work. We wake board that’s what we like to do. We like to wake board until we can’t move. And I don’t even think about the studio any more. I just let go for about five or six days and we do that once a year and I work an entire year to make enough money to go do it again.