Frog Hollow offers not-so-sloppy seconds

Author: Lea Calderon-Guthe

"Hi, Walter, this is happenin'! Come on in. Did you bring your wallet? We're having a sale!" This was Kathy Clarke's jubilant greeting to Walter Salzman of Brandon, Vt. as he walked into the Frog Hollow Craft School's Seconds Sale on Saturday, Nov. 3. Clarke, the studio manager only half-jokingly referred to as the "studio goddess," spent the majority of the sale wrapping sold pottery in newspaper to ensure safe travel and doing chores around the ceramic studio. Yet, even so, she always made time to greet familiar faces at the community-oriented event.

The Seconds Sale, an annual tradition at the Craft School, is a sale of so-called seconds, or pieces of pottery deemed slightly imperfect by the artist. The spread this year included a wide variety of mugs, plates, cups, bowls and the odd sculpture, all under $30 with the majority costing less than $10. Standing out from the tables covered in glazed ceramics were selections of hats and scarves by local knitters and a collection of locally-made sterling silver jewelry that sat atop a stand next to the 'Dollar Store' table.

People filed in and out of the cozy and cluttered, yet well-organized, studio in shifts throughout the six-hour sale, all with positive reactions. The studio remained operational during the sale, and Elissa Denton '07 sat at the wheel most of the morning watching the shoppers.

"A lot of people are coming to do their Christmas shopping, and a lot of people have been impressed with a lot of the work and wanted to know more about the person or the art," Denton said. "Pretty much everyone coming in is having a great time. We've had kids come in that just want to watch people 'play in the mud,' too."

The sale was not just for the benefit of the customers, however. Barbara Nelson, the education director at the Craft School, cited the Seconds Sale as an important fundraiser.

"The Seconds Sale is to help pay for the education program here at Frog Hollow," Nelson said. "The tuition that we charge doesn't cover the costs. It covers some of the costs, it maybe covers the instructors, but it doesn't cover the cost of having this ceramic studio and it doesn't cover the heat and the electric and the property taxes and repairs - all those things. We're always struggling to raise money for the things we need."

A sale of less-than-perfect pieces might not seem like a good way to raise money, but the supposed seconds got no less public admiration than their more expensive counterparts in the Frog Hollow Art Gallery. Salzman, visiting the Seconds Sale because his wife, Nancy, is a frequent potter at the Craft School, thoroughly enjoyed the works on display. He stood admiring a ceramic, polka-dotted dinosaur with a child on its back for several minutes.

"I think everything they have out here is beautiful," Salzman said. "I'm very impressed. I'm thinking of buying this dinosaur. I wonder why it's only a dollar. It's so cute for only a dollar."

The high quality of the work for sale was due in part to the fact that many of the pieces were not true seconds, and even those that were may have only been imperfect by the artist's standards, not the purchaser's.

"A lot of these things are not actually seconds. Some of them are seconds, but a lot of these are students' works and some of the students make some really beautiful things," Nelson said. "People want to buy things upstairs [in the gallery], but it's expensive, so when they see a seconds sale, they come here because there are still some really nice pieces at very good prices."

A practicing potter herself, Denton was able to shed some light on why an artist might call a piece a second that anyone else would call a success.

"A second means that the artist looked at it and there's something that they don't like about it enough that they wouldn't sell it with one of their regular works," Denton said. "They're just not as happy with it as they could be, but the mugs still hold water, you know?"

Whether the art for sale should be called seconds or successes was not the main issue at the end of the day, though. The people who visited the Seconds Sale came because the Frog Hollow Craft School is a beloved part of the Middlebury community - it tickles the town's creative talent and fosters a sense of community pride in the artwork that its students produce and the bonds that are formed within its clay dust-powdered walls. Salzman's description of his wife's experiences at the school echoed this sentiment.

"[The school] is very nice. She's made a lot of friends and she knows a lot of people here," Salzman said. "We participate in a lot of activities that go along with Frog Hollow, too. I think [pottery] is a very nice thing, a creative thing, for the people here to do. I might even get into it myself - someday."