For those of us lucky enough to call Hood River home, there’s a good chance you’ve seen local potter James Diem’s ceramics displayed around town and at local art fairs — like the upcoming Hood River Valley Harvest Fest this weekend at the Waterfront.
Diem sells 60-percent of his work at juried art fairs across the region, in an average of 12 shows per year, with the other 40-percent sold in Northwest galleries. And even though he’s been busy preparing for Harvest Fest, that’s not the only upcoming event on the calendar.
“After Harvest Fest, I have two shows in November — the Tri Cities and Spokane,” he said. “Locally, I always have work at the Columbia Art Gallery, but I’m really excited this holiday season about a pop-up style gallery, organized by Cynthia Caudill and Jill Warilla, housed at the restored US Bank Building at 301 Oak.”
The gallery, at Third and Oak, will be open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Nov. 1 and running through Dec.7.
“The pop-up gallery will be filled with tons of gift-perfect art from all your local favorites,” James Diem said. 301, the former city building, is owned by Steffen Lunding and Claudia Lane, who restored it in 2011-12 and operated it as a gallery and wine bar until late 2013.
Diem describes his style as highly functional and elegant, accentuated with vibrant glaze combinations. “Lately, I have been working with patterned textures to emphasize and embellish handles and other user contact points,” he said. “I have a few forms, including a large mirror — big enough for a bathroom — that no one else is really making.”
Diem is a fulltime potter, husband and father, and his days are a balance between the three. “I always get up and get the kids (6-year-old Aneka and soon-to-be 4-year-old Forrest) and (wife) Anna off to work and school, making breakfast and lunches, helping get the kids dressed and brushing teeth, etc.,” he said. “After everyone heads out, I’ll check email and get out to the studio by 9 or so to start the workday.”
He’s in the studio usually until 4 p.m., “unless there’s a deadline, then I often work late, especially during the summer months when the art fairs are concentrated,” he said. “Until this year, I had the kids one or two days a week and worked in the studio the others and often on weekends.
“The studio often requires after-hours attention,” he added. “Most days, I have to go out after dinner and flip pots or cover work up, load or unload kilns.”
His studio work “moves in cycles,” he said. He usually spends three weeks “throwing and trimming” and another week “glazing and firing and packing for the art fair or galleries.” From start to finish, the process goes something like this:
“When I’m in the throwing cycle, the first thing I do in the morning, after wet mopping for dust, is process the clay,” he said. “I buy two different clay bodies (clay formulated with specific characteristics), a porcelain and a porcelainious stoneware, from a clay supplier in Portland. I use a pug mill to mix the two clay bodies together, producing a custom clay body that is as bright as a traditional porcelain, yet a little more forgiving to throw and hand build with. I typically throw 20 to 40 pots a day and trim, removing the excess clay and creating feet for the pots from the previous day. When the pots are dry, they are bisque fired (at) 1,940 degrees to prepare them for glazing. The pots are then glazed (glaze is essentially a thin layer of glass that is formulated to shrink at the same rate as the clay body when fired), then glaze fired (at) 2,300 degrees.”
All that’s left is to unload the kiln and pack the finished pieces.
Diem appreciates “both the physical and mental aspects of the job. I love how the wheel demands you stay in the present and activates both your mind and your body,” he said. “You’re working essentially with refined dirt, but in minutes, you can produce and immediately (see) the results of your labor. Plus moving 50-pound boxes of clay all day keeps you in shape.”
There’s also the camaraderie with fellow artists.
“I consider myself friends with all the potters in town,” he said. “We clay people are of the same tribe.”
The hardest part of being a potter? “I’m a gregarious fellow; the studio can be kinda lonely sometimes.”
Diem grew up in Greenville, Mich. His parents were jewelers, and he learned the art of silversmithing at an early age. He received a K-12 Art Education with an emphasis in ceramics from Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Mich.
“For an art teaching degree, you have to survey all the art medias: painting, printmaking, sculpture, drawing, digital art design, photography and ceramics,” he explained. “I fell in love with clay and the clay studio.”
Diem has been working as a professional potter since he and Anna moved to Hood River in 2004 — but Anna had previously lived here in 2000, when she accepted a temporary speech language pathology position with the Early Intervention program with the Hood River County School District.
“In 2000 … Anna was looking for an adventure after graduate school,” Diem explained. “I had spent several summers in Bandon while in high school, working with my uncle, who was a building contractor. I had always loved the raw beauty of Oregon and suggested she check it out. My wife has one of those professions (Speech Language Pathologist) that is always in demand. She interviewed all around the state and had multiple job offers, including Bend and Brookings.”
Diem “came out to visit multiple times over the course of the year, and we promised each other that we would move back if we could.”
At the end of the school year, Anna moved back to Grand Rapids and the two were married. When a fulltime position opened up with the district in 2004, “we were able to make the jump back,” Diem said.
In those early years, Diem worked at the former Eliot Glacier Public House (now Solera Brewery) in Parkdale, “pouring beers.” He also worked as a substitute teacher and “did many residencies in the schools with Arts in Education to make ends meet,” he said. “Initially on moving out here (to Hood River), I produced a line of jewelry, and later sold some abstract photography as well,” he said. “After the (economic) crash in 2008, people seemed to more easily justify purchasing functional work, so I began to focus exclusively on clay.”
These days, he doesn’t have to travel far to get to work each morning; Diem’s workspace is right outside his front door — he has a two-car detached garage that he’s converted into his studio. “It’s a dynamic (read messy) working studio, so I really only open my studio to the public by appointment,” he said.
Besides his local shows, Diem can be found on his website, hawkeyedesign.com, his Facebook page (James Diem Ceramics), or by calling 541-354-9966.
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