About Sean Belman

I make pottery at the wheel in my home studio in the East Rock neighborhood of New Haven, CT., and on the porch of our summer cabin in the mountains of northeast Vermont. Most of my work is functional: dinnerware, vases, lamps and planters, meant to be used daily. My current pots, I hope, take some influence from my New England garden surroundings, local hikes and weather, as well as certain types of Japanese and European pottery, and the everyday vessels of my childhood. The potters I most admire are Lucie Rie (for her forms and delicacy), Duncan Grant (for his loose graphic glazes), Richard Batterman (for his modesty and usefulness), and George Ohr (for his eccentricity).

I've always enjoyed making things with my hands — painting, gardening, cooking, sewing. I took my first pottery classes in 2015 with the excellent teachers at La Mano Pottery in New York City, where I lived for 30+ years. (I was lucky enough to live directly across from La Mano and would carry my wet pots home to dry, dodging traffic). Pottery is not a craft for the impatient. The heat of the kiln transforms glaze in ways that are not entirely explicable even to the expert. It's been said that it takes 30 years to become a master potter; so at age 76, will I at last throw the perfect bowl?

When I began potting, my goal was to make my own dinnerware to use at home, celebrating domestic pleasures, the joy of eating and drinking or fresh-cut flowers arranged in a vase. Now that my dinnerware is overflowing the cupboards, my goal is to keep creating and to share my work with others.    

My philosophy is to make pots inexpensive enough to break, beautiful enough to keep forever. My work is food safe, dishwasher safe and oven-proof, but inevitably things break or chip, usually the items we love and use most often. If you want to avoid breakage, wash by them by hand.

Of all pots, the mug is the one I have the most intimate relation with. I raise it to my lips, I cradle it, I wash it. Daily, several times a day. I have favorites. I select or reject them according to my mood — coffee, tea, hot toddy. This is the beauty of hand-made pottery — that it lives side by side with us not calling for attention, not needy, but allowing slow discoveries of depth and detail over time by daily contact.