About the Artist
Fishing has always been a part of my life. As a child, I spent many days with my family along the Monterey Bay coastline. We fished many spots along the bay, from 17 Mile Drive to Santa Cruz. I knew the pier at Moss Landing well. As I got older, I learned about the steelhead that swam through our local creek seasonally. During the rest of the year, there were “trout” to be caught. These were of course juvenile steelhead, which I eventually came to understand. In the spring and through the summer, the local farm ponds had some great bass fishing. Eventually I taught myself to fly fish with a rod that I put together from broken parts of my brother’s and cousin’s rods. It got me going in the right direction. I would come home and practice casting while sitting on the low fence that separated our yard from our neighbor’s, because if I were to ever fish from a canoe, I would need to do this. I had read this in a magazine article and took the words to heart.
Our family cat obliged me with a pull on the line every once in a while as it charged the piece of yarn tied to my leader. For a young kid, this was great fun. It was even more fun when I cast Muddler Minnows to bass. We would goop up Muddlers with floatant and cast into farm ponds, twitch, wait, twitch, wait, and then strip them in. Wham! I never got tired of that.
I was 12 years old when I taught myself to fly fish and tie flies. I also began making and repairing rods and raising my own worms. Good worms were hard to get in the summer, because the ground dried up. I never did go for the red worms sold in the tackle stores, and night crawlers were too big. Besides that, they cost money. I could grow worms for free. There was nothing like a good earthworm for bass and trout.
With all this energy going into my fishing at that time, I started drawing fish, too. I started with bass and moved on to trout, steelhead, and fishing equipment. I copied a lot of photos from magazines. It was a good place to start. Nowadays, I take a lot of photos myself and sometimes use them as a starting point for drawings or paintings. Most of my paintings now are done with Chinese brushes and black ink.
The summer after my sophomore year in high school, I became interested in ceramics. I have been working with clay ever since. I went on to earn a B.A. and master’s degree in ceramics. I also have a secondary teaching credential and taught ceramics at the high school level for five years.
I still work in ceramics as my main medium. For the past 27 years, I have been firing in wood-fired kilns. I built my present kiln in 2002. I fire for 72 hours, using almost three and a half cords of wood. Typically, I do not glaze the outside of my pieces. Instead, I depend on the buildup of wood ash to accumulate and melt on the surface of my pieces to form a glaze or finish. Besides tableware, I make ceramic sculptures and one-of-a-kind pottery. My ceramics can be seen on my Web site, www.thekilnshed.net. You can contact me at ccalimpong@thekilnshed.net.
Conrad Calimpong
