About the Artist

It feels as though I was born with an urge to create.

I was raised in a household without many "things". We were 13 children in a household where "making do" and pitching in were the way. There was very little room for decorative items, and certainly no money for them. Functionality trumped decoration hands down. Practicality ruled the day.

As for space in the house, there wasn't much. We played in the great outdoors, whether softball in the quiet country street or adventures in the woods. 

My aesthetics were formed in that place and time.

My tools growing up were pencils and crayons and, if unlined paper was in short supply, the cardboards from my father's shirts.

When I got old enough to babysit, I added some cash to the birthday dollars from my uncle, and bought Craypas oil pastels and a real drawing pad.

A lack of training nearly made me give up on drawing, at age 14. But if you are born with a need to make art, something will find its way to the surface, and I began to write, just for myself, just to give expression an outlet somehow. 

In the earliest days of marriage, with my husband at a street fair in Greenwich Village in NYC, I bought four stacking mugs from a potter. In the months and years that followed, I turned them over and around many times in my hands. The bottoms were smooth brown clay with tiny rough bits in it. The mugs were glazed gray and blue, and specks of brown from the clay beneath had migrated through the glaze during the kiln firing. They all were broken long ago, but I can still see them in my mind's eye.

I did not see why I, too, could not make functional art. I began my pottery career in 1985, when I was already the mother of two children, at Kean College's ceramics studio in Union, New Jersey. After about a year I bought my own kickwheel and put it in my basement. A year or so later I bought my first electric kiln.

Nearly 30 years after beginning at Kean, I still write, but nowadays mostly for my blog. I still draw, and have taken many classes over time. In the studio, the old kickwheel is adjacent to my new electric wheel. The old kiln sits beside a newer one with a digital programmer on it. My day job takes place in the second incarnation of Mimi Stadler Pottery studio, in Hillside, New Jersey. I'm still downstairs, but my current studio workshop sits adjacent to my gallery, The Gallery Downstairs. The work is refined constantly, yet the surface decoration still bears strong influences of the woods of my childhood. And many of the forms still tend to be practical...with creative quirks.