Today we’d like to introduce you to Loren Lukens

Hi Loren, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.

I was a college art student planning on studying painting and sculpture, when I took a requisite ceramics class and was immediately hooked. Pottery coalesced form and function along with a traditional path of craftmanship that I found appealing given my farm boy upbringing where I learned about natural processes, husbandry and resource responsibility. After several makeshift studios during my college days, I found a serious work space in Santa Fe, NM, and benefitted from the arts and crafts reputation of the community and strong tourist saturation along with reasonable living costs of the mid 70’s. Five years of full time studio work prepared me for my next big change, when my wife and I moved to Seattle, WA in 1979. Renting store front studio space helped me introduce myself to the burgeoning art community and we were able to buy a small house before the Seattle housing market blew up.
In 1997, when our daughter was 16, we found a commercial building with an attached house for sale in a corner of West Seattle that time had forgotten. We lived and worked at Brace Point Pottery for twenty five years. A small retail gallery supplemented my sales to galleries in 20 states and occasional local craft fairs. In 2020, the pandemic ended my wholesale business and I pivoted to more local clientele and representing the work of local painters and printmakers.
Our daughter is a geologist, and when she accepted a professorship at the University of California in Merced, we decided to make another big change. We sold our Seattle property to Deb Schwartzkopf, who has established Rain City Clay studio, a pottery school that maximizes the use of the 7000 sf building. We now live around the corner from Claire, her husband and their young daughter and I have established a new work space in our garage and switched from high fired reduction to cone six electric.
The Central Valley of California could not be more different from Seattle and I am still making the adjustment, but I am finding new colleagues, new forms and glaze applications and new exhibition opportunities.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?

Although I didn’t realize it at the moment, I have been very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, again and again. Pottery sales have provided a sufficient living such that I have never had a real job. Therefore, our ability to purchase property was always in doubt but we have been able to negotiate roadblocks successfully with creative thinking and nontraditional solutions.
To establish my wholesale business, I travelled to East Coast sales events in the 1980’s, sponsored by the American Craft Association, that catered to a growing cadre of galleries exhibiting hand made American Crafts… expensive and risky. But I was able to build a reliable client list that I could build a business around and shipped work to dozens of galleries in twenty states coast to coast.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?

Artists make work for themselves and, if they are lucky, someone likes it enough to make a purchase.
Business people make things for other people and, if they are lucky, they don’t hate themselves for doing it over and over again.
Combining Art and Business is a tricky pairing and success can mean having it both ways. My customers are always asking for the latest thing I am doing, but they really want something just like what they are familiar with, but with a small change. My best artistic work may be the latest innovation, but my most financially successful work is the familiar just before it goes stale. Should it stay or should it go is an artistic and a business conundrum.

Where we are in life is often partly because of others. Who/what else deserves credit for how your story turned out?

I credit my parents, who farm raised me with solid values, work ethic, confidence and curiosity.
Thanks to Ray Kahmeyer, my college professor, who introduced me to clay and taught me to love pottery.
Thanks to Frank Willett, who opened his Santa Fe Pottery studio to me and taught me so much about the business of art as well as the art of living.
Thanks to my wife, Beth, for 50 years of sharing our lives.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lorenlukens.com/new-work.html
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lorenlukens/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/loren.lukens/