About Us
Jack Sexton
By Andrea Beam
Gazette Lifestyle Reporter
The Gaston Gazette
Reprinted with permission
After working in textiles all his life, Jack Sexton found himself at 40. After some exploring, he decided to make his passion his profession. Now, he spends his days behind the potter's wheel.
'Round and 'round it goes; where it ends, nobody knows - except for Jack Sexton, who guides the whirling clay between his palms.
Subtle caresses from his fingertips transform a block of mud into a graceful oval.
It is smooth and rounded, and for a moment the hourglass shape beneath his fingers could be the figure of a beautiful woman, a tulip's bloom, or an exquisite vase.
In three minutes, Sexton has created a flower pot.
He uses his thumb to fold down one part of the tulip-shaped lip of his creation. The bottom edges are trimmed with a sharp potter's knife. He lifts the pot, still wet, from the wheel.
In 48 hours the pot will dry leather-hard, ready for the kiln, where it will be baked, and later, hand painted.
For something that takes years of skill and just as much heart, you'd thing Sexton had been at the wheel all his life. A born artist.
But the art form never caught his eye until he was 40 years old - when the recession of the late 1970s knocked him out of his job as a textile supervisor in a mill.
Frustrated, Sexton went to college in search of a new, more secure career. He took a few business courses, but it was an extracurricular art class that held his attention.
"I decided pottery was what I wanted to do," he says, working in his concrete-floor pottery shop in Lowell. "I never had anything challenge me like that, and I guess that's why I wanted to do it."
Sexton also had a wife and five kids to feed. He always had drawn a little, but never had once strayed from paper and pencil.
"The first time I tried to make something on the wheel, this one-pound piece of clay almost beat me to death. I intended - was determined - I could do that. And it never ends, even after this long. There is always something new, a new way, a new color, a new shape, a new concept."
Evidence of his creative pursuits are everywhere in his shop, which has been his most recent - and most permanent location.
After leaving Gaston College in the early '80s, he apprenticed at Myrtle Beach, S.C., for several years, until he made it back to Gaston County to begin his own business, JS Pottery - first in his back yard, and then at Laurel Hills Nursery.
But what you see here is not necessarily Sexton's true artistic expression.
"People dictate what you do," says Sexton, who prefers contemporary works fashioned in the unusual colors he experiments with.
"If I did everything I liked I would have to bury it in the back yard. You have to make what people will buy."
Instead, customers clamor for his hand painted pieces, like his signature stoneware painted with blue irises he and his partner, Grace Carr, paint by the dozens.
One of his hand-painted, hand-carved dogwood mugs was among the gifts the recent contingency from the Gastonia Sister Cities Committee took to Gotha, Germany.
You'll also find his collections - created reluctantly at first - of face jugs, a Southern folk variety of pottery, which amuses collectors with their exaggerated re-creations of bulb noses, bulging eyes, buck teeth and slack tongues. The uglier, it seems, the better.
"I told myself I would never do those," he confesses. "I didn't want one of those ugly things in my house. But I made a few and they have sort of grown on me."
Customers now come to Sexton for custom-made pieces for a variety of functions: from kitchen utensil holders to soap pumps and canisters.
"I may make 50 to 150 pieces in a day and spend the next two weeks processing them," says Sexton.
"I can straighten out a mistake quicker than most people can make a piece. Sometimes, it's easier to kill a piece and start over. I never spend more than three minutes (on the wheel) on any piece."
Sexton uses different clays to create different pieces - from those that will yield eating and drinking utensils to those used for sheer decorations.
"I know what I will make from whatever the clay feels like," he says.
Then, the degree to which he fires his works in one of his four kilns determines what the piece will be used for.
At 2,000 degrees, most pottery "seals" for use as cookware; higher temperatures -as high as 2,250 degrees - produce stoneware and porcelain. Firing makes the pottery hard and durable.
After firing, pottery is prepped for painting. Three-dimensional pieces, like flowers or a handle, are added at leather-hard stage.
"You can cut it, you can bend it, you can squash it," he says. "The only limitation you have is your thoughts."
"What I like to do is make pottery," he says. "It's not something you would do if people paid you to do it. There's not enough money in the world to pay you to do it. You have to love it."