Dreamers With Empty Hands They Sigh For Exotic Lands

It's autumn in New York, it's good to live it again

Oct 02, 2025

As an experiment, I would ask everyone who reads this piece to make sure that they are reading it on a purple background, not the whit background that I usually see on SubStack.. You can usually reach the purple page by clicking the title of this essay. Please let me know if you like the purple page better than the blank white page. Thank you.

I think that I have mentioned before that it’s uncanny how different people bring similar items to the shop, at roughly the same time.

Currently, I am shooting for a Southwestern auction. I have posted about some of what is in the auction here, and here.

One consignor has artwork, one consignor has jewelry, and today, we had a consignor walk in with southwestern pottery; we now have the trifecta!

It’s not an extensive collection, but it has some very nice pieces.

The shape of this pot is known as a, “Seed Pot”, and this example is just over 4 inches in diameter. The decorations are of a style called, Sgraffito, which is essentially a scraping away of the surface of a pot, creating geometric designs.

The potter’s name is Norman Lansing, and while he creates art in several mediums, ceramics is his specialty. Mr. Lansing, is from the Ute Mountain band of the Ute tribe in, Colorado (though I am not certain where he lives).

Norman, is known for his strong, graphical style, but he also crafts some remarkably subtle pots, sadly, I don’t have examples of those. But these are pretty damned nice! This pot is titled, “Crossing at dawn”.

This pot, is titled, “Running Bear”. If you look closely, you can see each, individual stroke of his tool that scraped away the thin layer of clay. There are thousands of individual cuts on this small pot, with no mistakes! The concentration, and patience, required is far beyond my ken.

I shot these pots with my Zeiss Makro-Planar lens, and focus-stacked each shot. There was just too much intricate detail on these pots, detail that would be lost where the focus would fall off, so I focus-stacked the shots, and I am glad that I did.

This pot is titled, “Weather Wind”. I was tempted to make this a B&W shot, but I just couldn’t make myself do it (at least for this article), I might turn it tomorrow, at work.

I would love to be able to create detailed graphics on my pots, but I know my limitations. I will observe, and appreciate the work of artists such as, Norman Lansing, instead.