Moss green and grey skies: how the Pacific Northwest shaped my palette
For me, a colour is never just a colour. The slate greys on my stoneware vases and the muted moss greens curling along the rims of my decorative plates are memories before they are glazes — fragments of drizzle on cedar bark, fern unfurling after a wet morning, the hush of a forest floor near my childhood home outside Seattle. Years later, in my Barcelona studio with the Mediterranean sun pouring through the window, I still reach for those Pacific Northwest tones first.
I trained as a painter before I ever touched a wheel, and that training left me impatient for surface. The palette I carry into clay is the same one I learned to mix as a girl: Paynes grey thinned with water, raw umber bruised toward green, a yellow ochre so cold it reads almost as moss. When I throw a vessel, I am thinking about the colour of light filtered through a stand of Douglas firs, or the lichen that clings to basalt along the Hood Canal.
It surprises people that someone working under the bright Catalan sky would reach for such quiet colours. But quietness travels well. A friend who picked up one of my grey bowls at a craft market in Melbourne told me it reminded her of rain on the windows of a tram in Fitzroy. Another collector, back in Sydney, said the moss green reminded her of the rock pools at Bondi after a southerly buster. That is when I understood: these tones are not regional. They are emotional, and emotions are portable.
The wet forests behind the glaze
I grew up in a small town north of Seattle where the rain was a kind of architecture. It built the moss that carpeted every fallen branch, softened every garden path, and painted the sky in fifty shades of grey from October through May. My mother, a botanical illustrator, would take me into the woods with a tin of watercolours to match the moss to a swatch in her palette. She never quite succeeded, and that failure became permission to chase a colour without ever having to land on it exactly.
When I began making ceramics in my twenties, those watercolour sessions came back. A glaze is a kind of painting, but it is also a chemistry problem and a firing gamble. I started blending commercial stains — iron oxide, cobalt carbonate, copper carbonate — until they approximated the soft, waterlogged greens I remembered. The greys came later, mostly from reduction firings where the flame pulled oxygen out of the clay and left that bruised, charcoal-edged tone you see on the outside of my coffee cups.
Translating atmosphere into ceramic surface
There is a particular thing that happens in the late morning under coastal overcast — the light is flat, even, almost weightless. I have spent years trying to recreate that light in glaze. It is similar to the way a photographer learns to read weather; if you are interested in flattering outdoor portraits, you begin to notice the way grey skies wrap filters. On a clay surface, that softness shows up as a satin finish rather than a gloss, a glaze that seems to absorb light instead of bouncing it back.
My decorative plates often begin as small oil sketches where I paint the colour field first, then translate the brushwork into carved or slip-trailed line. The translation work — turning colour field into tactile line — is what I love most about working in clay.
From Seattle fog to Costa Brava clay
After art school I moved first to Portland, then to Barcelona. The light here is louder, more theatrical, and the clay itself is different. I work with a Catalan stoneware, but I also keep a small stock of clay I gathered from a beach near Tossa de Mar. If you want to try the same approach, I have written about how to source local clay from the Mediterranean coast, walking through the washing, settling and testing process.
The Mediterranean clay fires warmer and redder than the Pacific Northwest stoneware I grew up around, so my grey glazes need a little more iron and a slightly higher cone. My glaze chemistry has had to adapt to a new landscape, even when the palette itself has stayed close to home.
Why Australians respond to these tones
I have shipped work to collectors in Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth and Hobart, and the response is always the same: the colours feel familiar. Tasmania in particular has a climate that rhymes with the Pacific Northwest — wet winters, eucalypt forests that read silver-green from a distance, coastlines wrapped in fog for half the year. A potter in Launceston once told me my moss glaze looked exactly like the lichen on a Huon pine in the Styx Valley.
Australians have a quiet relationship with grey — wool from a heritage Merino flock, weathered paling fences in Byron Bay, pewter mugs in an old Adelaide pub. My stoneware sits comfortably in homes decorated with Australian native art and the muted interiors of Sydney's inner west. When I supply Australian studios, I usually route my Albany slip orders through BHC Clay Smith, a small supplier serving Australian and European studio potters for decades. A particular shade of green-grey — eucalyptus after rain — keeps surfacing in the Australian landscape, and that is the shade I am usually chasing in the kiln.
Hands in clay: workshops and the tactile memory
I run small workshops from a converted mechanic's garage in the Gràcia neighbourhood, and once a year I take the show on the road to Australia, usually Sydney or Melbourne. The workshops pair hand-building on the wheel with a long, slow lunch of local wine and tapas. People arrive thinking they are here to make a bowl, and they leave remembering the weight of the clay and the colour of the glaze. Some translation exercises follow the same process I describe in my guide on abstract art in clay translating paintings into sculpture, though on a smaller, faster scale.
Most of my Australian attendees arrive already carrying some version of the palette I work in. They grew up walking through wet bush, watching mist roll off a harbour, sitting under a fig tree in a courtyard in summer. They do not need me to teach them the colour. I am only there to help them hold it.
Bringing these colours home
A few suggestions for collectors and curious visitors who want to live with grey and moss green without waiting for a commission slot:
- Start with one strong piece — a large plate or tall vase — rather than a set. A bold grey surface anchors a room and lets smaller pieces breathe.
- Pair the moss green with warm timbers. Blackbutt, spotted gum and Tasmanian oak sit comfortably next to my green glazes and echo the bark tones I was reaching for.
- Look for the imperfect. Reduction firings leave their own kind of weather on the surface — a streak here, a blush there. That variation is the point.
- Visit in person if you can. A glaze photograph flattens what is really a three-dimensional experience. Workshops and open studio days are the best way to read the surface.
- Follow along on Instagram for new releases, and subscribe to the mailing list if you want first refusal on pieces before they go to the website.
If you are travelling to Barcelona, the studio door is open most Saturdays. Bring curiosity, wear something you do not mind getting clay on, and let the wheel do the rest. On a wet afternoon in the studio, with the glaze firing in the back, the distance between the Pacific Northwest and the Mediterranean closes. Follow new work and workshop dates on Instagram, or join the mailing list for early access to pieces and pop-up events across Australia and Europe.