Jan Richardson began creating ceramics in 1960, but her love of craft goes back to a young childhood surrounded by creative women. From her roots in fine craft to her current extraterrestrial-inspired abstract wall pieces, Jan’s art spans genres and generations. Her curiosity and career in clay have led her across the globe. From her childhood in Long Island to her first clay class in Santa Barbara and to this day, Jan’s need to create sustains her.
Her first business was making and selling hand-crafted clothing. After settling in Knoxville, Maryland, Jan was the proprietor, head artist, and designer for Windy Meadows for thirty years. She and her crew of local artists recreated their rural Maryland architecture in handmade ceramic miniature to critical acclaim. From Maryland, Jan moved to St. Petersburg, where she closed the Windy Meadows line and returned to independent creating.
Not content to remain a solely practicing artist, Jan has also been a teacher, member, and promoter of her local ceramics communities throughout her sixty year career. Jan is currently teaching at the Morean Center for Clay in St. Petersburg, Florida and at the Safety Harbor Art and Music Center in Safety Harbor, Florida.
In her current body of work, her early love of indigenous art and geometric pattern have culminated in a collection of vessels designed to honor and echo that ethos. She asks us to look at the commonalities of pattern and design between ancient cultures and to consider what it was that they were communicating. Jan’s newest works are no longer simply functional objects, but vessels to carry the imagination to the farthest reaches of the universe.