If you’ve been to a recent festival, farmers market or craft show in Pocahontas County, chances are, you’ve seen the clay creations of Cynthia Gurreri. Or perhaps you or someone in your household—young or old—has participated in one of her art classes.

Prolific as an individual artist, Gurreri is also eager to share what she has learned. She teaches regular classes at the Pocahontas County Arts Council’s Little Yellow House in Dunmore, at Pocahontas County Parks and Recreation in Marlinton and in after-school programs throughout Pocahontas County. Memorial Day of this year, she also launched an annual art event, dubbed “Artapalooza,” at the Opera House, offering family-friendly instruction, demonstrations and art-based fun.

While most of her current work is throwing pots and creating sculpture, Gurreri has been on a life-long artistic journey. As far back as she can remember, Gurreri says she has always had a paintbrush or pencil in her hand. She took her first oil painting lessons when she was 12 years old and later took as many art classes as she could in high school.

“I’m an art person,” she says. “Even my physical activities are art. My idea of physical activity is dancing.”

“It’s always about creating,” says Gurreri. “It’s always about putting things together. There’s always a need, for me, to make two different things go together.”

For her, this can mean combining painting with pottery, or combining scraps from past pottery projects into new, multidimensional creations.
Gurreri says that it has only been relatively recently that she expanded her palette of materials, pursuing clay and sculpture with a passion.
“I actually went around a circle to start making pottery,” she says. 

Living in Virginia Beach in the early 1980s, Gurreri began making figures out of salt, flour and water, a mixture known as “baker’s clay.” But she says it was a too much work to put into a piece that might only last a year. The humidity of the coastal climate took its toll on those early works.

With an interest in making more durable sculpture, she turned to a pottery instructor at the local community college.

“By the time I got around to mould-making, I was completely addicted,” she says. “For about eight years, it was nothing but pottery.”

Later, between 1994 and 1998, Gurreri worked as a lab assistant at the Virginia Beach Center for the Arts, where she gained more experience throwing pots.

Gurreri says those two experiences, gave her the basic skill set she needed as a potter and the confidence to make the artform her own.

“Between the college course and being the lab assistant was how I got the knowledge of how to mix my own glazes and the actual workings of how to put a studio together,” she says.

The multi-hued glazes on her pieces show off Gurreri’s flair for experimentation.

While Gurreri appreciates the control offered by off-the shelf glazes, she says she likes the adventure and unexpected results that comes with creating her own.

“My glazes are surprising,” she says with a laugh.

Among the distinguishing features of Gurreri’s sculpture are the textures that make you want to reach out and feel the piece in your hands. The secret to these textures is simple: doilies. She presses them into the surface of the soft clay. Thanks to her sister, Gurreri has a box overflowing with doilies, stained red-orange from the clay.

The glazes and textures are only one part of the equation. The heat of the kiln and ambient humidity add more variables to the creative mix of a potter’s life.

“It’s always a surprise,” she says. “There are so many variables, and there are so many things that can go wrong. It is a very challenging medium—much more challenging than painting.”

But the rewards, she says, are worth it.

“It’s like Christmas every time you open the kiln,” Gurreri says. “Ask any potter; it’s all about opening the kiln. You just never know what’s going to come out.”

“When it turns out right and it all comes together, it’s a wonderful thing,” she adds.

While her artistic roots go back to painting and drawing, Gurreri is happiest when her hands are wet with clay and a new piece is taking shape on the table or potter’s wheel in front of her.

“For me, it’s a physical expression of my artistic nature,” she says. “Painting is wonderful. I still like to paint. I like to do painting classes, but this sort of stuff—the dimensionality of it—is just a little bit more fulfilling, because you can really hold it and touch it.”