Introducing Animalia Pottery to Vintage Halloween

Vintage Halloween Store is now carrying fun and quirk pottery ornaments from Animalia Pottery! You can check out the initial offerings here. 

I met Todd Shelby and Karen Pritchett at their Animalia booth quite a few years ago in Albuquerque, NM at Weem's Artfest and fell in love with their pottery--it's fun, bright, and quirky and really makes a festive statement. 

Here's a little Q & A with Todd and Karen to introduce them to you:

VH: How did you both become interested in pottery?

TS: We met at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. This is a tuition free liberal arts college for poor Appalachian kids who work ten hours a week on campus. Karen and I both eventually worked at the Berea College Pottery making traditional stoneware. It was after graduation that we concentrated more on color and surface design which led to our current work.

VH: What defines your style?

TS: Our style is quirky, colorful, whimsical and definitely formed by time spent in New Mexico the last twenty years.  

VH: Tell us what inspires you to create?

TS: I think we're lucky to have been able to work full time as artists for twenty five years... Inspiration comes from the world around us, a consistent urge to work with our hands, momentum from past creative endeavors, and a visual vocabulary that we continue to build. We've also learned to keep working even when inspiration eludes us.

VH: Favorite Halloween memory from childhood?

KP: My older sister was obsessed with Barnabas Collins from the television show "Dark Shadows".  Our bedroom walls were decorated with drawings and paintings of vampires and bedtime stories were always ghost stories...  I guess my Halloween memories are really memories of my sister Janie and the creativity and coziness of those dark chilly nights.  

TS: I was probably 5 years old, living in Alabama, and Halloween was so stormy with rain, wind and lightning that my parents reinvented trick-or-treating. They stood behind each door in our house,  opening after our knock and pretending to be different neighbors. "Is this the Shelby children?" they would ask while giving us candy and admiring our costumes.  

VH: Your favorite Halloween theme?

TS: Weird hand-carved pumpkins, day of the dead, ghosts and witches.

Jenn:)