Hand Painted Mug

Alex Matisse came south at eighteen to learn something his family could not teach him. The name is the one you're thinking of — Henri was his great-grandfather — and Alex has spent most of his working life declining to mention it. “I wanted to build something that was my own,” he said once. A potter, he meant, not an artist; he's particular about that distinction. So he left college, turned up in North Carolina, and apprenticed under Mark Hewitt, learning the slow way, at the wheel, for years.

In 2010 he built a brick kiln on a tobacco farm in Madison County, one that could hold two and a half thousand degrees for three days running. No gas line. No road a truck could come down. He named the pottery for the road the farm sat on, and he and Connie threw every pot by hand. He could have stayed there — a potter with that name and that training would never have wanted for collectors. He built a factory instead.

East Fork now employs a hundred and twenty-five people in Asheville at a minimum wage Alex set at roughly three times North Carolina's, using clay from the Southeast and glazes Connie mixes herself. The plates have a fullness at the rim you won't find on anything drawn by an industrial designer. It's a different ambition than you'd expect from that surname, and I'd argue a better one — not a precious object, but a good table, set for as many people as possible. The hand painted pieces are meant to be mixed: with each other, and with whatever you already love.