Deborah M Pittman's Page

Deborah Pittman is currently Professor of clarinet and studies in American Music at CSUS Sacramento, where she’s taught since 1991. A native New Yorker, Ms. Pittman moved to Sacramento in 1981 to play second and bass clarinet with the Sacramento Symphony, a position she held from 1981-1990. After leaving the symphony, she began to explore other outlets for artistic expression.

“I devoted 45 years of my life to the clarinet. It was my first love and it has taken me to some wonderful places. I discovered the joy of playing with clay during the summer of 1994. Since that time, I have become addicted to the feel of wet spinning mud, to the smell of wet mud, to all the possibilities that wet mud holds. No one ever told me you could make music without making a sound.  I will forever be a mud woman.”

Current Series:
 Wandering Ancestors, a series of tripod-pots. Each pot is thrown on the wheel and altered by hand. The result is a fat pot with the volume and symmetry of a traditional wheel-thrown piece on top and a sense of movement that comes from the three feet on the bottom.
Crusted Earth, a series of pots that ate wheel-thrown and textured to create a skin that mimics several earth-like surfaces and hug the pots like a hairnet.

Her pots are Raku fired- a quick firing method that always yields a surprise.

“It’s like opening a Christmas gift- you never know what you might get. Sometimes it’s like an out of tune note that resists focus- sometimes it’s like a Shostakovich Symphony- pure bliss.

“ Many thanks to my past and current clay mentors:
Linnell Barnhart            Randy Broadnax
Don Ellis                Ray Gonzales
Ken Holis                Ben & Dennis Parks        
Charlie & Linda Riggs        Sam Tubiolo