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Gene Arnold

Member Since: 2004

Media Specialties:  Clay;

City: Mt. Airy

State: North Carolina

County: Surry County, NC

Bio: Mentor in Clay All businesses search for a name that will stand out and be easily remembered by its customers. Mud Duck Pottery was named by Gene Arnold’s two boys in honor of an old pick up that was retired from Gene's construction business and became their mud puddle jumping truck on the farm. Latonna Bowman also has a passion for collecting anything connected with Donald Duck! The name is a winner for its catchiness and for the style and quality of the pottery turned out by owners and creators, Gene and Latonna. After years of being interested in pottery, Gene and Latonna started taking pottery lessons. Their interest continued to grow and they began traveling to Seagrove N.C. to learn all they could from the many potters in that area. All this time they were evolving their own style of Raku, horsehair and functional stoneware. For Gene, throwing has always been easy. He leans toward neutral colors and unique shapes, while Latonna prefers to use hand-building, extruding, cutting and creating her bread "baskets" of varying sizes and vibrant colors. Both Gene, in the construction business, and Latonna, a supervisor at Renfro in Mt. Airy N.C., shared the same emotion while holding a piece of 5000-year-old pottery. Gene realized, "through pottery we've found a way to leave our mark here on earth. Maybe someone else, another 5000 years into the future will feel what I felt as he holds a piece of Mud Duck Pottery." Enthusiasm spread, and Gene's mother Elizabeth Bunch often joins them in the studio to create her clay angels. Over the last few years, both Gene and Latonna have enjoyed the festival circuit and invitations to display their work as close as Seagrove and the NC mountains, and as far away as Georgia. Their pottery has become easily recognizable. What fills the showroom shelves represents hours of intensive, usually muddy, work with the pottery wheels, mixing glazes for just the right color, hot sweltering hours at the kiln and often cold fingers from cooling and washing of the raku pots. Mud Duck is young in the pottery community but Gene and Latonna have learned a lot and have come a long way. Mud Duck followers will say they're on their way to the top.

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