Mary Blakley Ceramics was a joint business, established by Tom and Mary Blakley in 1966, when the shop was built. Tom was a commercial artist and a cartoonist whose cartoons had appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers, among other magazines, in the mid-1940s. As the economics of the cartooning business declined in the late 1950s and into the early 1960s, they needed another way to make a living. Mary had taken classes in clay at the Redland Fruit and Spice Park in the late 1950s and had found her medium. Previously, she had done watercolors and even drawn a few cartoons. By 1965, creating cartoons in clay became an alternative to the traditional cartooning that Tom had previously done on paper.

While the majority of the work that they created was commercial in nature, they also created art pieces that many people do not know about. I hope that others will contribute photographs of the commercial pieces, particularly the Character, pelican and owl pieces, as I do not have any of those pieces to photograph. Character plaques, pelicans and owls were their “bread and butter” pieces.

Tom died in 1984 and Mary continued the business until she died in 2004. In 2006, I established the Mary Blakley Fellowship at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, which she attended on six different occasions, in her memory.

In addition to the Fellowship at Haystack, I’ve long thought that it would be a wonderful idea to establish a website to document the story behind Mary Blakley Ceramics. It’s a long story and there are thousands of works to document, hundreds of glaze formulas to be published and many stories to be told. I can’t do it by myself and would greatly appreciate contributions from the many hundreds of people who have collections of their work. Please use the Contact page to make arrangements to send me contributions to this project.

Initially, I will be uploading digital scans of photographs that I have in my collection and pictures of works that I have. I’d like to add others, too – I only have documentation of a small portion of their work. If you wish to be acknowledged publicly, I will be pleased to publish your name. If you’d like to remain anonymous, that will be fine also.