LEARNING BY SELLING

Leotis Belcher of St. Louis, a freshman at Southeast Missouri State University, used clay to sculpt his hand.

A lot of art students leave school without knowing how to make a living, says Southeast ceramics instructor Amy Kephart.

Her students are getting first-hand experience in the basics of making a living from art by conducting the ceramics studio's first-ever sale.

"Recent Works in Clay: An Exhibition and Sale of Students' Work," will be held from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. today and Friday in the third floor lobby of the University Center. Proceeds will benefit the Southeast ceramics studio.

The work of about 20 students will be for sale, along with pieces contributed by Kephart, Department of Art Chairwoman Sarah Riley and art instructor Katherine Ellinger Smith.

Some of the students are contributing as many as 40 pieces to the sale.

Besides learning how to form shapes at the pottery wheel, apply glazes and fire the kiln, Kephart wants her students to know how to price their work and to understand what working for a percentage means.

Setting up the sale and watching people come in and buy their work gives students confidence in their abilities, she says.

Kephart is a graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute who is finishing her master's degree at SIU. She switched to ceramics 10 years ago when she realized that she was always trying to build up the surfaces of her paintings.

She likes the idea that ceramics is not just for the art elite.

"It's functional, something people use on a daily basis," Kephart says. "And I'm a very tactile person. I like the romance that someone takes a cup I made and puts it to their lips."

Ceramics is a beautiful alternative to Styrofoam cups, she says.

"Being a mother and a woman and knowing the domestic part of life can be so humdrum, this spruces up life."

Kephart starts fledgling students out by having them make a simple coil pot.

"I want them to have a relationship with the clay, to understand how clay works.

"Then I let them go and experiment with shapes."

Leotis Belcher, a freshman safety on the football team, is making a clay sculpture of his hand.

The St. Louisan won a Congressional Art Award in high school for his painting of Deion Sanders but has impressed Kephart with his first tries at ceramics.

"I have to work and make it three-dimensional, make it look real," Belcher said. "That's why I did my hand -- it's how I'm able to do everything."

Jennifer Fredenburg, a junior fine arts major, used to consider herself a painter but thinks she's found her medium in clay. "I love the way clay feels, holding it," she says.

"I've fallen in love with it. I think about it night and day."

The attraction of clay for Leslie Zahner, a junior art major, is its possibilities. "Painting is limited to a canvas. This can be functional or non-functional, and you can build changes through all three stages of the process," he says

Making ceramics means spending eight to 13 hours a day in the studio, always keeping pieces in process until the final product emerges perhaps a week later. "You do it because you love it," Kephart says. "You're not going to get you labor back."

Besides different levels of ceramics, Kephart also teaches a class called Ceramics and Metaphor, which satisfies one of the general education requirements.

Some students take the class because they think it will be easy. "Most walk out understanding that art isn't easy," Kephart says.