Admirers throw together a pottery compendium

The colorful ceramic works artist Jean Taylor has produced during and beyond her 50 years of teaching at the Community Center of La Cañada Flintridge could fill a book.

But it wasn’t until a group of students put their heads together and got the community involved that it actually happened.

Ines Gomez-Chessum, Allison Goodman and Georgie Kajer wanted to honor the lifelong artistry of their beloved teacher, and a book seemed like the perfect idea. The trio planned their tribute, a full-color art publication, and created a campaign on the crowd-funding website Kickstarter to raise the $7,000 necessary to produce it.

They kicked off the effort on Feb. 15 and raised $8,000 from 78 donors in 30 days, Kajer said. The end result, a 96-page coffee-table book titled “An Ever-Widening Circle: The Ceramic Artistry of Helen Jean Taylor,” will be available for purchase Friday and Saturday at the community center’s semiannual ceramics sale.

“I don’t think there were very high expectations,” Kajer said of the group’s early efforts. “At one point, I called it ‘a loving scrapbook,’ but it’s become much more than that.”

“An Ever-Widening Circle” was created just in time to mark Taylor’s 50-year anniversary in June, but the artist said she wasn’t anticipating anything special.

“I’m still in shock over all of this. It was the last thing I ever expected,” Taylor said.

In addition to professionally shot photos of Taylor’s works, the book includes occasional notes and essays from people who’ve worked with the artist over the years. Through that narrative, a bit of Taylor’s personal story is revealed.

Born in England in 1926, Taylor lived and worked in Europe, South Africa and Canada before moving to Los Angeles in 1963. She honed her craft at Pasadena City College before helming the ceramics program at what was then called the La Cañada Youth House in 1966.

“I came to teach because I was desperate for a job,” Taylor confesses of her beginning at the center. “(But) I knew I had to do this properly or not at all. I threw my whole self into building this.”

Maureen Bond, the community center’s executive director, said Taylor’s bet paid off. Today, ceramics classes at all levels are booked, and the pieces that make it into the center’s semi-annual sale are professional-level works.

“She’s just a wealth of information, and her glazing technique is really different,” Bond says of Taylor. “There’s nobody like her.”

Although she officially retired in 2006, Taylor still leads Friday studio classes and occasional workshops at the community center. She is especially known for her virtuosity in glazing, a practice known to frustrate even some advanced artists. Taylor herself attributes this to her fascination for color and texture, inspired directly by nature.

“I love being outdoors, and I love the ocean,” she explains. “So when I’m doing a pinch pot, I’m thinking flower shapes, shell shapes and barks. The sense of color is, to me, an exciting thing.”

At 88, her wheel throwing days are winding down, so Taylor has reinvigorated her interest in pinch pots, which she feels are less constrained by the rules of physics. As time progresses, she adapts so she can continue her art.

And students like Kajer are glad she does.

“We don’t have a living national treasure like other countries do, and Jean is very humble, but there are a number of people who know what they’re talking about who would say Jean is working at a very advanced level,” she said. “Jean has had a very prolific career. This is just the tip of the iceberg.”