The Potter of El Marino Park

Just off Berryman Avenue, at the edge of El Marino Park, sit a row of red picnic tables alongside a small brick building. If you’ve never looked inside, you may be in for a surprise when you discover that this is Culver City Parks and Recreation’s very own ceramics studio.  At first glance, one can see the familiar and touching reminders of early childhood: vases made from clay coils and creatures of every possible kind, some recognizable and some decidedly not. Small, but densely packed with work tables, storage shelves and ceramic objects of all shapes and sizes, this studio has been hosting children’s–and adults–classes for decades.    

Under the friendly and patient guidance of teacher Sylvia Baar-Limon, classes—open to children as young as three–are held at the studio six days a week, all year round. And while she doesn’t teach adult classes, Sylvia has conducted Saturday afternoon sessions for the last few years, and the whole family is invited.

Sylvia has been our local ceramics teacher for seven years; if one thing is clear when you meet her, it’s that she loves what she does. If you ask her to name her favorite things about teaching classes in Culver City, she immediately declares, “My passion for ceramics, my passion for children and my passion for community.”  There’s no money in it, she laughs, but there’s certainly a lot of joy.  

An experienced teacher, she uses every session as an opportunity to gently teach her students more than mere pottery, giving them the skills to make beautiful and functional projects. Along with the many heart-shaped picture frames set out on a recent afternoon, Sylvia showed me a selection of ceramic eggs, but rather than traditional Easter designs, her students had  designed theirs to hold baby dinosaurs.  For another class, she taught the budding ceramic artists how to make clay spheres onto which they painted the continents, making their very own globes.

Ceramics is a wonderful way to enrich children’s lives, Sylvia says; it sparks their creative juices and can create potters for life.  Which is not a bad thing at all, noting that pottery can be very meditative and has a wonderfully calming and centering effect on people of all ages.  And with so many techniques, clays, glazes and tools available, she says, the possibilities are limitless for life-long learning and enjoyment.

Even when she’s not teaching, sometimes Sylvia hangs out at the studio, working on her own projects just for fun.   Because you never know exactly how any firing is going to come out, she says, every time you open the kiln it’s like Christmas.  

And who can resist that?