“ Right away I realized that I was better at this than any craft I had ever tried. I became consumed. I would stay up all night working on projects in the studio.”
The best part of his day, he said, was digging up blue shale clay and shaping it into his creations.
“ I would spend hours messing with clay. I always had a knack for working with it and shaping it into stuff,” Dylan said.“ I didn’ t think of it as making art, I just liked creating bowls and faces.”
When he was 12, Dylan got his first job working with clay. His grandmother, Karen Quackenbush, a first-grade teacher in Brown County, asked him to dig up 50 pounds of clay and bring it into her class.
“ She is an avid painter and promoter of the arts,” Dylan said.“ She tried to incorporate art into her class as often as she could.”
The class, and Dylan, created“ pinch pots,” a simple form of hand-made pottery. Pinch pots are formed and shaped by pinching the clay with your thumb and forefinger.
“ It was the first time I had ever put anything I had made in a kiln,” Dylan said.“ I loved it.”
The clay class wasn’ t the first time his grandma had encouraged Dylan artistically. When Dylan was ten she took
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Jan./ Feb. 2021 • Our Brown County 21