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Finally, after several years of searching, I found another coffee mug so similar to the one I bought, that is has to be the same potter. The photo was attributed to Claudia Dunaway, an artist living in Burnsville, North Carolina. I have not been able to recall where I bought my mug, but from a date on the photo, and that I was on a short vacation which went through Asheville near that time, I have guessed that I may have bought the mug at Southern Highland Craft Guild, Folk Art Center, on the Blue Ridge Parkway, just off Hwy. 70 at Asheville. *I have asked there, and at the New Morning Gallery another place that I’ve bought mugs from through the years, but neither location recognized my description or image I had on my phone.

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I just found a useful piece of information about Claudia Dunaway on the Toe River Arts web site:

“From 1974-2018 Claudia Dunaway was a full-time potter working primarily in stoneware and porcelain, with a focus on carving and drawing on the surface of her pots through colored slips, a process called  sgrafitto. In 2018 Claudia received a scholarship to Penland School of Craft for a woodblock printmaking class taught by Master Printmaker Keijo Shinohara. This experience shifted her focus to printmaking….”

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I was on one of my short vacations in 2018 that took me through the Asheville, North Carolina area.

I bought the mug because of the various whimsical elements: cartoon space ship, plants which in my mind represent an alien race or community, the swirls embedded into the mug, and the “three point” nature of the mug’s odd shape. *I did not expect to find the following YouTube video in which Claudia Dunaway explains how she makes the imprinted pottery/mugs. She is actually using the image that I have on my mug of a cartoon spaceship. And, if you look closely at the video, there are several not yet printed mugs that might be like mine once finished.

I’ve now found enough examples, see above gallery, that I know this is a Claudia Dunaway and John D. Richards Collaboration. They were doing these as far back as 2012, and Claudia Dunaway may have gone in a different artistic direction about the time when I bought my mug. Oh, well.

NOTE: I sent her an email asking a couple of questions and she had definitely been doing “other” work and could hardly recall anything about my mug. It was a collaboration between her and her partner. He had drawn the images, and she had added the images to the mugs and other pottery with a print screen process (see video). Interesting and it might have even been possible that one of the unfinished mugs seen in the YouTube video might have ended up being mine. [end]