Meet your Monitors: Joe Pagni
Article by Justin Soffer
If you show up at the ceramics studio on a late Friday afternoon, you’ll probably be greeted with an enthusiastic “How ya doin!” from monitor Joe Pagni.
Joe was born in nearby Crockett, attended local schools, and still lives in Crockett today. His friends call him “Pino.”
A retired carpenter, Pino spent most of his life in the construction and engineering business. He built his own house in the 1960s and still lives there with his wife DeAnne, a retired nurse. The Pagni’s met in 1956 when Pino, recently returned from a tour of duty with the army in Korea, decided to try ice skating in San Francisco.
“Everybody else was doing fine, but I kept landing on my backside,” he said. “She helped me up and skated around the rink with me. That’s how we met.”
Pino’s introduction to ceramics came in 1968 when he signed up for night classes at Diablo Valley College. Later he studied with Ernie Kim at the Richmond Arts Center from 1972 to 1975. In 1977 he joined the Concord Ceramics Studio, where he made friends and pottery until the studio closed in 2005.
Pino, who is a student in Michael Berkley’s Friday night class, decided to become a monitor after driving down from Crockett early on a few Friday afternoons. He was hoping to get studio time before class, but the studio was closed because no monitor was available. Pino took matters into his own hands and signed up as a monitor.
“Now I don’t have to worry about the monitor not being there, because I’m the monitor,” Pino explained.
Pino has done a wide range of ceramics: pit firing, gas and wood kilns, raku. He enjoys practical pieces such as bottles, bowls of all kinds, and goblets with attached wood or glass stems. But he also enjoys fanciful pieces.
One of his favorite techniques is to stack layered slabs of clay that have been colored with different oxides. He throws the clay repeatedly on the floor until it is about a half inch thick and the different oxides emerge through the surface. Then he uses a hump mould to create a bowl, attaches a one-inch piece of extruded clay as a foot, and adds sprigs to the side of the bowl in the shape of a woman with wings.
Although Pino has been a member of the Walnut Creek Clay Arts Guild for less than a year, he made his first visit to the studio in the 1960s.
“When I first saw the place, it was just a Quonset hut,” he said. “It sure has changed a lot since then. It’s a pretty nice place now. And the people are nice too.”