Artist M Rathsack Makes Art for her Own Soul
By Meg Hale Brunton
After making a name for herself in Western North Carolina as a favorite artistw and teacher, M Rathsack is finally getting to do exactly what she wants to do, creatively. She is expressing herself through a variety of forms of art, teaching her own art classes, and even starting her own business to create immersive artistic events. In short, M is a modern Renaissance artist.
Originally from Colorado, M earned her Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts in Ceramics from the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, CO. After graduating, she spent ten months working with Americorps, then got a job teaching science with the Barrier Island Environmental Education Program in South Carolina. “I love being outside, but I was not much of a beach girl,” she confesses of spending her days in the sun and sand. “It brought me around to teaching, and I was meant to teach.”
In 2000, M transferred to a sister program with the Mountain Trail Outdoor School at the Kanuga Conference Center in North Carolina. She loved the work she was doing, but found it tricky to balance her time between the seasonal job at the school and a variety of day jobs. She eventually took a position teaching at a paint-on-pottery studio in Hendersonville. After introducing her own clay class at the shop, M started to develop a following from the clientele. People requested that M teach classes on other art techniques, but the studio management did not want to expand their repertoire.
In 2006, M decided to strike out on her own, rented a small space on Main Street and began teaching art classes. M’s School of Art offered primarily painting, drawing and fiber art classes for school children, as well as camps, and adult classes. “I tried to make a whole experience for the kids there,” M says. As its popularity increased, M took on additional adjacent rooms on the floor to accommodate clay-working classes and a gallery. Finding herself at the helm of a thriving business, M moved her art school to a small cottage in South Hendersonville where she remained for almost nine years.
After losing that location, and after the Covid-19 pandemic put a stop to group gatherings like art classes, M had to put a lot of her art supplies in a storage unit and found herself needing a source of income. Since time to herself was in abundance, she began creating her own art. “My studio was here and it was full of clay and supplies. I sat down and made work that I wanted to make without caring what anyone thought,” she recalls. “I want to make the weird art that comes out of my brain and hangs on the wall. It was so refreshing!” While M made some functional art that was easier to sell, she says she was pleasantly surprised to find that people liked and bought her ‘weird’ art as well. Through her art business, Dancing Potter, M marketed her pieces online as well as out of her booth at local art fairs and markets.
One of M’s current favorite artistic styles is Raku, a Japanese-inspired type of pottery that she refers to as a ‘clay painting.’ For Raku, one creates a work in clay and fires it, but removes it from the kiln while it is still 1800 degrees, then puts it in a bin of combustible materials, such as pine needles, then smothers it. “All kinds of really cool things happen to the glazes while you’re removing the oxygen from it,” M explains, describing how the unglazed parts of the clay turn black, parts with a lot of copper makes the glaze flash, crackle glazes cracks, and oxidation turns things blue. “You can manipulate things to get the results you want, but you just never quite know and I love that part!” M adds that she is delighted to have returned to her clay roots, and that she has put off doing ceramics for fun for too long.
M has also maintained her classes, though now that she is teaching intimate 4-5 person classes out of her smaller location in Mills River. “I have students that really want to learn,” she says of her classes. M also does workshops and contract work, teaching art across WNC at places like the Henderson County libraries and the Asheville Art Museum. For most of her art classes, she is able to make her services compact and completely mobile. “I’ll take my supplies and do art with people anywhere. It is wherever I am, basically.”
In addition to teaching and creating art, M is currently working to bring interactive artistic experiences to the people of WNC with her new business, Whimzy & Wonderment. The idea for the Whimzy & Wonderment came to her after a Theatre Bizarre event she attended in Detroit. She thought of all the enjoyment that the people of Asheville and the surrounding area would get out of an experience like she had. Her first event was a masquerade ball entitled Carnevale in Venice at the Masonic Temple in Asheville, where guests got to take a gondola ride through cardboard canals, ask their burning questions to the Mouth of Truth, see aerialists and belly-dancers perform, and various other attractions. “I recognize one of the main things I am supposed to do is bring people joy,” she says of her events. “It’s just art that I want to create for people, but not a gallery, and not like an amusement park. It’s always gonna grow and expand into whatever weird thing is in my brain.”
Nothing if not multitalented, M admits she gets bored if she focuses on a single type of artistic expression for too long, but feels this quality has fostered her in creating the art she was truly meant to. “I’m finally making the stuff I want to make; I did finally get to make art for my soul,” she says. “Because I have so many facets of what I do, there’s no time to waste. If you want to do something, do it. If you’ve got an idea, explore the options to make it happen.”
For more information on M Rathsack, or to view her art, visit her website: https://www.instagram.com/dancing_potter/
To learn more about M’s School of Art, go to: http://www.msartschool.com/
