Laurie Franzo, by her own admission, plays in the mud all the time.
Laurie Franzo is an accomplished Hellertown-based artist who works in clay, glass and a combination of the two.
“I am known as a mud lady,” says Franzo, a clay artist who operates a studio in the basement of her Hellertown home. “I was an art teacher for 30 years. I have been a clay artist my whole life. I started when I was nine when my mom brought me to a clay studio and I was hooked.”
Franzo is also a mosaic glass artist and sometimes creates with glass, sometimes with clay and sometimes with a combination of the two.
For the past 15 years Franzo says she has been visiting New Mexico where she studies with an 86-year-old “elder” who is teaching her the ways of the Taoist pueblo natives. “I dabble in different cultures,” she explains. “I get a handle on different clays and how it is used. She knows when I am coming and I get off the plane and she hands me a shovel and says ‘let’s go dig,’ and we dig.”
In terms of the subject matter of her art, Franzo has been fixated on the same theme since she was a little girl. “I always loved Mother Nature,” she recalls. “I never have my head up. I would always be looking at the ground for rocks and feathers and beautiful objects you could see on the ground.”
Today, that translates into artwork that largely is “of organic form” and features things like birds, animals and insects as well as natural textures. For example, Franzo recently created a piece featuring the Barnegat Light House which incorporated real rocks she had found on the beach as well as a piece of driftwood she used to depict a seagull.
People may also commission Franzo to create works of art for them. In fact, she recently completed a unique piece for Advanced Optics on Main Street in Hellertown, based on optometrist Terry Roberts’ love of tropical fish.
“He has a tropical fish tank in the office,” Franzo explains, “and he admired this one kind of fish. He asked ‘could you make it for me and make it into a light box?’” The result can now be seen hanging in the office.
Franzo says there is no hard and fast schedule for how long it takes her to finish a project, but as a general rule, someone looking to commission a work should expect that there really isn’t anything quicker than a two-and-a-half to three-week process.
“What people don’t know about clay is there are phases you have to go through,” explains Franzo. “A raw piece of clay is 60 to 70 percent water and clay has its own brain. It will fight against you. It will crack and warp. In some cases you have to wait seven days for it to dry, then fire it, then color it, then fire again. Just that process of the clay work could take a month.”
“You can speed it up. There are little tricks of the trade, but it is not an instantaneous thing. With glass you have the color already there. It’s more about cutting pieces, making a jigsaw puzzle and putting it together,” she says.
The bottom line is, Franzo wants her art to make people happy.
“If a person doesn’t smile at my art, it hasn’t been made successfully,” she says. “I want them to come away saying, ‘that was a very cool thing.’”
“I feel like I failed if I don’t get that reaction from people,” she added. “I really want people to enjoy what I do.”
Photos contributed by Laurie Franzo. Note: An earlier published version of this story incorrectly identified the pictured fish mosaic (above) as the one commissioned for Advanced Optics in Hellertown. They are two different pieces of art. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the error.
