If you were to wander into Akira Satake Ceramics — a light-filled studio housed in a century-old tannery-turned-artists' complex in Asheville, North Carolina — you'd pick up on the Japanese essence of the artisan's style.
Satake's pottery works showcase the minimalist aesthetic of Japanese ceramics with dark clays beautifully overlaid with fragile layers of white porcelain, a quintessential character seen in his Japanese teapots and chawan (Japanese tea bowls). But, other than the broad strokes and assumptions some of us make when appraising art, how much can we divine about an artist from his or her art?
Satake, it turns out, spent much of life working in a very different profession: music, both as a musician, a producer and a record label owner.