A Note About Pottery

Pottery is one of the oldest art forms on Earth, but it didn't start out being considered art. For years, p­ottery was created by craftspeople strictly for utilitarian p­urposes with little consideration for how they looked. These pots were hand-built, fired in bonfires and served the purpose of carrying grains, water and other liquids, as well as storing seeds. Shortly thereafter they began to use pots for cooking.

Pottery is broken down into three wares -- earthenware, stoneware and porcelain. These are all considered ceramics, which explains why potters are often referred to as ceramic artists. It's a tactile, often meditative form of making art with a scientific bent. A good ceramic artist understands the tricky relationship between human and clay. 

_{Emilie Sennebogen "How Pottery Works" 2 March 2009. HowStuffWorks.com.} 

A Note About Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and airbrushes, can be used.

In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action (the final work is called "a painting"). The support for paintings includes such surfaces as walls, paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer pottery, leaf, copper and concrete and the painting may incorporate multiple other materials, including sand, clay, paper, plaster, gold leaf and even whole objects.

Painting is an important form in the visual arts, bringing in elements such as drawing, composition, gesture (as in gesture painting), narration (as in narrative art) and abstraction (as in abstract art). Paintings can be naturalistic and representational as in still life, landscape, photographic, abstract, narrative, symbolic, political and expressionistic._Wikipedia