Photo courtesy of Nicole D'Amore Sandy Swanson finished the last tiles for this Ventura Yacht Club project just three days before the deadline.

Sandy Swanson has captured the spirit of the Ventura Yacht Club in a colorful tile installation finished just in time for the April opening day of the 2008 season.

People stepping on the club's new elevator can look down and get a gull's-eye view of sailboats and power boats entering and leaving the harbor. The Channel Islands are in the distance against a sea-blue background of tiles in the 3-foot-by-8-foot installation.

Swanson's project accomplished three goals. The yacht club needed a new tile entry for its recently installed elevator and wanted to recognize donors. Swanson needed a project for her Ventura College ceramics class.

Long-time members, Swanson and her husband, Paul, first heard in January that the club was looking for red paver tiles for the elevator entry and wanted them to be similar to the tiles on the floor.

"They were probably 40 to 50 years old, and they could get them, but not the same size," she said.

Not long after that, Swanson went to her first class in ceramic decoration, and instructor Deanna Pini talked about projects the students could do. She mentioned a piece she had created incorporating names into a mural.

"It was like bells went off," Swanson said. But she wondered if she could pull off the project.

"I didn't know if I could draw power boats with all the details, but I just worked at it, and it came together," she said. With Pini's encouragement, Swanson learned airbrushing for the water and sky and how to blend underglazes for the islands, trees and boats.

She took pictures of boats belonging to members, found photos in magazines and did sketches for trees and other details. Her husband snapped shots of the islands from the tower at the Channel Islands National Park Museum, and she made stencils from the photos and drawings, enlarging them to the size she needed on the computer. She arranged the stencils into a composition on the 48 tiles before airbrushing the ocean and sky, then painted the details by hand. Pini assisted by writing the names of the 120 donors on the rope border of half tiles and on the boats.

"I will learn that skill on another project when time is not so critical," Swanson said. "There was a deadline because we wanted it done for opening day," she said.

Three days before the April 5 deadline she took the last tiles from the kiln. They were still hot, she said of the tiles she hurried to the Yacht Club. There she placed them in thin-set and then grouted the joints as members decorated for opening day.

This was not Swanson's first experience with ceramics. While living in Pennsylvania, she took a class with a friend in handbuilding and throwing when her children were young.

Her husband built her a wheel, and her three kids would play in the clay while she used it.

"I think it was kind of an obsession," she said. "When I was on the wheel, that is all I wanted to do." She helped start a potters guild and build a kiln at Penn State University and had her own wheel and kiln after the family moved to Glendale in 1977. She was among eight artists who started a co-op in Montrose and co-owned an arts and crafts gallery there.

It is still alive and well today and was mentioned in the January issue of Sunset Magazine, she said.

Always into boating, she and her husband bought a house in Ventura in 1997 and moved to the city in 1999 after he retired from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

At first, she was reluctant to retire from the gallery. "But we met so many interesting people here at the yacht club and I thought that wouldn't be so bad," she said.

They co-own a 52-foot ketch and spend time at the Channel Islands and cruising with club members to Catalina and other ports of interest.

Swanson participated in a Ventura County Potters Guild exhibit at Studio Channel Islands in 2007 and plans to continue taking ceramics classes.

"Before this, my thing was mermaids and sea creatures in bas relief," she said. "I will probably go back to that. My husband volunteers for the Channel Islands National Park Service and will often be gone for a weekend, and it is something I can do then."

— To recommend an artist to be profiled in this section, or for more information, contact Nicole D'Amore at ArtProfiles@roadrunner.com or 405-0364.