Meet your Monitors: Kathy Minard
Article by Michael Meleyco
Kathy Minard is the studio monitor on Tuesdays from 4 to 7pm. She is a remarkable, educated new potter who has many interests, skills and accomplishments that make her a welcome and potentially valuable member of our guild (and she has a website). Her instructors for the last two years have been mostly Lynne Meade, who has helped Kathy learn to start throwing and carving pots, and Chris Kanysik who taught her.
Kathy grew in El Cerrito and graduated from SF State in chemistry. While she was developing interests in Botany and Oceanography, she started working as a bench chemist in the biotechnology field, which defined her career. She considers herself semi-retired and her responsibilities presently include a mother who requires home care and an upcoming wedding for her 
husband's son.
Art expression and skills includes her beautiful bird sanctuary gardens centering on a large fountain and pond which helped in her recovery from cancer, paintings of tortoises from a visit to the Galapogos, and deep sea photographs from around the world. The present interest in pottery was possibly kindled by her father’s involvement in ceramics as a therapy for being too good an engineer. She still has some of his pots in her home.
The brevity of this article only allows mention of her kayaking interests in Point Reyes area, involvement in the Cooking for Solutions workshops at Monterey Aquarium, deep-sea diving trips to Fiji, Mexico, the Galapagos and Thailand.
She professes to love all animals and her love of other creatures is evident in her carving of frogs and iguanas on her pots, the array of bird feeders in the yard and the aquarium of pollywogs on her kitchen window that she is raising to reintroduce back into the wild. She welcomes all CAG members to come during her monitor shift on Tuesdays because it is usually a quiet time to work, while at the same time she has had to protect her shift by keeping away non-members coming early for class. Please help me support and appreciate this new member who has stepped forward early to participate with us.