“I’ve been doing ceramics since forever,” Eric Boos says. “I’m one of those old baby-boomer-back-in-the-‘70s kinda deals.”

Boos is funny and irreverent when he talks about making art, though clearly it’s a serious passion for him. He still sounds a little like what he was in 1970: a young surfer dude/anthropology major who one day wandered into the ceramics studio at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and thought: That looks pretty neat.