Get the best things to do in NJ sent right to your inbox with our Weekend Buzz newsletter.
Artist Johanna Younghans makes broken-edge ceramic vases from her Bay Head studio. Photo: Laura Moss
Artist Johanna Younghans has spent her life surrounded by water. With her parents, Jon and Sally, and her younger brother, Jack, she lived full-time in Mountainside, but migrated to the Jersey Shore every summer, spending July and August in Bay Head. From ages 4 to 18 (Younghans is now 25), those months meant living aboard Dauntless, the family’s classic 45-foot cabin cruiser docked on Barnegat Bay. Sharing a tight V-berth with her brother and falling asleep each night to the lapping water made for carefree days and an inspired existence. She was influenced by the ocean and estuaries, pirates and mermaids, seashells and sailboats, ships and shipwrecks—equal parts reality and fantasy.
“I was in a bathing suit 24-7,” she says now. “My summer uniform was a life jacket.” Life was idyllic, she admits, sailing, swimming, and immersing herself in maritime lore.
Younghans showed an affinity for drawing early on; marrying her love of art and the sea came naturally.
“I’ve always been artistically inclined,” Younghans says. “In high school, I sketched all over my homework.” Fortunately, her parents embraced her talent and encouraged her. “They never said, ‘You’re crazy to do this,’” she says. “In fact, they told me I was crazy if I didn’t do this.” At 18, with her parents’ support, she left one coastal town for another, attending the College of Charleston in South Carolina to study art history and fine art.
Photo: Laura Moss
She returned to the Jersey Shore four years later with her degree. Her parents had purchased a mixed-use building in Bay Head. The historic structure had formerly housed Applegate’s Hardware, a beloved five-and-dime store that sold everything from screws to flip-flops, postcards to beach chairs.
The building’s owners planned to sell it and retire, but then Superstorm Sandy hit, and the structure was largely decimated. Despite the destruction, Younghans’s parents had continued with their plan. Working closely with the town planning board, they rescued the building, turning a portion of it into a spacious, three-story home, while developing retail space on the ground floor.
The massive attic space was a storage warehouse until Younghans swooped in and claimed it as her studio. The top-floor windows look out over Scow Ditch, a serene, brackish waterway that feeds into Barnegat Bay. It was in that studio that Younghans honed her skill of sketching exact, picture-perfect renderings of historic ships, birds, as well as whimsical images of mermaids and sea creatures. Her earliest sketches—line drawings on paper of fantastic figures inspired by the human body (imagine a female with a clamshell head)—sold as quickly as she could draw them. She added egrets, herons and swans—all birds she saw frequently from her studio window—and those, too, were snapped up. Younghans began to realize she might make a living doing this. She quit her part-time retail job and launched into art full-time.
Photo: Laura Moss
Younghans began exploring various mediums and discovered a love of clay, eventually learning slab building, a form of pottery that begins with a 25-pound block of clay that she rolls flat, like a pie crust. Naturally, she had to invest in a slab roller and a kiln.
“The kiln was my first big-girl purchase,” she says. Placing a kiln, which reaches 2,200 degrees, in a historic wooden and masonry structure was dicey. Fortunately, her dad was unfazed. Early in his career he had taken over his family’s ceramic refractory company (think high-temperature gadgets like crucibles) and was well versed in safety protocols. He quickly set about fireproofing a space for his daughter.
Now, Younghans works in her studio each day with various types of clay, creating cream-colored stoneware or bright-white porcelain, depending on what she’s making. Her signature piece, a cylindrical vase in various sizes with natural cracks along the rim, uses stoneware, fired three to four times. “It looks grey when it’s wet, but it turns into a creamy ivory color after firing and glazing,” she explains.
Photos: Laura Moss
She works with a needle tool, sketching mostly in cobalt blue because “the color pops on ivory,” and she loves to add a gold accent. The gold formula is toxic, so she wears a respirator and works in a well-ventilated area when applying it. “I’m obsessed with the gold,” Younghans says. “It’s like pirate’s treasure.”
With no storefront, the artist’s business depends on word of mouth, art markets and social media.
Each piece she creates is custom-built and drawn, requiring an inordinate amount of detail which, in turn, requires an exorbitant amount of time. She has also produced custom items such as a ceramic tile backsplash with exact images of the owner’s sailboat; dinnerware designed with treasure maps and family landmarks; and a series of bridesmaid gifts with renderings of mermaids that feature the personality traits of each individual recipient.
Photos: Laura Moss
Ever expanding her repertoire, Younghans is considering making lamp bases and has collaborated with local interior designers. “This whole community has been so supportive,” says the versatile maker. “I don’t want to put myself in a box. Right now, it’s all about ceramics. Clay is my current canvas, but it could lead into something else.”
Younghans’s current goal is to have enough inventory on hand to sell in retail outlets, but she rarely has adequate stock. It’s a nice problem to have.
Each summer, Younghans relocates her studio to Dauntless, her childhood summer home. Being on the water still provides the most inspiration. “The creative process often goes in a direction that I don’t control, but water is always a big thing,” she says. “If I lived somewhere else, I don’t know what it’d be, but right now, I really like the nautical thing.”
For more info, follow @dauntlessbyjohanna on Instagram.
Lauren Payne is the former Home & Garden editor at New Jersey Monthly and is a frequent contributor.
