Visiting her family’s second home on the Chesapeake Bay years ago, Shirley Gromen loved to go fishing with her dad. Now she illustrates those fish, along with regional birds and plants, on wondrous black-and-white porcelains. Mugs, vases, plates and platters are incised with her drawings of swimming crabs and striped bass, or perhaps a pelican pausing among native grasses.

Enhancing the tactile surface of her ceramics, Gromen applies a sgraffito technique. It involves spraying black glaze over her hand-built or wheel-thrown porcelains, then carving through the surface to reveal parts of the white clay body underneath. Before firing, Gromen may drop liquid-clay dots onto a blowfish image, highlight the orange beak of an oyster catcher, or glaze an object’s interior to make it fully functional.

Gromen likens her imagery to bird-watching. “I want it to be more detailed, more about the markings that indicate a specific fish or bird,” the potter says. “I see these as stories—shad running to mate in spring when the shadbush flowers bloom. Or fish on a journey to wherever they’re going.”

For the past decade, Gromen has been living and working in the same town she enjoyed as a child—Ridge, Maryland, five miles from where the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay meet—as she continues to observe and interpret the natural world around her.

For more information and a list of the artist’s upcoming shows, see shirleygromenceramics.com.