BLOWING ROCK — Eric Serritella spent two decades as a Vice President at an advertising agency before taking his first pottery class at 35 and falling in love with it. Twenty years later, he was in Blowing Rock hosting a traditional Gong Fu tea ceremony and displaying large-scale ceramic sculptures carved to look like birch trees and weathered logs.

Serritella is a realistic ceramic sculptor of large-scale works carved to look like birch trees and weathered logs. He has integrated glass into his ceramics, and some tree sculptures are functional teapots.