When I first met Michelle Ross, we were simultaneously going through a revolving door at the Los Angeles Polymer Clay Guild.  She was just discovering polymer clay and I was taking what turned out to be a hiatus from being able to regularly attend meetings during a yearlong, demanding college teaching job.

My brief impression of Michelle was that she was enthusiastic and friendly, reaching out for any new polymer clay technique she could lay her hands on. And while I didn’t realize it at the time, this was no typical polymer clay novice. She had spent all of her working life as an artist in one form or another.

<>When I returned to guild meetings 10 months later, this so-called newbie was now the guild newsletter editor and a few months shy of becoming president of the guild. She also had become, and continues to be, a superb polymer clay artist, as countless regular viewers of  “The Carol Duvall Show” know from her many years on television, appearing first as a rubber stamp guest artist, then as a polymer clay guest artist.

Michelle Ross’ polymer clay work is characterized by not so much any particular specialization or theme as it is by diversity and an eagerness to play with new ideas. These can result from the happy “stumble” upon an “incredible new tool” purchased for all of 99 cents at the local discount store to the methodical way in which she discovered how to transfer images from high resolution computer inkjet paper, using liquid clay and a rubber stamping heat gun.

Her latest obsession – and there have been many during the four years that we have been friends – is airbrushing on clay.  This has resulted in some staggeringly beautiful pendants and a new project idea for one of her last “The Carol Duvall Show” shoots, as the show wound up a more than a decade-long run.

Michelle Ross began her art career as a young stay-at-home mother with a serious case of cabin fever.  A San Fernando Valley native in Los Angeles County, she had the good fortune to live across the street from her mother, from whom she inherited her artistic bent. It was that mother who volunteered to babysit Michelle’s toddler, then promptly shooed Michelle out of her home and through the door of a local ceramics studio, where Michelle began working with clay.  Pretty soon she was selling her wares at art fairs and doing occasional teaching at local schools. 

Ceramics did not generate enough money to help a couple with a small child make a monthly mortgage payment, so Michelle went down other avenues for income. For a while, she went through a series of completely unrelated jobs, ranging from working at the Pottery Barn (“I think they thought I knew something about plates and dinnerware”) to service writer in an auto garage. She even contemplated working in a dental office, to help pay for her daughter’s braces.

One day a friend noted that she had always enjoyed “playing with make-up,” and suggested she become a make-up artist. Michelle did just that and spent the next two decades working in films and television, most notably on “Real People” and “Party of Five.”