About This Here Potter's Blog

Well, its been a long time.

I first sat at a wheel under the watchful eye of Lynn Munns, a fine potter in a community college in Casper, Wyoming, back before George Bush or post-modern anthropology or neo-cons or HIV-AIDS or any of our present-day realities.  It was in the 1970s.  Since then, and for a long time, I didn't throw pots.

Now, Lynn has retired, but he still throws and still gives workshops at Red Lodge.  According to some potters I know, he is inspiring yet another generation of potters with strong, utilitarian forms and fearless salt glazed and (sometimes) wood-fired cone ten pottery.

As for me, I would not make a pimple on a potters ass.  But thanks to Munns I did make a start.  Thanks to  Patrick Siler (a ceramicist and amazing all-around artist at Washington State University, where I did some ceramics for a time) I also learned a few things. Like not over-thinking my pots, for example.  And my Dad is a fine furniture maker, his mother was a wood carver and sculptor;  Mom is still an amazing oil painter; two of my sisters are artists—the third one is artistic in maintaining a lovely family. I'm the prodigal, finding my way home.

So here is a place for me to post a few images of work I'm doing, the crappy pieces and the not-so-crappy pieces; a place to reflect on what progress means (if it means anything at all).

Nov. 2012 • First Pots in 20 Years. Mugs, soon. 

I'm at Silica Studios in Palm Springs, where I am surrounded by a crew—a family, really—of amazing potters and sculptors.  I hardly feel I deserve to be this lucky—but I am.  I mean, I'm lucky. Whether or not I'm deserving is something to consider; nevertheless, if I'm learning anything at all, its owing to the interaction of the clay, the fire, and the amazing potters and sculptors who come to the studio every day to work on creating new pieces, to create ways of telling the truth that you can see and touch and use.  For telling the truth is what pots can do; and quite well. Everything these potters do around the studio is a kind of teaching.  Lucky for me.

So while I've done a few other things and enjoyed them,  for me there's nothing quite as engaging as messing about with clay.  It speaks to my heart and hands in ways that bring to mind another valued teacher, Tenshin Roshi, who has been trying to get my head to open up to Zen practice.  Tenshin often reminds his sangha that the old Zen master, Dogen Zenji, called the doing of Zen "practice-realization."  Its realizing (real-izing) something (something beyond vast yet as transient as a flint-spark) through practice.

Making pots is like that.  Realizing something (often, an empty thing, like a finished, unused, empty pot—empty but potentially of service, empty but maybe nice to hold and see) through doing.

So that's what this blog is about: realizing pots. Which is, sometimes, about completely forgetting about pots and just making or using them.  Appreciating them, and the creatures who make, have made, and use and have used them.

Jeepers, that's all pretty highfalootin'.

This blog is really just some pictures and words about pots.  'Nuff said.