Working within the pottery tradition is like Native American Culture: it simultaneously modifies and retains itself. The potter simultaneously modifies and retains pottery tradition through his or her pursuits in clay. Bound to a tradition and yet developing it, the potter modifies and contributes to its development as an artistic caretaker (we hope) of the medium. Thus the idea that “it has all been done before” is a truism, but for each individual, his or her development is unique to him or her. And for the artist, it has not been done before until they do it themselves through direct experience. I know when looking upon the Knosis octopus jar (Gardner, 116) that through either hand building or using the potters wheel we as potters most definitely would go through very similar pathways, if in not identical steps, to form that work in clay. There are basic forming methods and techniques which “are what they are” as in what is necessary to build a clay wall even though the materials may be slightly different. Coiling, pinching, throwing basic forms on the wheel--these are all staples in the potter’s basic repertoire of forming methods. A potter makes pots and the potter can take the pot and do something more with it aesthetically, and yet the pot itself can be something more or less in either its simplicity and humbleness--evoking an austere aura of a culture or individual’s value system. Or, a pot can be flamboyant, a Las Vegas, a response to the tradition, an amalgam of implied, hidden, or cliché metaphor. A pot can be an obscenity to the tradition--a poorly crafted, aesthetically weak form that communicates carelessness, poor training or lack of heart. This is what differentiates one potter from another even though they belong or may be included in the clay tradition. The aesthetic choices one makes once the form is created and the relationship to the form with the glaze surface (which may or may not include various forms of decoration, either by the hand of the potter or in conjunction with the firing process), arrives at the creation of something aesthetically strong or weak.

It is in fact these aesthetic choices (many which lead the potter down very similar if not nearly identical pathways to creation and yet also result in very different aesthetics when the work is completed) that differentiate one’s work from another. Nonetheless, there is a baseline of difference between a potter in the tradition, and an artist visiting or playing in the tradition. Lets take, for instance, a simple covered jar meant to contain a food source. And then we have the artistic, flaring, covered jar that pushes form, surface, and function, with the furthest on the spectrum being implied function. This may or may not be truly functional or in actuality is sculpture, perhaps abstract or realistic, or something altogether different. Nevertheless, artist, potter, artist potter, potter artist, whatever one wishes to call them, a mere reference alone has him or her working from or within a tradition whether or not they think they are.

Certain things are unavoidable within the tradition of pottery making. The basic process is the same. One obtains clay from the earth, either refining or using the clay as it is. One then works the clay into a form with hands or a variety of tools, drying, possibly trimming, then glazing, and finally firing. If the work is utilitarian, or even non-utilitarian, there are basically 4 categories of shapes or forms that pottery falls into: the flat or platter form, the bowl or short open form, the cylinder--the vertical/horizontal hollow form, and the hybrid form which is usually some combination of these forms to form a whole. As potters, it is our adaptation of these forms or combination of forms that is culturally and aesthetically specific to our needs, use and the materials at our disposal. Our way of making speaks of our culture and person, religion, and our philosophical stance or value system.

In the Western world, we make a mug with a handle (inherited from our English and European traditions) allowing us to hold, ala clenched finger disassociated from the form, perhaps allowing the perpetuation of a work ethic or value system that desired the other hand to have freedom or be working, demanding half an attention. The hand-held mug is a two, three, or full fingered fist, an extension of the attempt to grasp something and yet not hold if fully. It is held, yet at a distance. Contrary to the East, a tea bowl or cup would require both hands to grasp, to hold together, demanding not half but the full attention of your palms requiring you to bow before the metaphorical cleansing and restoration of the soul through the taking of your tea or food. If it is a yunomi, a daily tea-drinking vessel outside the abode of the tea room found still today in the majority of households in the Asian world, it still requires one or two complete hands to fit snuggly around its form, feeling its warmth--a difference in cultural adaptation of a simple and short form based on social and spiritual values associated with everyday activities--the aesthetics of the form are dictated by the tradition of making and yet are also dictated by deeper meanings associated with predominant psychology/philosophy of the culture and its effect on the individual’s value system and world view as it is expressed. Kim Stafford tells us in the Soul of a Bowl

Although we are working from within a tradition, perhaps the aesthetic nature of what we create comes from a much deeper place calling us to remember those things in life which are most important to us--those first encounters of feeing a sense of security, warmth and love in their most base forms. Like the alchemist, the potter may make an aesthetic choice to mix these aspects or qualities into the work, setting up spatial emotional psychological relationships to take place and heighten awareness of those aspects of our lives that we may have forgotten, that are important to us and yet we tend to ignore these potential facets of opportunity of awareness as we become caught up in a fast paced modern world. The potter may also make other aesthetic choices to challenge us or our formal conventions with forms or their intended use. I recall my first “aesthetic experience,” when I came down a stairs and saw a Gustiv Klimdt painting, enormous and beautiful. I don’t care that he has been criticized for being too decorative. I have viewed and read Gustiv exhaustively--there was something in the work that held me on the stairs and brought tears to my eyes, it was what the East Indians call “a santarasa,” something on a conscious and other than conscious level I still don’t understand and yet I will try to explain. I think it had to do with love, or the lack of it on some level at that time and I felt that through the visual. Coming through the eyes to the heart as the Japanese say--and to the inside of the mind and the spirit. I like to think of the experience, in defining santarasa, as the silence that “calls us out of ourselves to the concentrated being of the work itself” (Deutsch, 18). I can’t say if my experience is what Deutsch further goes on to say is a pure spiritual experience, but I know I’ve had many aesthetic experiences even when I did not know what the word “aesthetic experience” meant. Aesthetics by man and nature are all around us. How can one not be bombarded by aesthetics, good or bad? As artists, we know this and I believe, if successful, we are able to enliven our work with this energy and its associations either intentionally or unintentionally. I remember as a young child looking at the sky, feeling the clouds, seeing the butterflies--a softness and beauty I could not touch and yet on some level I could feel these phenomena and understood their relationships. I understood the caring relationship between my mother and her children much like the sky and the sun and the clouds. These relationships of forms and what they connote are all around us--they are phenomenological metaphors of the mystery of our being and our connection or lack of connection to each other. Perhaps it is spiritual, perhaps they are inseparable as Chuang Tzu said: “there is no real or enduring distinction between subject and object, between man and nature, insofar as they are in perfect rhythmic accord with each other” (Deutsch, 47-47). Inner and outer connections and fragmentations are present in nature and in our daily thinking and approach to working. Such is this mystery of aesthetics, beauty, truth, of aesthetic preference and intent and the why, the meaningfulness behind the artist‘s motivation. And that is altogether another paper.

So let me ask wherein lies the cultural meaning within the tradition of pottery? Where in lies the individual meaning? Is it not in the “aesthetic intent” which defines an individual’s work versus a tradition or an individual in a tradition? Would it not be the aesthetic intent of the artist, that may want the surface to be desired to be touched, to invite visually associating volcanic surfaces, the deluge of magnamatic rock formations ebbing and flowing from the bowels of the earth, breaching the surface from deep within geomorphic constraints, thousands of pounds of pressure finally released making a connection with the surface, an outcropping, a hallowing from within, and to call upon the sublime desire for maker and non-maker to connect, for a finger, or a face, a cheek or lips, the hand to fall upon a form and feel the familiar and the strange? Could this possess a cultural as well as an individual or universal meaning in a single touch? Is it not our desire to have our work touched beyond what the eye thinks it perceives to where the individual feels our work, gets a sense of what we consider is good or communicated about the work? Is it not necessary if the work is functional that it be touched? And so the aesthetic of not only the form of our work which informs the user of our intent but its tactile nature of the surface in conjunction with the form communicates our intent through the act of feeling from a touch? Perhaps this desire to be touched, absorbed or enveloped which certainly I was preoccupied with at this time in my life, which has its roots in the primal, reproductive nature of living things, has to do with knowing and becoming the beautiful, the pursuit of truth, and has revealed itself in the aesthetics of the surface, form and the success of the artist’s intent is where these aesthetics join either successfully, supporting one another or simply failing in their attempt? So many questions and yet an answer may only be a touch away.

As the potter turns his work on the wheel or hand builds, the potter is touching the clay and the clay is unavoidably touching back, reminding me and presumably others engaged in this process of creation--on the micro level as I sit at the wheel to the macro level and all its socio-religious philosophical spiritual associations in the world. Does creating or effecting what one considers a good aesthetic simply have to do with this: wanting to express something beautiful, of feeling and getting beyond our mind (as our own mind seems to be a barrier) to something much more profound, a higher mind, a soul, whatever you want to think of a deeper aspect of yourself, to where truth and its association to beauty are one--and letting that live and communicate, connect with the viewer/toucher through the work?

I want to say that until recently, I did not understand the scope of history (not to say I understand it fully) or the tradition of what I was inspired and still am inspired by; that is, the Japanese aesthetic (whose roots are in China and Korea--I can hear them cursing me now) from a few simple tea bowl forms I had seen Mike Weber bring back from a wood firing--it all goes back to that first aesthetic inspiration and was continued in seeing the works Jim Grittner. Was it my first agate I held as a child pulled from a wet spring ground, shiny with its layers full of light and mud, the smell and contact with the earth of spring and renewed life, the love and adventure and imagination a child is so enveloped in during those formative years--all these associations tied to a visual and tactile experience of something beautiful held in my hands as I was once held in hands? Did Mike understand on a cognitive level what he was making and its place in this or another culture, or was he too simply attracted to the energy and motion expressed in conjunction with the earthly glaze interaction of shino and ash, a sense of designed randomness? Is Jim’s simply layered shino surfaces reflective of the steadiness and simple-ness of commitment to form and feeling? Perhaps these qualities of aesthetic preferences are all going on simultaneously, changing somewhat as we change. Sometimes we understand our aesthetic preferences and other times it remains a mystery--because we are constantly changing and why we keep searching in the material, a parallel to our own lives and our individual search for meaning, beauty, truth or what we value.

I have a theory that we all know as children good design--we see it and recognize it in the natural world and even with no technical mastery (what has a child learned in 2 years of life?) a child can express something, albeit simple, profound, truly original, his or her own marking or formulations, an individual text of expression, the beginning of one‘s own tradition of something they do as an expression of their life--until they are absorbed into their culture. A child naturally possesses and expresses this energy, unabated. We, somehow as adults, seem to have become reserved, pushing ourselves away from something dynamic, no longer embracing the child (which is really an earlier state of self) within. Picasso said something to the effect of “I’ve spent my life trying to become a child again.” So how have I put myself in a state of “in or out of mind” to get beyond my “adult” mind and life? I’ve found the act of repetition, of working in a series, of exhausting and pushing the habitual nature of the mind to repeat itself past boredom to a creative state where working becomes playing and thoughts turn to expression. Let me illustrate this:

Perhaps what is extraordinary is the process itself.  I am learning that aesthetic development comes from good craftsmanship which includes practice and commitment to your vision and refining all the time, finding a way to do something better. It is in the tea bowl form of all my forms that has become the basis for my understanding of where good craftsmanship and good aesthetic development arises from: practice, repetition, and recognizing all aspects of the process and returning again and again to the process and yet somehow moving beyond it. All steps are equally important. This way of working or approach to handling the clay has its place in many traditions and yet because of the dynamic of culture, the Japanese took the process further. The Japanese pottery tradition is no doubt very “Zen” and is why the Japanese would throw 1000 tea bowls in a sitting--it is meditation, discipline, the mantra of throwing intentionally the same or similar form to reveal the few jewels are the words of yoga, where the mind was set up with a behavior where it would be intentionally lost in the repetition of form to transcend itself and bring something beyond and through the cleansing of the self, expressing of nature and self into the aesthetic of the bowl. Kakuzo Okakura in his “The Book of Tea” reveals to us, “chado” or tea ceremony, its process, and essentially says it is the metaphor for cleansing and restoring the body. I think creating pottery has a similar effect.

It is my aesthetic intent in my work to reveal some aspect of the energy of creation on multiple levels beyond the simple concrete creation of the form, to cause others to stop, take their glasses off and look closer, become absorbed in the 15 foot painting now condensed within the scope of your hands, one degree of three hundred and sixty, turning, scintillating, a diurnal surface that speaks of the geological and the ontological of timelessness, of something including the word God and yet beyond it and all its psycho-social/religious formalisms. Like all forms, I believe the work is a conduit, vehicles for something greater in and beyond ourselves to transport, transform, and alter our being and possibly those viewers of the work. The artist is not the only alchemist transforming--he himself is transformed through the work and its process of creation.