Save the Date
Cufflinks and hubcaps
Trophies and paperbacks
— T.W.
Once in a while you look at the foot of a pot & see that along with their mark, the potter has contributed the date when the piece was made, or even the place. Always a little disconcerting. Often I'm in a thrift store when I see this, rummaging around among the waffle irons & Pyrex, oh look here's a little vase that is obviously handmade. Here on the foot – an optimistic flourish of iron oxide – Santa Fe '92, it might say.
Hmm, I think, setting the vase back in its dusty Tom Waitsian place, nah not buying that after all, even if it is handmade. It's been pinned in place, so to speak, by the conceit of the maker. The maker was probably not from Santa Fe, though pleased to be here, and hopeful that a little uniqueness of this town would rub off onto the vase, making it more special. Same with the date. Making the vase reveal the exact moment it got made – that makes it unique, right? And unique is good?
When I was a kid I my parents read me & my brother a lot of books out loud, and then I started reading a lot myself, often books written in the nineteenth century, and often in the first paragraph as the scene is being set there is a little elision of the date. At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18— , begins one of my favorite Poe stories, one I certainly read as a kid back then. I remember being fascinated by this practice, and understanding that a writer needs to avoid pinning a story too specifically in time or place. Not long ago, Poe begins another story, about the closing in of an evening in Autumn, I sat at the large bow window of the D— Coffee-House in London. I remember being fascinated as a kid by the conundrum this practice represented. You want to introduce your story, still though you want to leave a lot unknown, so that the reader's imagination is free to invent. You want to say where the story takes place, and at the same time you need the reader to be able to see the place very immediately in their own mind, contributing their own imagined details. All art is like this I think. There needs to be an opening, an uncertainty, so that you can make it mean something, spontaneously, when you encounter it. Timing is everything.
This paradox swirls around for me these days too, just as much, whether I’m reading Poe’s Tales of Mystery & Imagination or at a thrift store, a museum, or in my own studio. A good pot needs to be articulate without being prosaically specific. A good vase needs to be floating through time, just a little, and it needs this more than it needs to be special.
Think about the title of the painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, for example. It’s 'A' Sunday afternoon – it is one of many. It would be a different painting if it had been called just 'Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’. Or if we knew exactly which Sunday Georges Seurat had in mind that would be a bit alienating. That would be prosaically specific. None of us were there, after all. I saw that painting recently in the Impressionist room at the Art Institute of Chicago, standing there pondering among many in the dim windowless space, craning over the crowd & seeing the image of the painting, as at a concert, reproduced in the little rectangles of peoples’ phones before me.
Moving along a little from there to the Contemporary wing, much less crowded, I stood in a bright room in front of a great flat black canvas with Oct. 31, 1978 written on it. The painting is huge. The letters & numbers are big, white, san serif. Hmm, I thought, completely arrested by this giant painting. Where was I on that date? Oh yes. I remember. I put myself back in that day. I put myself into the painting. The effect was to memorialize that now-distant moment, and also to trivialize it – how fleeting. How far away. I learned that Kawara painted one of these, maybe not this big, everyday for years. So the paintings are about painting, and about time, and about the rhythmic everyday quality of studio work. I learned that he followed certain rules for this project – if he didn't finish his date painting before midnight, he destroyed it. When traveling, he painted the date the way it would be said in the country he was in. The letters are always handpainted, the background always a solid color.
I'm always inspired by visiting museums. I return to my studio eager to work, and, usually, also just a bit whistful – envious, even, of these artworks that get to be in the museum & whose futures, so to speak, have already been decided. They have security, they are in retirement. How about my pots – what will happen to them, and where are they going, aside from possibly to the thrift store? How about my studio practice – when will I ever get life arranged so that I work everyday like On Kawara? I was lamenting my lack of studio time to a friend earlier this summer, a hot dry morning in June. He's a geologist, so, an excellent perspective on time. He's also a disciplined, energetic, prolific, potter whose pieces have a sense of enthusiasm & coherence that I also was a tiny bit envious of. How about in July you make one pot a day? he suggested. Even if you can’t get in your own studio for a full session.
That's a good idea, I admitted. That'd be thirty-one pots by the end of the month. That's something.
You could post each one on Instagram.
Oh, I said. That's the other thing. I totally need to get back on Instagram.
You could do it just to take the pressure off. Just for the fun of it.
Right, I agreed. You know what happens, I’m short on studio time, when I do get a window of a good four hours I just procrastinate. It's so weird. I guess I feel like I’m so far behind, there’s all this pressure. One pot a day could work to get a little momentum going.
My friend nodded.
So I started. July first. I threw a vase. Easy. I realized I already had a number of rules in place for this project, without even having thought about it. The pieces would be unitary, never part of a set. They would be big – three pounds minimum. They would only be pieces I 'want' to make, never part of an order. I would only make my pot of the day when I'm alone.
Day two: throw another vase, and trim the first one. Suddenly a question came up that I didn't have a rule for. How do I know which vase is day one, and which is day two? I'll have to put a number on the bottom. I reached for my little set of metal stamps & impressed 1 into the foot of the vase I'd just trimmed. I felt uneasy. I felt the vase feeling uneasy. I could almost feel it looking at me reproachfully – why did you just do that? Clay is a soft forgiving material, the final product after a mountain has been washed to the sea. As my geologist friend had explained to me. Clay also is a bright and hard mirror of conceit. You can see your reflection, always.
The next day, trimming vase 2, I decided to use a paintbrush to scrawl a number on the bottom. At least this way I'm not actually changing the form – I'm adding a layer of conceit, maybe, but at least I'm not making the vase different in a primary kind of way. I set the brush down. There. The vase looked at me just like the last one, but said nothing this time.
Day nine: I'm going out of town for a few days for a memorial service. Do I scrap my pot-a-day project? I read the Wikipedia entry again on On Kawara, and saw that he didn't actually make a date painting every day. Some days he made none, and on other days he made more than one, and, while he pursued his date painting series over many years, in any given year he only made between 64 and 241 of them. Not 365 of them.
How about I make five extra vases today, and number them for the upcoming weekend dates I'll be at the memorial? Good idea I thought, though the vases I'd already made were silent, when I glanced warily over at them, waiting on their rack for the kiln. By now the earliest numbers were bone dry & ready to be bisque fired. But I was busy. I packed my suitcase, got on an airplane, and returned the following week.
Okay, okay, I said wearily, as I unlocked the studio after my weekend away. Plus after an extra half-day of procrastination. I pulled the plastic from the drying vases with their brush-scrawled numbers, and reached for one. Here, I said, wrapping my arm around it, looking at the foot, reaching for a square of sandpaper. No more numbers. No more pot-a-day. I'll just...fire what I've got & get all these numbers sanded off. I could feel relief, like a chorus, from the collection of greenware. It was like I was their middle school math teacher & had just said there’s going to be no quiz on Friday. I fired my kiln on July 27.
I did get one or two good pots out of my abandoned project.
This vase is 18” tall, a light, easygoing shape that has not quite decided on what it is going to be yet. Which I like. Softly closing toward the top, without a neck or a rim. Slightly indented through the middle with vertical impressions left by a long stick swung against the still-wet form, further loosening its geometry. Actually what had once been the rim was cut free in the last moment of making, and flung at the shoulder of the vase, where it sticks as a not-round circle. The surface is an opaque, thin, satin, revealing brush strokes of porcelain slip slopped on underneath.
I was happy to see this piece in the kiln when it cooled, the best of the unfinished pot-a-day project. To be detached & easygoing in the studio was its goal and here, I succeeded. One of the not-best pieces from July is below. This 14” platter was inspired by Toshiko Takaezu’s ‘landscape’ plates, some of which I saw last fall at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She put down a base glaze sometimes, I think, and then poured or brushed another couple glazes on top, frequently a blue. I liked the in-the-moment uncertainty of this process, the three-dimensionality, and the way you don’t quite know how the glazes will like being next to each other. I left this piece on a table after unloading my kiln & taking the new pots away. For the last few days I’ve looked at it, each time studying more closely, as though the platter is saying more & more & I am listening better. It is disappointment that makes you learn to listen.
For one thing, Warren MacKenzie’s matte brown base glaze has something going on - there are tiny bumps all over the platter. These, on close inspection, are bubbles, forming late in the firing, as some ingredient in the glaze breaks down & releases carbon dioxide or another gas. It’s twenty-five percent whiting - calcium carbonate - that could be it.
For another thing, the glassy black over the matte brown is good. There is something here that could happen. It’s not happening yet. All it would take would be the month of August, and more studio time, and more dates, not contrived as numbers to appear on the bottoms of individual pieces but as studio days, left to wash freely, to overlap, to blur and disappear.
Theo Helmstadter
August 2025
