Small Revelations

Beware of cheap imitations —
Thankful for small revelations

I usually say, not that I'm asked very often, a lot of my influences as a potter come from artists or people who are not potters — people doing other things, music, photographers, kayakers on Instagram with their GoPro zig-zagging back and forth as they paddle through some canyon in the snow or the tropics. People who have been making records for fifty years and are setting out this week on a concert tour, with a new record, just them and a guitar.

The other night I had a studio of pots to glaze and if I got them all done in one go I could load the kiln and light it before the end of the month — I have a thing about firing once a month, if possible, as I always used to in the 'old' days. When I was touring my first album, so to speak. I gazed skeptically at a series of ramen bowls on the glaze table. I think they need a dark base glaze. And a thick opaque white, I suddenly realized, do I have one, to trail and fling across the curve of the inside surface. On top of the dark base? No. I could mix a white glaze up — it's early — I glanced skeptically at a mountain of other pots needing glazing also, tonight, before morning if this plan is going to work (even if the kiln actually starts at dawn, you can back-date it in the kiln log to the previous day).

The local radio station was playing a pre-taped interview with Chris Smither, interspersed with music, by this time I had already been in the studio all day, I had listened to enough or too many podcasts, all of my favorite glazing albums too. Great. Fine. I'll listen. Chris Smither was getting back out on the road and it had been a while since his last record. Just him…and a guitar. Who are your influences? the interviewer asked. A good artist has an answer to this question. They're not in a bubble and it’s not just vanity that makes them work — those guitar players retired long ago. A good artist came from somewhere and is going somewhere. They can't always put it into words though and it's a little bit of an interviewer's easy question, who are your influences, so I rolled my eyes. I decided to go for it and mix up a batch of the opaque white for the ramen bowls. This would take forty minutes. It was still early though.

Mississippi John Hurt – Lightning Hopkins, Chris Smither said easily. The phone connection was a little tinny & basic, you’d think a big public radio station would have better technology — could be the interviewer was still working from home of course. Back in February when he’d placed the call, before the actual tour started. They are my north and south poles, Chris Smither said. He had answered this question before – here was an artist with an answer to this question. I read the recipe and filled a bucket with a few inches of water, I would weigh out the dry powdered glaze ingredients and dump them in, then strain them through a sieve to make sure they fully mixed, then trail. And fling. I was in Mexico City? he continued, telling the story of getting started. I was seventeen and my roommate had a Lightning Hopkins record. This was nineteen sixty-one. I didn't know enough to know this was blues, I couldn't play the guitar yet? To me I heard rock and roll. To me this was rock and roll. I had to learn it! If you could make that sound, and that feel, all by yourself with a guitar…instead of playing with a full band…I learned every song on that record, Chris Smither said, I didn't really have anything else to do.

The interviewer was not skilled. Despite, as he made sure to mention, being a deejay for thirty years. I think I’ve been listening to him for most of that time. Dogged continuance is necessary to the longevity of the artist, let’s say, but not sufficient. Uh, said the deejay, that's interesting that you learn from other people!

Still, when the interview ended & Chris Smither hung up the deejay played a long set, not just of more back catalog, also the influencers and the influencees (plenty of people pattern themselves on Chris Smither). I weighed ingredients onto the scale, respirator on, and heard Sun House, Bonnie Raitt, Little Feat, even the Rolling Stones (influencer). Elizabeth Cotton.

That got me thinking about my influences. Not famous people, most of them. Who would be my Son House? I kept weighing out ingredients for the opaque white so I could get these bowls glazed – so I could get to bed before sunrise maybe. Most people who have kept me on track and lead me forward would be surprised to know they were an influence at all – the driver of the bus I rode in grade school, named, in an early case of life imitating art, Mrs. Wheeler. Someone I worked my first season as a river guide with who decided it was worth it, at seven-thirty one summer morning on Westwater, to get into a physical altercation with the lead guide over the right way to pack the kitchen box. You just want everybody to do it your way my fellow guide said spontaneously, fearlessly, knowing it might be a person instead of the legendary rapids that beat him up that day.

Soon after those days on the river someone gave me a cassette of Chris Smither. I know – a cassette tape. Longevity. Duration. Time. We’re going back a long ways here. Chris Smither has been on the road, and writing songs and making records, for decades. It was ten o’clock a moment later and the deejay signed off. I glanced back at the recipe and realized that the one ingredient that was the whole point of this project, that would make the glaze opaque so it worked as an overlay for the ramen bowls, zircopax — was gone.

Zircopax, a trade name for zirconium silicate, a stable, refractory, material that tends not to join into the melting glaze ingredients it's mixed with — it stays as tiny white angular particles that scatter & reflect light, making the overall melt more opaque and, with enough zircopax, white. Hmm, I thought. Now what? The music switched to jazz. A colorant of some kind, I thought. Some other kind. Maybe it’s better if it’s not white. How about rutile? What if I just add that to the bucket instead.

Simple to see where we come from —
Harder is where we are

Somebody else on that same trip, not an official guide, I don't actually know how he ended up running a boat that time on Westwater, must have been a friend of somebody, not surprisingly a very confident & extroverted person, he ended up being the one to talk to the ranger when we pulled up at the boatramp. Midmorning, midsummer, the Colorado River. Everybody in sunglasses fortunately and he told the ranger that a metal box containing a bottle jack and a socket wrench set was actually our first aid kit. Which we had left behind, someone at the put-in mistaking the van repair box (same metal shape) for a key item on the commercial permit. Go ahead and check it out, he said encouragingly, and the ranger just shaded his eyes, pen in hand, and then checked something off on his clipboard.

Of course it’s not just people, mostly it’s moments, and events, and things that happen when you don’t know what’s happening, that shape your work and either throw you off or keep you going. It’s luck. Nobody who gets interviewed by a deejay as they set out on tour though, especially after such a long run as this guitar player has had, ever says luck. To me, sometimes, naming your influences feels a little bit close to taking credit for things that just happen, or that you did in another time without knowing why. I’ll take my chances, I thought, and put a heaping spoon of rutile (titanium dioxide in an impure form) in a cup of the incomplete glaze I’d just mixed. It was starting to get late. Actually early. I got the load completed, and closed the kiln door and pushed the sparker button, hearing the little electric snapping sound of the beginning of a glaze firing. The radio had been off for hours, and it was still dark — you could look along the eastern horizon though and think maybe it was getting light.

A couple days later I unloaded the kiln. Chris Smither, out on tour, had played Albuquerque when I was busy with the firing. The friend of mine who first gave me the cassette of his music, another long-time fan, missed the Minneapolis show because he’d just tested positive. Oh well. The firing came out great. The modified glaze, with rutile instead of zircopax, is an innovation I am now going to take credit for. I thought of that! On purpose!

Luck — next time someone asks me about my influences, how I got here, maybe I’ll be honest though maybe not. Not all artists are.