Winter Studio Journal 2024 — Green River Pottery

I heard last week that Peter Schickele had died, at age 87. I was standing in the studio, scrolling through podcasts at the beginning of a work session, looking for something to listen to, & passed a remembrance of him on Fresh Air. Often I learn about the death of someone famous this way — not on the news, not in real time, only later when I happen to be looking on my phone.

I let the podcasts build up. When there is a week or two of The Daily or Fresh Air to choose from, I scroll. Not quite the same of course — the advantage I guess is you can defer learning what’s happening in the outside world until you really want to know, and you can put off knowing for weeks at a time. The disadvantage is…it’s not quite the same. Not like the radio.

I used to always listen to the radio. Especially when working and it's terrible, I know, I'm one of those people who associates the radio with a kind of communion with the world, at a comfortable distance, and with space, empty space, and silence, which is a little paradoxical, and also with the imagined presence of other people. We are together in real time, they’re invisible and still, presumably, at least a few people, working alongside, doing what I'm doing. Loading a kiln, sifting clay through a window screen into a plastic box.

The radio is a companion, and a symbol of knowing other companions are out there somewhere. It's good to be alone, says the radio. It's okay. You're not really alone.

In the early Two Thousands Peter Schickele had a one-hour syndicated radio show that I used to listen to on Sundays. This was back when you had to wait for a show to start, and your work day, your studio session, to some extend grew around the schedule of what was on what station when. That always guided me, gave me a reason to hurry, pulling on dust-covered clothes & showing up out in my workspace before the theme music (remember? radio shows had theme music) started. Schickele Mix was a random, funny, improvised, hour of classical music, though I'm sure Peter Schickele would not want it described that way. If it sounds good it is good was one of his refrains, meaning that you can't really call some music 'classical'. The labels don't quite fit. He was always pointing that out. Schickele was a composer who loved Bach & Mozart, and often wrote satirical pieces in their styles. He loved performance, and treated his radio show like a performance, and wanted to be irreverent, and personal, and less sanctimonious about 'great' music.

Along the way, if you listened week after week, you learned a lot about music in general. In one show he pointed out that Mozart basically thought of melody as a vocal line, so that even his symphonies sounded basically like songs – you could imagine them sung. To prove this he wrote his own lyrics to a supposed opera, and sang them over the first several minutes of the Jupiter symphony. It was funny. Ah, I would say at parties, for years after, when the topic came up – sometimes it did – well, so Mozart, he really composed for the voice, you can kind of imagine words to everything he wrote.

Ouch. The tiresome thirty-something male! In those days I was building my first kiln. I'd purchased a pile of refractory brick that once had been someone else's kiln, and in my yard in Chimayo where I lived at the time I'd poured a concrete pad. I bravely began stacking the bricks into a sprung-arch kiln. With a great chimney towering above. Could the neighbors see it – would they care? How big of a propane tank should I get, and how far away should it be? How many BTUs is enough?

Instinctively, as you start on a path you're unsure of, you look for help, and it comes obliquely, in ways you don't always recognize at first. I wanted to be a potter, and there was only so much help I could directly get from other potters as I started building my studio. Nobody can tell you what to do, and you kind of have to figure it out. I think I got so much out of listening to Peter Schickele because I sensed how much he loved music, and composition, and how motivated he was to be an outsider in the 'classical' world, a rebel. He thought that world was self-referential & self-serious. I knew I wanted to be a potter, and I needed a guide in how to be devoted to clay without being too serious about it. I wanted to be irreverent, and personal, and to avoid sanctimony, which of course there is plenty of in all corners of the ‘art’ world.

I love how as an artist you are maybe more inspired into your own work by what other artists do in other fields, and I love how the people who guide you don't need to speak directly to you, or be right there over your shoulder. Though they do need to be present, if invisible, right alongside.

This winter I divide my days, theoretically, through the week, three at home (in studio A) and four in Santa Fe (studio B). In Santa Fe I teach, or help keep the studio stay organized & supplied. Of course, other people are doing most of the actual work, loading the kiln, watching the kiln, mopping. Any potter must love cleaning. Mopping. A couple days ago I was cleaning, and making several trips to the storage unit, watching the winter light advance and lengthen. I hoped to return home to Studio A before dark. The long winter light, quickly advancing & the long nights! I relish these & try to store them up for the endless bright summer ahead. It is always better to fire a kiln at night, and it is good to be working when it's dark outside, to be up before dawn even begins.

Letting down the truck's tailgate & rolling up the clattering metal door of the storage unit I began moving a stack of clay boxes into the unlit space. No electricity at the Pacheco Street storage facility, which is okay, though that also means no heat, and I’m taking a chance stacking clay boxes into the unit this time of year. Will they freeze?

As I skidded some boxes of clay out to the tailgate I saw a great big black widow – I'd surprised it, somehow not crushing it, and now it was disturbed, out in the lengthening afternoon light, attempting to scramble up the smooth steep curve of the wheel well. I watched for a moment. Its long fine legs getting covered in clay, it lost traction & kept slipping down. A beautiful, dangerous, big, spider that wanted darkness.

I finished unloading my boxes, putting on a pair of leather gloves. The spider was still there after, unsuccessfully trying to climb the side of the truckbed. You rarely see a black widow exerting effort like that - usually they are so poised & reserved. I tore a piece of paper from a fifty-pound bag of feldspar & used it to scoop her up. I placed the paper on the ground near the closed roll-top door, easy enough get under & into the dark. Instead she just went under the paper, and sat there. I shrugged, and got in the truck. As I turned around & sped off, always busy, the paper had blown away & I saw the spider a last time, those incisive long black legs covered with clay dust. Consider the lives of others, it seemed to say, in this little dream-like moment of the winter afternoon. Don't hurry so much, and be careful. Everybody is trying to get where they’re going, and everybody is mystified, occasionally, by where they are, and we all want to adapt. Which is of course the origin of art itself – the hard, sometimes deferred, work of getting used to the outside world. All art is adjustment said...who was that, was it Aristotle?

Okay in this totally improvised winter studio journal, just to return to this mug, from that first kiln in Chimayo, glazed with Warren Mackenzie’s dolomite matte, that’s a moon brushed over in cobalt, probably with my left hand. In those days I started using my left hand to hold the brush or the trimming tool, since this made my work more personal, I thought — more improvised, less sanctimonious. I remember that anything that fit in the kiln would be included. There were not that many shelves. I fired nearly everything I made.

I did a lot of stars & moons. Just starting in clay, I compensated for my trepidation by looking up - the night sky always helps you stop worrying about the practical and the ‘outside world’. The cup is tea-stained now, after a few decades in my mother’s kitchen. Many potters have their formative works safely stored in a parent’s home, and I am fortunate, though sad, to receive this one back. In winter, a handleless mug is best — and this warmth-giving, trepidatious, off-center mug is just right for the dark weeks of January, the new year’s uneasy, even dangerous, first steps.