Copyright © 1999 Doug Browe
Arts & Entertainment
October, 1997 pp. 16,17 & 28

                  
As a child, I always felt a bit off kilter. It was as though everyone else was given a script, and I had to improvise. This has formed a great direction of my life: the search for a correct path, a feeling of that which was meant to be. In my youth, this did not ad as an ally. I was drawn to all who assumed they were right. But following is one of the greatest wastes of human resource; another is the struggle to be the leader, rather than just striving to be.

The potters included in this show, Friends and Inspirations (October 3 to 27 at the Mendocino Art Center) are people who are concentrating on their lives and their life's work, consumed with the act of being. When I was asked to assemble a show of clay for exhibition at the Art Center, I felt it was important to introduce the artists within the context of
my life.

I met Brent Heerspink when he moved to the rural farming area of Michigan to which I had fled. Brent had just returned from England working in potteries. I would drop in to visit and watch. What I began to see was rightness. I had worked with clay in school, and had even gotten a small electric kiln and some clay and had been making pots. But being around Brent, I had started to get that feeling -- that satisfying feeling that what you are doing is right.

In 1973, due to a back problem, Brent was in need of help that I was able to offer. I began to have a growing awareness of his studio rhythm, and thus became a small part of Brent's studio and his life -- and he a big part of mine. I spent the next year following him around the studio lifting and moving materials and, more important, watching him make pots, fixated on the rightness of his motion.

I decided to attend college, and went to check out Grand Valley State University. Arriving to find Warren Mackenzie giving a workshop convinced me that this was the school for me. Attending the school at the time was a potter, Willem Gebben, who I could tell was on the right track. Willem's work is strictly functional wood-fired stoneware. It is quiet and reserved; it pleases the hand and eye, but, after living with it for years, his work does not bore or seem redundant.

Bill Strickland was the head of the ceramics program, and was quite a potter. He had a great talent for bringing the influence of contemporary academic ceramics to the studio, and weaving it into the traditional and functional work to which I was drawn. When Bill passed away a few years ago, we lost a great potter and a good teacher.

My first day of classes at college introduced me to Dan Gorno. Dan and I lived together down by the Grand River in a shack we called "Louie's Place," taken from a sign that was a gift of the river. It was Dan who first came out to California to attend the EAFW wood-fire workshop. Dan returned with pots and stories, so in the winter of 1976, out West I went to see what all the excitement was about.

The excitement I found was a pretty young miss by the name of Jan Hoyman. Jan captured me with her straight-forward approach and her incredibly strong, yet feminine, forms. Jan's eye for form and surface are a large part of the success we enjoy in our collaborative work and life.

Tom Orr was working with Jan at Dick Hotchkiss' Studio in Grass Valley. We meet many people in our path of clay. That feeling of rightness is just with some of them, and Tom is one of those people. Tom is now the director of the ceramics department at The Oregon College of Arts and Crafts in Portland, Oregon. His work reflects his excitement for life and the depth of his personal power as clearly as a mirror.

Jan and I visited a great collection of old earthenware and a re-enacted turn-of-the-century working studio in Greenfield Village in Detroit, Michigan. Julie Porter was working there, and was later to join forces with Brent Heerspink. Julie's collaborations with Brent work so well because of her full and ample forms and decoration. Together they make a great team.

Larry Henderson moved to Ukiah to be a tech for Mendocino College. In 1985, we all rented the warehouse that is home to our studio, and which Larry used as his home for two years. He has become an important part of our wood-fire group and a good friend. Larry is the best teacher of beginning throwing I know. His work in clay has a feeling of generosity and a voluptuousness I find very satisfying and kind of sexy.

The summer of 1990 brought us Allegheny Meadows as a studio assistant. His positive attitude and strength of character make him quite an asset in any shop. His current work is as eclectic as the countries in which he has lived and worked over the last few years. Allegheny's clay relies heavily on the form, cutting up thrown pots and reassembling them, and using glazing to enhance, not cover, the piece.

Leslie Campbell has been part of our Mendocino wood-fire group from the beginning. An intuitively sensitive and strong woman whose work in clay is best described as sculptural, with an English functional pottery foundation. Her work is about the exterior line the pieces present and the interplay of the kiln's decorations on them.

I met Jackie Davidson nine years ago as one of our students at the Mendocino Art Center. Her excitement for learning won me over from the start. An accomplished clay worker with a quick, sharp mind, her current sculptural pieces are strikingly contemporary, drawing inspiration from ancient Japanese axes.

Kent Rothman has been the director of the Art Center's Ceramics Program during its current renaissance. He has worked hard to reassemble the physical plant of the ceramics studio and, through his connections in the world of clay, to bring top-notch ceramic instructors to the Art Center.

What Friends and Inspirations offers is a glimpse into the lives of 13 ceramic artists whose driving force is their work in clay. Thirteen people dedicated to the exploration of clay and, more important, to the search of that feeling of rightness. 

Friends Gallery: see more than a dozen works from the exhibition.

More: a detailed review of "Friends and Inspirations" from Mendocino Country Entertainment, October 1997.

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