A former student recently asked me: “Did you always want to be a potter? Or was it a following from your family? Or did you want to do something else?” This is my long answer:

My history in Art and Ceramics is hard to explain. I felt that art was and is my calling. For better or worse, I have seen it as a spiritual calling. Trying to make up my mind what form it would take has been one of the hardest dilemmas of my life. Any other time I would probably been a preacher, which is also in my family. I trained in theater but saw it as dangerous for my soul because of the lifestyle and the lack of control most actors have over their art, though I also have training in tech, directing, and playwriting. I also have a love of film, but editing was always too tedious, however rewarding. Music, never happened in the way I had hoped, though I still consider myself a musician. My friends were always technically better than me though I have a gift for improvisation as in other arts. Painting was and is a passion of mine. Pottery is grounded, like a good partner that balances me when otherwise I might be wayward. It is demanding but also rewarding. I thought at first I wanted to be a sculptor, but it takes real physical strength unless you do small work and It never was a practical solution for my life until recently. It has been easier to sell my pottery. Poetry is my secret life, the world and words, where everything comes to light, literature in general. I am all of these things but always fought my fears and my other major flaws which kept me stagnant spiritually and slowed my highest aspirations, an aspirant of higher spiritual consciousness, invested in this world that I love. This is only a glimpse. 

More specifically, I felt that I knew more and had more training in pottery so It sort of took over my life. I had at least​ 5 formal teachers including my father. I saw countless other potters work from a very young age. The influence that the discussions I had with my brother-in-law about the craft made me think I had to prove something to myself. When I got the chance to wood fire, I took it. I had an old timer, D X Gordy, tell me I was a master around 30. My relationship with my father always made the choice problematic. It was not exactly my intention to do what he did. Even my eclecticism has something to do with him, though I did learn to cook and sew from my mother. I had at. countless direct and indirect influences, and I have read and studied extensively.

I do not think of myself as a potter’s potter, like Hamada, Cardew, or Mark Hewitt, but I am a potter none-the-less. I hope I have not been misguided in this.