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Above Left The first "bowl" to survive the wheel Above Right The first product of my very brief handbuilding career These pots are not for sale, of course. They keep me humble. Fifteen years ago I was working as a technical support specialist for a mainframe software company in Reston, Va. One day I found out that the wife of one of my co-workers was an amateur potter. Because I had always been fascinated watching potters work with clay on the wheel, I commented that I would love to take a class somewhere -- just to experience what it felt like to work on a potter's wheel. He said, "Oh, it takes a long time to be able to make anything that's any good. It's really hard. You can't just 'take a class' and make something." I regret that I let that comment stop me for a lot of years. In 1997 I made a comment to a friend about how I really liked pottery, and the next time I saw him, he gave me a small bowl he had made in a beginning pottery class. Looking at it now, I can see clearly that it was made by a beginner. The walls are thick. The foot is clumsily trimmed. The form is nothing special at all. But then, I just thought it was wonderful. It occurred to me that I wasn't getting any younger and if it took a really long time to be able to make something, then I had better get started. And if this man could take a beginning pottery class and make something this wonderful, then so could I. A month later I walked into my first pottery class. I still have the first really awful little bowl that "survived" my initial efforts on the wheel. I made a lot of really awful little bowls. They got bigger, and they changed shape, but the one thing they had in common was that they were all really awful. I didn't care. I was learning and enjoying finding the little bit of creativity inside me that I didn't know was there. A few months later another friend, upon hearing about my efforts in the pottery class, bought me a subscription to Ceramics Monthly. That opened up a whole world to me that I didn't even know existed. I had never seen such beautiful pots. I started paying attention to names that kept appearing over and over. Warren MacKenzie. Bernard Leach. Hamada. I had no idea there were "famous potters." In the summer of 2000, I traveled to Vermont to spend nine days working one-on-one in a pottery studio. The potter and I spent a lot of time talking about pots. He had an extensive library of pottery books, and I enjoyed just thumbing through them. One day we drove about an hour south to the studio of Sam Taylor in Westhampton, MA. Sam was opening his wood-fired kiln that day and I was like a kid in a candy store. As fast as Sam would take the pots out of the kiln, I would grab the ones that "belonged to me" and place them, still warm, on a table in the middle of the yard. When we were finished, Sam took one of the pitchers he had made into his kitchen and filled it with lemonade that we enjoyed in the warm afternoon sun. I've learned a lot since that first class in the fall of 1997. Probably the most important thing I've learned is: "Oh, it takes a long time to be able to make anything that's any good. It's really hard. You can't just 'take a class' and make something."
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