something new

Our friend Kazuko is a potter. She’s been working with clay for over fifteen years. She and her husband have known my parents a long time, so I remember when she first began learning at the wheel.

Kazuko is a lifelong artist who studied painting and weaving as a young woman in Tokyo, and none of us were surprised when she demonstrated a talent for pottery as well. But it was her artistic vision, even before she had truly mastered the technique, that amazed us all. She had unerring instincts when it came to choosing glazes, stenciling details, creating simple, eye-catching patterns for her plain bowls and vases and platters. She was able to envision the most beautiful objects in her mind and then build them out of clay. These were pieces of herself, taken from her artist’s eyes and mind and heart, and she had given them three-dimensional representation, made them real for us to see.

She gave me a few pieces of her early work, small bowls and squat teacups and the occasional vase. I loved and treasured these gifts, however quick she was to point out their flaws. She saw herself as very much a beginner, so of course it came as a shock to her when she found that people actually wanted to buy her work. Everyone pressed her until she agreed to create a certain number of pieces for a local arts show. Of course, every piece sold, and everybody told her she hadn’t charged nearly enough.

It became inconvenient for her to drive back and forth to the studio where she had first learned to throw, so her husband built her a little potter’s shed with her own wheel and kiln in the woods next to their house. With her own space, she began to experiment – different clay, different glazes, different styles, different patterns. Large vessels, small ones, functional ones, pieces for display only. She made her own stamps and stencils and designs, and hand-built vines and flowers and birds in flight. Her work filled the plain wooden shelves inside her shed and spilled over to the cinderblock steps in front.

My mother goes to every one of Kazuko’s shows, and usually buys me a new piece every Christmas. My father visits Kazuko’s shed from time to time and goes through her trash heap – finished pieces that she is dissatisfied with, for whatever reason – and she tells him to take anything he likes. My parents have a ton of Kazuko’s artwork at home, and I think at least half of it was brought home by my father, who loves castoffs, and who (like the rest of us) can never see the imperfections so glaringly obvious to Kazuko’s critical eye.

* * *

I love pottery, and I buy it often for myself or for others. Kazuko is one reason I love it; another is the centuries’ worth of Korean pottery, with the famous pale green celadon glaze, that I have seen many times at the Freer Gallery of Art in D.C. I like art in general, though I’m woefully ignorant of most of it, and my appreciation of it is limited to “I know what I like and I like that.” What I have always liked about pottery – apart from the fact that it can be beautiful as well as functional – is that it doesn’t simply sit on your shelf or hang on your wall (though it can do those things); it’s something tangible, with weight and dimension; it’s something you can take down and grasp and hold. Something you can feel. Every piece is different, and yet every piece is some combination of the same basic elements, earth, water, and fire.

Despite my total lack of artistic talent, I’ve always wanted to take a pottery class. It was on my ever-growing list of Things to Do…Someday. Sometime last year, after I began staying home with Abby and found myself, for the first time in my adult life, without a “real job,” the thought occurred to me one day that maybe the time was right for me to take a beginner’s class. I called the local pottery studio and paid my fee and even bought some of the tools I’d need, but what with one thing and another it never worked out to actually enroll in a class until this summer.

This morning was my first class. Dan and Abby came downtown with me, and before they dropped me off we all had a delightful breakfast at a little French cafe and bakery. Abigail ate the world’s blueberriest muffin, much to her delight and stickiness, and Dan and I had egg and gruyere sandwiches and split half a dozen beignets. They were amazing – so light and delicious, topped with two kinds of sugar. I think they were actually better than the beignets we had at Cafe du Monde a couple of years ago (I know, heresy! Insert gasp here!), though the coffee in New Orleans is exponentially better than anything you can get in the Triangle. 

The pottery class was scheduled to last for three hours. Dan and Abby dropped me off in front, a few minutes early (I like to be early for things. I think I was early to every class in college; I would actually set my watch five minutes ahead, and then show up five minutes before that. Anyway, you guys, old habits die hard. And it totally paid off in this case because I was able to claim a nice shelf for myself. I am what Hopkins people would call a pottery class throat). Everyone, as it turned out, showed up before the teacher, who was running a bit late. One guy brought Krispy Kremes, which of course I couldn’t manage to eat since I was still stuffed full of beignets.

Turns out our class is a mixed level class; there’s only one other person who is brand-new to clay besides me, and everyone else has taken at least one beginner’s class. I think their enrollment was a bit short for the beginner’s class, so they made it mixed level. It meant that the other beginner, Tina, and I got a lot of help from Pam, the instructor.

Of course, when I say “help,” I mean “direction,” and when I say “direction,” I mean “a shitload of information delivered in the tone usually reserved for high school driving instructors.” Seriously, Pam made me so nervous, especially in the first hour or so, that I kept jumping whenever she wandered over to my workspace and said something about my technique. Then she would tell me I had just taken my hands off the clay too quickly, which was why it was messed up, and I would be like “DUH, it’s because you made me NERVOUS and I JUMPED.”

Tina and I exchanged a lot of Looks. Embarrassed, alarmed, nervous, guilty Looks. It took me back to my Catholic school days.

Pam is very brusque, which I guess I am fine with (I don’t think of myself as a shrinking violet), but it’s a bit overwhelming when you are trying to learn something new. Whenever I did something not quite right – which is, let’s face it, kind of implied by the whole “beginner” label, and the fact that I had never touched raw clay until today – more often than not, she said something in the tone your driving instructor used to employ when you had done something particularly stupid in “the flow of traffic,” and even though there was never any real danger, because, of course, he or she had just made use of the handy brake at his or her feet, you really ought to keep in mind that in most other cars there would be no passenger-side break and no experienced and alert driving instructor, which means that you – and everyone in the car with you – would most likely be dead.

But Pam also knew how to be encouraging at times. She used my wheel to demonstrate the first throw, so I didn’t get to try throwing or centering myself until my first lump of clay had already become a funny-looking bowl. But when I threw my second lump of clay, I managed to center it myself – pushing down and out – trying to apply equal pressure with both hands. Suddenly, my wet lump of clay was no longer wobbling about on the spinning wheel – it was the still point at its center. And Pam, walking by at the time, looked at me seriously and said, “look at you! And you thought you didn’t know what you were doing!”

Alright, it’s not exactly the kind of praise I got used to when I had the world’s best kindergarten teacher. But I guess I’ll take it.

Over the course of the class I managed to throw, center, shape, and cut three funny-looking bowls (though one of them, the one I spent the most time on, is actually not bad-looking at all, even if it is too small to be very useful). I also managed to spatter the bottom of my pants, the front of a borrowed apron, my wheel and table, and the wall behind it with lots and lots of reddish-brown, clay-stained water. (Cleanup took awhile, and my hands still feel dry and grainy.)

Pottery is like nothing I’ve ever done before. I had forgotten how hard it is to learn something that can’t be read or heard or memorized or learned through conventional study. Even ballroom dancing, when Dan and I took classes before Abby was born, was somewhat easier than this, because I already had some understanding of music and rhythm. With clay, Pam can tell me over and over what I need to do, what I should look for and how it should feel, the way I should brace my feet or hold my hands or lean with my body over the wheel – but I cannot learn simply by listening to her words, no matter how often (or how firmly) she says them. All I can do is pick up the clay and push it around, and try not to be afraid of it. Remember, thou art dust.

Honestly, I did not think I would be able to center that second ball of clay today. I was starting to think that I was just exposing myself to embarrassment and failure by signing up for this class – me, total non-artist that I am – and I was remembering just how much I hate not getting things quickly, and how I often avoid doing things I’m not good at, even though I know that makes me a tool. My lump of clay was wobbling to and fro, even my hair was slipping out of my ponytail, and I felt sweaty and disheveled and frustrated.

But if I couldn’t center the clay, then I couldn’t even start anything new, not even a second funny-looking bowl. I couldn’t learn if I couldn’t start. Which meant I had to learn to center, today, or that was pretty much it for my pottery experiment.

I closed my eyes. I didn’t have to be able to see, after all; I had to be able to feel. I pushed, down and out. Hard. I stopped worrying that I would wreck my clay, make a huge mess, or hurt my back bending over the wheel. I felt the slight burn of the wheel’s metal surface through the layer of clay on my hands. It hurt a little, but I kept pushing.

I opened my eyes. The wheel was still spinning along, but my clay was no longer rocking and rolling to and fro. It was steady in the middle, smooth and suddenly appealing, awaiting my direction.

“You’re centered,” one of my classmates said earnestly.

For just a second, I really did feel it.