My Mom Is A Potter

Just don’t tell her that.

Three blocks and a lifetime separated my mom’s second-story apartment and the pottery studio. She worked her last job as a human services consultant in Augusta, Maine, but lived in Hallowell, one of the cool, creative hamlets outside the capital city. She couldn’t always fly back to her home in Nashville on weekends and had to find ways of occupying her time. Lobster eating is a fairly pleasant diversion, especially when she could call Jason at Hallowell Seafood and Produce on her way back from the office and say, “Hey, cook me one. I’ll just pick it up on my way home.” Between fresh lobster and Isamax Wicked Whoopies, it’s difficult to cast oneself as stranded in Maine over the weekend.

Mom befriended all the locals, as she often does, including Malley Webber, a master potter and owner of Hallowell Clay Works. Malley tried in vain to get mom to take pottery classes.

“I’m not the creative type,” mom would say, without knowing that she was. Creative types sometimes are the last to know what they are. Malley took another shot at it one weekend.

“Phyllis, you should at least come down and sit in on one class.”

“No, I don’t think so. It’s not my thing,” came mom’s predictable reply.

“They’ll be wine,” Malley said.

“Sign me up,” came mom’s predictable reply.

Over the years, mom smashed through her share of glass ceilings in the killer-competitive world of business consulting. She became a vice president of a consulting firm and project manager of more multi-million-dollar projects than I’m sure she’d care to count. But a clay-dust-covered apron and glass of Pinot Grigio instigated a near-instant abandonment of community organizing and consulting. The collegial atmosphere of a glass of wine was something mom understood, felt comfortable with, and enjoyed thoroughly. Any pressure to excel at the art form hid behind a collective of women laughing, drinking, gossiping, plotting, and becoming.

Sitting at the potter’s wheel, muddy hands upon a mound of spinning clay must feel as though the earth and its rotation are yours for the taking. The urge to form must come from the clay because mom did not, and to some degree, still does not, believe it comes from her. That’s the view of most potters, as it is with most artists. The combination of #55 Laguna clay, a rotating wheel, and human touch creates a rebirth of sorts. At least in those willing to allow it. And if in a moment of singular awareness, monotonous productivity, or dumb luck, the artist accepts the art, a creative life begins anew.

A creative life comprises four, sometimes unequal parts; joy, purpose, addiction, and mystery. The subparts, of course, are poverty, frustration, jealousy, and self-doubt. Thankfully, for my mom’s sake, those that enlighten late to their creative selves often escape those maladies.

Mugs, bowls, vases, and objects unknown to anyone, flew off my mom’s wheel like sparks from a fire. Still believing that the initial first months were only classes, glasses of wine, and camaraderie, mom rushed headlong into a life she would have lost a hundred bucks in a bet over. Who would have thought, least of all her, that retirement would ring in a new job?

Once back in Nashville, mom found her new pottery community quickly, a local art den known as the Mud Puddle. They offered classes in pottery wheels and hand building, and apparently, in wine drinking. These were like-minded women. Every artist needs that second booster rocket to ignite. As important as the first moment of experience is, it only takes hold when combined with the second experience. All creatives, whether singers, writers, dancers, painters, and all the rest, need that conformational moment or series of moments that turn initiation into obsession.

The Mud Puddle and the cast of clay-addicted characters surrounding mom’s early creative journey provided that necessary kinetic exchange. Once art and artist come together, transformation occurs in the senses.

My mom saw beautiful bowls hanging in elephant-leaf trees, mugs in round stones along Cub Creek Road, and plates popping out of street signs, asphalt, and every flat surface parading past. She heard the whir of the potter’s wheel in the turning of tires, in the flap of a bird’s wing, and in rainstorms pushed through on gusts of wind. But to a potter, the sentinel sense is touch. They will tell you that you can wash your hands all you want to, but once you feel the slick lotion of clay mud oozing from the spiral of earth spinning on your wheel, the feeling never leaves your hands.

Hands that work in clay ache, sizzle, and fidget in fits of imagination. Hands that work in clay clasp in an effort to understand a bowl thrown out of round or the last-second collapsing of a tall vase. They create the best of themselves in one throw, and in the next one, crush the worst creations back to their earthly beginnings. Hands that work in clay grow used to building up. A potter who doubles as a mother learns early on the art of building up from simple elements. She finds the balance between seeing what it can be and letting it be what it will be. That critical artistic skill comes from being good at being human. That may be one reason a potter is quicker to take pride and ownership in her child than she is in her coffee mug. But, if the universe is fair and kind, the gentle, loving thoughts of mothering a child meld effortlessly into the mothering of a cup, a plate, a bowl, and the divine process.

My mom is the perfect definition of an artist in that she is the last to believe it.

“No, no, it’s just for fun.” Fun is what it should be when you first venture out because if you don’t learn to have fun with your art, your gift will sit on your soul like a bloated bad dream, spoiled milk, like rotten meat. It’s the fun and the passion that protects artists from the worst of artistic life. Like a songwriter, an author, and probably all creative disciplines, there is a piece that validates and informs the art and propels the artist. It’s the first creation that allows them to whisper to themselves, I am.

I am a singer, writer, dancer, painter. I am a potter. That whisper comes long before any grander pronouncement but heralds a big bang moment in the creative’s growth. Artists use self-doubt and self-effacing humor to great advantage until they no longer have to. That first defining piece allows for new propellants. Self-confidence, ego, vision, and other powerful affirming parts of the soul no longer demur to anything less.

She would need to tell you for sure what that piece was, but I’d venture a good guess. I think it was the birdbath she made a couple of years into her hobby-turned obsession. She hand-built it, molded from the imprint of a big trash-tree leaf, maybe from the likes of a Colocasia plant. I’m just showing off now. I only pretend to know botany through my mother’s pottery.

 Using a melted glass technique in the glazing process, this piece turned out like a small river valley, with greens bleeding into slick blues, reflecting shiny off the glass, just like a river does on a sunny day. And alongside that river lay small gray, brown, and black beaded pebbles built up into river stone banks, stretching end to end on the metallic-green landscape. If I were a bird, I’d choose this watering hole over the real thing any day. She built a small dowel-post-stand, stained it brown, and planted it between the cedar birches out front of the house.

One way to know for sure that someone has rounded the corner between hobbyist and artist is how they react to someone complimenting their most beloved pieces. Second-guessing is second nature, so they begin their response as they always do.

“Oh, well, it’s OK, but I could’ve done better.” But the telltale sign of artist maturity comes one second later, in the machine-gun firing of terminology and process.

“I used gun-metal green for the bowl part and Mottled Blue for the water because when you fire it at cone 6 for eight hours, you get that perfect little river!” There, she said it. “Perfect!” And she didn’t even mean to. It just slipped out, but only momentarily. And after the layperson snaps back into reality after floating dumbstruck in a torrent of terms, the emotional response to the art takes back over. As it always does. As it always should.

In the best of artists, my mom included, the inward confidence of coming into your own does not reflect outward. It doesn’t need to. The pieces do that for them, as they do for the admirer. After that first inspirational piece, the artist changes. Mom now talks in the lingo of clay; Speckled #50, Textured Turquoise #80, and Stoneware clay. She speaks of melted cones, glaze shadings, slab rollers, bisque fires, rib tools, under glazing, and slurry. Clay becomes both comrade and foe. One day it follows the hand’s orders like a shadow, and the next like a hard-headed son.

Life in the arts is one of solitude and collaboration. There are pros and cons to both. And on some level, they are synergistic. To be collaborative, one must bring their own vision to the table, but to sit for hours alone with cold clay, expecting to bring it to life, requires the knowledge that there will be a sharing of it. I’m sure that some purist somewhere will disagree and say that an artist doesn’t have to share their art for it to be worthy or worth doing, but as a writer and musician, and the son of a potter, I beg to differ. Maybe they’re right about the worthy part but worth doing? Making art that goes unseen, unheard, or unread for too long is like running the vacuum cleaner with your hand over the hose. The power within can kill itself.

And for all the indignity and heartache that comes with going public with your art, and those disparagements seem unending, the feeling of having someone connect with something you made is no watered-down whisky or half-cut heroine. In terms of highs, it’s the penultimate. I think that which binds us as creators is the push-pull of failure and success, popularity and irrelevancy, and the plain old, misunderstood glory of doing what smarter, richer, and more powerful people envy. There’s a secret satisfaction in dissatisfaction, and every artist knows it. Like a cult password or the covert knuckle-shake of Masons, there is a subtle look one artist gives another. And in that one look, we know all. We know each other’s pain and why we all wake up in the morning to do it all over again. That soul connection makes the loneliness of art and dreams worth it.

People that know our family are quick to say that my father was the biggest supporter of my music. Maybe because we share a clone-like DNA, both of body and spirit. But I am lucky to have enjoyed the complete endorsement of my crazy artist life by both of my parents. Mom becoming a potter, or maybe realizing that she had always been, is one of the great blessings in our relationship now. We have always bonded well as mother and son, but now we bond as artists.

I remember the first time I realized she understood me as an artist. She finally made enough pieces over the years and got the necessary validation from her friends and fellow studio potters. And let’s face it, every artist builds their careers on the backs of friends and family. After growing used to under-charging her friends for beautiful vases, plate sets, and coffee mugs, she leaped the art show, craft-fair world.

She bought a little 10x10 tent, and after seeing those tents take off like the Blue Nun in the October air, she even made PVC pipe-concrete anchors for them. She bought a show table, put Square and PayPal on her cell phone for taking money, packed up her wears and headed off into a sea of shows. Cub Creek Pottery was now in business. Toward the end of one of her bigger shows, one she had prepared her best work and confidence for, we made the connection.

I called in from the road, in between a string of concerts in the northeast to check in. It was a Sunday, in the waning hours of a big weekend craft fair.

“So, how’s the show going, mom?”

“Oh, it’s going well, a lot of work and a lot of fun.” Then came time for the nuts and bolts of the conversation.

“So, how many pieces did you sell? I asked.

“Oh, just a couple small ones. I don’t know why people like toothpick holders so much, but they do!”

“Hey, that’s cool, mom. People will be picking their teeth at a lot of dinner tables tonight because of you.”

And then came the moment I had been waiting for, the intersection of understanding between two artists.

“Well,” she said with more than slight irritation. “The guy next to me has about sold all of his pottery.”

“And?” I goaded, already knowing what had to come next. She shifted into an aggravated whisper. That kinda’ nuanced speaking is hard to pull off.

“He’s not very good. His stuff is so amateur! His glazes were runny, and his bowls were wampee. Everybody came to my table first, and they all loved the birdbaths and picked up every coffee cup and plate I had out there. Then they put them down, bought a damn toothpick holder, went on to his booth, and cleaned him out.” Ah, there it was. And I gave the only answer an artist can give another artist. But more important than that, I gave the answer that best described our new, deepened relationship.

“Well, welcome to my world, mom.” It was our initiation, the secret code uttered, that opened her eyes to the backdoor of my creative life and mine to the fact that my nutty artist brain was born of two parents.

Mom has an eye for color and texture, whimsy and uniqueness. Those characteristics show up in birdbaths and dinnerware. And bring to life angels, goblins, dog bowls, and butter dishes. They sit on the tables of family and friends and in the kitchens, parlors, and bedrooms of strangers. Her art does what art is supposed to do, celebrate life.

She’s handmade coffee mugs for my band’s merchandise table for years, each unique and perfect for someone. She has made, and we have sold more than a hundred of them. And you probably know by now how the call in from the road goes.

“Hi mom, wear just loading out of the venue and going to hit the road for a few hours.”

“How did the show go?” She’s an ardent supporter of my music, but that’s not what she wants to know.

“It went pretty well. People seemed into it, and we had a good night at the merch table.”

“Uh, huh, good. So, you sold some CDs then?” She asked. I just left it there for a second, just for fun.

“Oh yeah, sure did-it was a good night.”

“Well, did you sell any mugs?” she’d ask with some anticipation. I always answered the same because her mugs always sold. In fact, they often outsold our CDs.

“Of course, we sold like three of them,” I said.

“Which ones? Please tell me not the small maroon one.”

“Yep, first one to sell.”

“God, I hate that one; I can’t even believe I gave that to you to sell. That’s so embarrassing.”

“Well, we’re twenty bucks richer for it,” I said.

“What? You sold that for twenty? Oh my God, it was hardly worth five!”

“Whatever, mom. Hey, we also sold six toothpick holders.”

“Of course, you did!” she said.

My mom is an artist, a wizard of humanness, and a lover of good white wine. And my mom is a potter. Just don’t tell her that.

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Happy Mother’s Day MOM!

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I would love to hear what you thought about this essay and if it brought any personal memories or stories to mind. Please feel free to leave a comment. I’ll answer all of them. I would love to strike up a conversation about this piece and your thoughts. Please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend. Thank you. - Mark