It all started a long time ago.....

I credit my late aunt Lois with sparking my interest in using clay as a creative medium. Sure, there were the usual childhood experiences with clay in school (I vaguely recall making fantastic creatures in 1st or 2nd grade class) but I didn't get really interested until we moved to California when I was a boy.

I remember my family living with my aunt's family while we were looking for a house to buy. She took me to her potting studio and she showed me how to make an ashtray (a tabletop keepsake holder anyway, both my parents had long before quit smoking) from a rolled slab of clay. I pressed a large grape leaf into the upper surface to make an impression of its veins and surface textures, then cut it out at the edges of the leaf, resulting in a clay facsimile of the grape leaf. I gently shaped the clay leaf into a shallow bowl. After firing, I remember coloring the clay by rubbing it with a brown shoepolish.

Lois was considered the only "creative" person in our two families; my mother (her sister) claims not have a creative bone in her body, though she never gives herself credit for her well-above-average sense of taste in home and furniture design and decoration. Anyway, I like to think that somehow I inherited artistic sensibilities, if not skills, from Lois. Here's the only item of her handiwork that I have in my possession:

This flower pot is stoneware, approx. 8.375" wide at the top and 5.125" in height. She had a wonderful flair for the organic in her work (which included painting, sculpture, and fiber arts as well as wheel-throwing). She loved using found objects to make impressions in clay and she generally stayed away from smooth rectilinearity in her designs.

As for me, my own OCD-driven tendencies (or, if I were to describe them in a positive light, my artistic sensibilities) urge me toward geometric simplicity, smoothness, rectilinearity and clean lines. I intend to break those habits (if that's all they are) and employ them only when I choose to do so.

Here is my Skutt wheel:

I bought it in November from a man and his wife who were in the process of moving. He promised me a box of bats that went with it but said they were in a box somewhere, buried amidst all the detritus of a lifetime. So I had to make one from 1/4" masonite and then I later bought another from Marjon Ceramics in Phoenix.

This wheel is perhaps 30 years old. I've sought information on it but as yet have come up with zilch. Skutt's website is entirely devoted to their current products (no more wheels) and they don't answer their emails-- SHAME! The model number is DC-1 and it's rated to 1 hp maximum. The head is about 13.25" across with bat pins at 10.75" to centers. Naturally, current wheel standards don't include such measures so I had to drill my own pin holes in a blank bat.

My first throw on it:


I've taken wheel throwing classes a few times over many years, never for sustained periods of time. The first was when I was perhaps 11 or 12, the next wasn't until I was about 29, then again four years ago. Each time, I found I was able to pick up again more or less where I'd left off. That was encouraging enough for me to decide I'd always want to have a wheel of my own. When I saw an ad for one in the paper last fall, I jumped on it; turns out the one advertised had been sold but, oddly enough, the seller had received a call from someone who wanted to buy something else in her ad and she'd kept his number. She gave it to me and the rest is history.

I'll post pix of other throws soon....