What's New oniggle?
Hi, my name is Tricia Williams.
The following presentation is the third in a series of three tapes that provide information
about making pottery on the potter's wheel.
As Master Potter Jim Koslowski works, he will talk about why he makes pottery and explain
some of the reasons we are attracted to this ancient craft.
Listen and watch as he throws pottery in a production mode and talks about pottery personified
and the personal satisfaction he gains from working with clay.
So look, listen and learn how to use the potter's wheel the right way.
Thank you Tricia.
I really like to make pots.
In fact, I love to make pots and often times when I'm working at the potter's wheel people
come before me and they ask me why.
Do I ever get bored at it?
The fact is I don't get bored at it.
I love to make pots and I think one of the reasons is because I've done an awful lot
of thinking about who I am and what I want and the kind of person I am.
I like to make pots because at the end of the day, number one, I get a certain amount of immediate gratification.
I can look down the table and look at the 100 or 200 pots that I've made and feel good
about the day's work.
There was a time in my life where I was a public school teacher and I did that for 12
years and I did a pretty reasonable job at it.
The problem is I never really knew exactly who I was affecting or how effective my message
was and I always came home a little bit frustrated.
I wondered.
I was never really quite sure.
With the pottery, I know when I've made so many pots, I know that they're made well and
it's right there.
I'm not saying that people who are teachers shouldn't be teachers because it's a very
important job except in my case it was very important for me to have that gratification.
The other reason I like to make pots is because I feel as though I was given the potential
for creativity or talent and I have a lot of creative energy.
It's important for me to do things with my hands and to feel good about what I'm doing
and to use some of the ideas that I have.
Pottery gives me that outlet.
It's very good therapeutic release of that creative energy.
Another reason I like to make pots is because I was raised in a family where my whole family
was factory workers.
My dad worked on a railroad.
My grandfather worked on a railroad.
I was used to the eight hour, nine hour, ten hour days and working hard.
Somehow in a period of time when I was being raised, that work ethic was imbued in my spirit
and it became a part of me.
I work hard.
I like to work hard and pottery affords that opportunity and for me to be successful in
business I have to continue working hard on a regular basis and I work six and a half
days a week.
So the combination of the three, that creative energy release, the need for immediate gratification
and the fact that I have that Puritan work ethic is a nice combination and it works for
me and I like making pots.
Besides which I like the feel of clay as it runs through my fingers.
Pottery is an ancient tradition.
Early man as he was developing came up with his first craft and that happened to be basket
making.
The story I'm told is that clay was wiped inside the basket to make it more airtight
so berries wouldn't fall through.
The basket one day found its way to the fire and of course the basket material, the grasses
and reeds burned away and he realized what happens to this mud that he wipes inside the
basket and by heat treating it in that fire it becomes hard.
It was just a couple short steps from then on to make coil pots and manipulate that clay
to purposely make pottery.
And eventually glazes were discovered as these fires were in the alkaline sands on beaches
or in different areas and glazing was evolved.
We use pottery on a regular basis in our lives in modern day humanity and I think most people
don't realize how important that contribution is.
When we have our dinner at home most of us use some kind of pottery plate in order to
eat our food from.
If we go into a fine restaurant you expect to have a nice fine pottery plate whether
it be porcelain or stoneware or some kind of pottery.
And although there are glass plates and paper plates and metal plates and wooden plates
most of us are more comfortable and prefer eating from a ceramic or a pottery plate.
Ceramics is important in our modern day industries.
For example ceramics itself is non-conductive of electricity and it's used as an insulator
for telephone poles and all the wires that have to travel through the air in that way
and right on into the smaller machines and the computers that we make.
Even the silicon chip is a ceramic product.
Ceramic tiles, special high silica ceramic is used on the space shuttle so that it doesn't
burn up into the atmosphere as it comes back down.
Even closer to home and one of the reasons why we have the better state of health that
we all live in is because of the sanitary awarenesses that we as a people have come
up with and one contributing factor to that is the way we make our sanitary appliances.
We go to the bathroom, the kitchen sink, the basin, all of those appliances are made with
ceramic material.
In most cases they're cast, they're slip cast, clay made into a liquid form and then put
into a mold but it's ideal because it can be molded into any material and it is easily
cleaned because of the high gloss glaze that we are able to produce on our appliances.
Building materials, just stop and think for a minute all the buildings that you've seen
that are brick buildings or brick faced, even that is a ceramic product.
Think of the tiles that you've seen, either outdoors or indoors that are ceramic tiles.
When I work on the potter's wheel I generally work in what's called a production mode.
Right now I'm making a series of half pound cups.
They're three and a half inches wide according to the ruler and the caliper measurement and
I'm going to continue working on these cups throughout this whole series, this whole presentation
and I'll probably have 30 or 40 cups by the time I'm done and as I work I'm able to continue
carrying on a conversation and talk about different ideas.
One of the reasons I'm able to do that is because I've made so many thousands of these
cups that I have what's the equivalent of muscle memory.
A good example of that is probably if you can go back and recall when you were four
or five years old and you were learning how to tie your shoelace the first couple of days
or couple of weeks you really struggled at it.
You really had to think about where the cord went, where the knot went, what went first.
Now you get up in the morning and you don't even think about it.
You just automatically tie your shoes, bang it's done and your mind is on the activities
for the day.
It's because you've tied that shoe so many thousands of times that you needn't think
about it.
I've made this cup so many thousands of times that I in effect needn't think about it and
I can think about other ideas.
The production mode is an opportunity to really create masterpieces.
Now each one of these cups that I'm making is in a production mode.
Sometimes I'll be making bottles.
I might make 40 or 50 bottles at a time and all of the bottles are pretty decent because
I've made so many of them, they all are reasonable and they all look nice aesthetically and functionally.
But every once in a while there's one of those bottles that comes out and it just sings.
It's a masterpiece and if I could do that 40 times in a row it would be wonderful but
it even doesn't happen with the amount of experience that I've had.
One in 40 is absolutely beautiful.
And in a similar way it happens in music.
After the composer Bach, when Bach was living he had the particular job of creating a new
musical piece for High Noon in Mass Church on Sunday.
And he would do this week after week after week.
And not every single piece that he produced was an absolute masterpiece.
Some of them in fact were cumbersome.
They were all decent pieces.
He was a good composer but every once in a while he'd come up with a particular masterpiece
that just absolutely sang.
And that music was made in a production mode.
Same thing in pottery.
Not every piece will be a masterpiece.
If you make enough pottery, mostly all the pieces will be desirable, aesthetically sound,
design wise.
But every once in a while comes that masterpiece.
Potters today are in somewhat of a dilemma.
It's a handmade process and our whole lives are inundated with materials and things as
a result of the industrial process.
When I work as a potter I am not at all in competition with industry.
There's no way that I can compete with the mold, with what industry produces in terms
of the speed, the materials.
It's just absolutely impossible.
Instead I think about what my contribution as a hand process, as a person is to the people
who use my product and what that actually means.
And these cups that I'm making right here for example, I have to charge when I sell
this cup an awful lot more money than I could get a machine made cup or a molded cup that's
quickly reproduced in a factory situation.
And you've got to ask yourself, well why would people be willing to pay maybe eight or ten
times the price as a quickly industry type production piece?
And there are a couple of answers to that.
First of all, when industry produces a piece, it produces that piece in multiples of thousands
and ten thousands and five hundred thousands.
When I make cups, well maybe I'll make thirty-five or forty.
And to me, that's like one process and that's just one reason why I don't get tired of it.
I'm not making one cup at a time, I'm making thirty-five at a time, but each cup takes
a certain amount of my time, it takes a certain amount of my spirit and my spirit and my time
and the decisions that I make about aesthetics, about how the piece is made is into the piece
and becomes a part of the piece.
And when the user uses the cup, he can run his fingers on the inside or the outside,
he can feel my finger marks, that handle feels good in his hand, each one of a set feels
good in his hand and there's a special quality about that.
And what's happening there is that he is realizing a social contact of one person to another,
which is so often lacking in our society today.
A lot of the things that we use, even the automobiles that we drive, are machine made
and molded and there are some nice cars and I'm not putting the mold down or industrially
produced products, I drive a car myself.
But when something is made by hand and you have the spirit of the maker and you can feel
his finger marks, it makes a certain magic to the piece that you will never achieve with
a mold.
In my home, I have many plastic food storage containers which are commercially available
and it's a wonderful product.
It's got a nice tight fitting cover, you can even lift that cover up a little bit and you
can burp it and you create a little vacuum in there and you can freeze in these containers.
They're wonderful.
I cannot make something like that.
I cannot compete with that.
There's just no way.
Now I use those things and I can't make them, but when I feel that particular plastic product,
I certainly don't feel a sense of another person making it, a sense of humanity.
If you're using something that's made by hand, whether it be a wooden product, a cloth
product, a pottery product, a glass, if there is a feeling of humanity, it becomes that
much more important and precious to us and that's one of the reasons why I also make
pots.
A hundred years ago, pottery making on the potter's wheel as an occupation was still
in its heyday.
The reason is because people would have need for containers and pottery served that need
quite well.
All of a sudden, the United States Bureau of Weights and Measures made an edict and
a law that said if you made a container that is supposed to be one quart in volume, it
has to be exactly that one quart in volume.
It can't be a little bit less or a little bit more and that's exactly what was happening
with the pottery that was being produced.
A potter with the same amount of clay on the same wheel is not going to get that same volume
each and every time.
It might be a little more, it might be a little bit less.
The Department of Weights and Measures says no, you can't do that.
So molds were evolved to create glass containers, plastic came onto the market to create those
containers and they were the exact same volume each and every time.
There was no need for pottery just as a container.
So industrial products began to take over the market for containers.
Now pottery is being produced for the reasons I mentioned as an aesthetic piece, as something
I make design decisions about, it has human contact and it also functions.
This is something that we value and treasure and we want.
One of the reasons why I'm able to continue working and talking at the same time, coming
up with some ideas, is a psychological theory that exists called lateralization.
Lateralization is based on the principle that the brain itself is divided into two hemispheres.
It has a right hemisphere and a left hemisphere and we each use both parts of the brain, both
hemispheres, but we have a tendency to either favor one or the other.
In my case, I favor the right hemisphere.
The right hemisphere in us, in all of us, is supposed to be the creative part, the part
that allows you to have ideas about music and ideas about color and line and design,
how things look, how things balance and are pleasing to the eye.
The left side, and we all have that side too, is the part that makes us more cognizant of
our environment to be able to make decisions and use our computation skills to be able
to be good at mathematics, arithmetic, allows us to balance checkbooks, allows us to be
efficient and organized.
I'm primarily right-brained and one of the reasons why I have a successful pottery business
is I have a good partner.
My partner is my wife.
She's left hemisphere.
She is extremely well organized.
She has patience.
She does not make mistakes with the books.
She keeps the books.
She keeps me organized and I'm allowed to sit here doing what I like to do best and
that's make all these cups and bring in all these other ideas that I have.
So in that sense, we have a good team and in any business, whether you have an entrepreneurial
spirit, which I feel I do, you have to have an organization and a business sense.
Just because you get good at the potter's wheel does not necessarily mean you're going
to succeed in business.
You can make 10,000 beautiful pots, but unless you can sell them, it's just not going to
work.
You have to sell the pots in order to be able to generate a dollar to continue buying additional
materials and supplies.
And if that's your goal, you have to think about the things that I said.
You have to have that feeling for business.
One of the reasons I do is because I grew up in a business family.
Most of my family worked in the factory, but my grandmother had a dry goods store and I
lived with her for a number of years, so the idea of business was not new to me.
I had that spirit.
In order to be successful at the pottery business, you have to have a creative spirit, you have
to be willing to do that, and you do have to work hard.
If you're only approaching this for a hobby, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
There are many university professors and art teachers who are real good at what they do
and that's just fine, but who could not survive in the business because it is a different
kind of work.
It's not better work or worse work, it's just different.
I prefer being a potter and being in business because of that entrepreneurial spirit, and
I get a chance to express my creative energies and I like to work hard.
That's also a part of me.
Oftentimes, people come before me and they seem to be a little bit squeamish about the
mess on my hands and the typical question is, what do you do about that mess?
You wash your hands and they're more concerned with whether or not my hands are clean or
dirty than with the pot.
That tells me an awful lot about the character of that person and whether or not that person
could survive in making pottery.
They have a different system about how they live, they have different values, and that's
okay.
To me, this is not a mess.
A mess is simply things or materials out of order.
This is part of the process.
That's okay.
I'll help you with that.
Oh
One of the things that we often do in
Describing pottery to each other and we talk about pottery and parts of the pottery is we tend to personify it
What I mean by that is pottery because it is so important in our lives
Almost is described in human terms
When we talk about a pot we talk about it in terms of the foot
the body
the shoulder
the neck
the lip
the mouth
Pottery is important in our lives
and
This concludes this particular tape, but I'd like to leave you with a few words of encouragement
I've been throwing pottery for 25 years and there have been times at the beginning of my career where
Progress wasn't happening fast enough and I wanted to give up. I stuck to it
I kept my focus right on that clay
I centered my thoughts on that clay if you want to make pots you can make pots
It's important not to give up. It's important to make thousands and thousands and thousands of pots
In the first weeks the first month the first year
The first couple years you're going to see quite a lot of progress
You'll have discouraging times
You've got to keep at it over the years the amount of progress that you make is less and less
But after 20 years 30 years 40 years, and I'm looking forward to that time
I expect that I will improve my skills as a potter. I love to make pots
and happy potting
You