And my sense helped us with the setup for tonight's lectern demonstration.
I also want to thank Eric Stevenson, who is a volunteer in our photography department,
and he actually shot many of the slides that you'll be seeing during Mr. Rock's presentation.
Having said all that, it would give me great pleasure to introduce the two potters that are featured in the Bridge of Fire exhibition,
shown on our fifth floor in the Asian Art Gallery.
And if you haven't had a chance to see this exhibition yet, the galleries will be open after the program this evening,
and will stay open until 8.30 tonight.
That will give you an opportunity to go upstairs and have a look at it, or have another look at it if you already see it.
Malcolm Wright and Takashi Nakazato first met in 1967, and during the intervening years their friendship has developed,
and they've learned from each other by working closely together.
Takashi Nakazato is a member of the 13th generation of the Nakazato family that has been working in Karatsu, on Kyushu, the seventh most island of Japan.
His father, Nakazato Taro, among the 12th, was designated as a living national treasure,
and in fact Malcolm Wright actually served as an apprentice for a few years under Takashi's father.
The exhibition that we have here at the museum was the product of a year's activity in 1991,
when both Mr. Evans and Mr. Nakazato worked at each other's studio in Marlboro, Vermont, and in Karatsu, Japan.
And so the products of this collaboration are in the exhibition,
and this evening we'll have the opportunity to learn much more about the interrelationship between these two potters,
as Mr. Wright will speak for about an hour on this slide discussing crossing bridges, similarities and differences in the works of two potters,
and this will be followed by Nakazato sitting at the wheel demonstrating the making of his ceramics,
and then Mr. Wright will also be taking questions and asking them from near the audience.
So without any further delay, I'd like to introduce both Malcolm Wright and Takashi Nakazato, and welcome them to Denver, Colorado.
I want to thank first the curators Sam and Ann Morse and the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts
for putting the show together, the Denver Art Museum for having you here, and Mr. Olsko for inviting us.
I want to say, first of all, our first meeting in 1967, Takashi came into my studio and ran his finger around the foot of one of my pots for the longest time,
and I didn't know if he spoke English or not, or what to say, and finally he spoke up and he said,
why do you make it so smooth on the bottom? And I said, so you can put it on the table and shove it across the table and not score the table.
And he said, oh no, that's all wrong. Leave it rough and force the user to pick up the piece and move it in respect to your piece and the table.
A thing he said more recently that also explains the difference between American and Japanese ceramics, he said, we don't like customers who don't like cracks.
I don't want to go through the history of our relationship. It's in the catalog, and Mr. Olsko went through it. If I get close to Mrs. Tsubasa,
I don't know if you're all right, because this is coming to my ear here. You know that or you can look it up.
I also want to say it's very strange to be in a position like this. A lot of you are potters, I think, and potters don't, they need a soul of existence.
They are in the studio for eight or ten hours a day and don't talk to a soul, so to suddenly talk to a lot of you is a strange thing.
A potter's life in Japan is very social. There are a lot of people coming and going. There's a completely different atmosphere in the studio in Japan.
I really want to talk about the similarities and differences in my work and his work, which can be extended to some extent to American potters' attitude toward pottery and Japanese potters' attitude toward pottery.
Somehow, if you go up in the exhibition, there's just a lot of pottery on display there, and if you blink, you can miss a lot of things. It's kind of hard to wait through so much work in a short time.
There are a lot of similarities and differences in our work and in our lives. We're both very much interested in food. We're both very much interested in wine.
Takashi is interested in western music, chamber music. My interest in chamber music is from the classical to the modern period. Our children are pretty much the same age, and there seems to be a link in that respect.
He wasn't my first teacher. I had several teachers before that, but somehow we both have developed a strong interest in functional pottery.
While in America, a lot of potters have gone off in many other directions, and America and ceramic movement has changed a lot, the two of us have kind of kept to a straight line. One of the things his wife said about his attitude about functional pottery is something about making lots and lots of pieces.
When I was a student under him and his father and brothers, he would make between 500 and 800 pieces in a day, and sometimes as many as 1,000 pieces in a day.
His attitude is, if you think about it, trying to focus on each little thing, it will die. But if you make many many out of that big number, one piece will be born, and she used the word born in a way of a piece coming to life and having a life of its own that transcends the potter.
This is taken hold with the user's hands.
I was very much concerned with little dishes to eat out with, as well as serving dishes for presentation and also for flower arranging, both for pieces in tea ceremony and for flower arranging and for the larger, more abstract flower arranging pieces.
I'd always thought about pieces being used in the Tokono Mahalo tea room. I'd never seen one of my pieces used in that context until we were in Toronto, I was in Toronto just last month, and saw a couple of my pieces used in that way.
It was very exciting to see that actually happen.
There are a lot of other things, play bodies, firing techniques, things like that.
I don't think I'm going to go into those today.
The biggest thing, the differences come in the shapes, especially when it comes to the necks and openings, and I'll point that out as we go through the slides.
The mistake with the wheel work, for the most part, he does some coil-on-battling, and in my studio he's detonating some work using the extruder.
But you'll see in looking through the pieces that our personalities are really very different in the way we take similar shapes and interpret them or use them differently.
This show, this whole project was his idea. We hadn't seen each other for 20 years. My wife and I went back to see him, and he said, let's work together, let's do this together, let's do that together.
He's got a boundless amount of energy, and so it developed. There are two potters and two kilns, Karatsu and Vermont, and his firing is unglazed, and mine work is mostly glazed.
He also does some glazed work, and so it goes back and forth. In the slides, I want to try and point out some similarities and differences as we go through.
Think of his own work in two different places, and my work in two different places, and then the difference between me working in my studio and him working in his studio, and likewise the reverse of that, and then Kitty Corner, it gets to be kind of confusing, and I won't try to carry it through perfectly the whole way.
Let's go ahead and look at the slides.
Here are four pieces that we made 25 years ago, 24 years ago. The pieces on the right are mine, the pieces on the left are Kitty's.
And in both cases, there's a thin lip piece and a thick lip piece. The piece on the right in both cases has a thick lip, and you would not put such a lip to your mouth.
And the shapes of the pieces on the left in each slide, you wouldn't put to your mouth, but from this kind of a slide, you can't completely see the detail, but the effect of it is quite different.
On the right are a vase and bowl that I made at that time in Toronto, and on the right are a very low plate and bottle that he made at that same time.
So that you can see there are close links in our work. They're out of the same kiln, obviously, but there are also differences.
These are both Nakazato pieces. The piece on the near side is obviously made in Toronto, and the piece on the far side is made in Vermont.
One of the distinguishing things is that his shapes are not usually round, especially vases like this, and that the necks are extended and full-shaped necks.
These are both my pieces, the near one in Karatsa and the far one in Vermont, and in both cases, the lip is minimal. It seems to me that I slipped toward making less and less strongly-stated lips over many years.
The piece on the right is shaped to make it slightly squared, and the piece on the near piece is squared slightly. The far piece is made with two large bowls that are joined together and rethrown.
The piece on the near side is Nakazato's, made in Karatsa, and the piece on the far side is mine, and again, you can see the effect, the attitude toward how we finish lips.
My piece on the far side was fired with a bowl upside down over it. His piece was fired lying down flat. His pieces, two very low bowls, joined together.
The piece on the near side is Nakazato's, made in Vermont, again with a strong lip, and the piece on the far side is mine, made in Japan, again on a wheel thrown form with a minimal lip, just cutting holes.
I found over the years of making pieces this way, I saved the hole and fired them and treated them as separate pieces. They have no function, but I find that they've given the ideas for new shapes.
There's one slide later of reflecting a new shape that came out of a hole of an earlier piece. When you look at the piece on the near side, up in the gallery, on top of the Tenoku glaze, you can see a fine green mossy texture.
That's the natural wood ash that develops during the firing in my kiln. Both of the kilns are fired with wood. My kiln is like Takashi's father's kiln and is fired in about 24 hours.
His kiln is a different type of kiln completely that is fired in about five days.
Here is a comparison between a traditional shape that he's made. It's really a rice bale shape that comes from Korean ideas that he's altered and changed. I've seen another piece made by the same technique.
It's really two bolts joined at the middle and then a throng neck added to the top. He has varied, on different occasions, the proportions so that sometimes, in some cases, the height is greater than the breadth.
In this case, the breadth is much greater than the length. The piece on the far side, he made in my studio. When he came there, he worked with the extruding technique and extruding tubes.
It's interesting to see, in some cases, how he has used one of the tubes to make a completely different shape than the way I make a shape or approach a shape from those same parts. Then he adds a throng neck, the same as he would on this piece.
Here are two of mine. The one on the far side is not in the exhibition and the one on the near side was in the exhibition in Tokyo. One fired in Karatsu and one fired in Vermont.
The thing that appealed to me about working with his play, his studio, and especially his firing technique is, in using a glaze, the glaze hardens the piece, gives it a rigidity, a coldness, a hardness.
The natural ash firing with no glaze gives incredible flash marks that soften the hard edges that appear. They're still very hard edges, but they have a softness to them and naturalness to them.
In making many pieces when he's throwing large, volume pieces, many hundreds of the same form, or today he may make an addition of, say, 100 pieces of one shape and then go on to another shape of the same size, the same sort, but a different shape,
is that the 16th century potters were not trained, they were not educated, they were not university-educated people. They were peasant potters and they didn't think about the forms.
They simply made them, and there was a softness and a naturalness that came out of that quick making. That attitude goes over into his attitude of firing, that the fire takes over and marks the pieces and finishes them and adds something which you can intentionally add.
While that's less true of a piece firing with a glaze coming like mine in Vermont, it still happens that this piece, in fact, broke. I glued it with the wrong kind of glue to make it watertight.
The glue fired and the epoxy leaks after a period of time. It was not watertight. I had to re-fire the piece and a bisque to get rid of the glue so I could then re-fire the high temperature.
This piece I saw change three different times. When it came out of the bisque kiln after the glaze firing, the glaze was quite red. It was an iron red at this temperature. That came back to something different than the original firing at high temperature, but there are irregularities that change and change again.
Here's an example of the piece on the far side is mine and the piece on the near side is his. It is made out of the same extruded pieces. It's a triangular die that makes a triangular tube.
Because an extruder wants to make even irregular pieces like cylindrical tubes and squares, it doesn't act very well when you try to make a non-regular form like a triangle.
I cut piece clay away from the tube so that it is no longer equal diameter at the top and bottom to change the piece, but it has a very strong hard edge.
Probably reflecting an English background and my Puritan upbringing. The piece on the near side is his. He's taken two thirds of two tubes, cut it apart and reassembled it at the top and the bottom and his spotted neck.
He's come off with a very soft, completely different piece using the same raw material. You look at the two pieces in the gallery and you wouldn't recognize that they were made from the same parts.
The show had two phases here in Denver. There wasn't space for all the pieces at once. In an earlier presentation, another four-sided piece.
This one is more diamond-shaped than the other one. Part of the side wall was collapsing on that piece and curling under it. He worked at it in such a way that it was ready to collapse and yet he brought it together and gave it a dynamic life.
His piece blazed on the near side and my piece unlaced in his kiln. Both of these are in his kiln, but mine was his small kiln. The glazed pieces in his large kiln were in his kiln.
That is typical of the way he makes bowls in Karansi now. It's not a traditional form. The 16th century form was really quite different from this, but it has a traditional so-called agaransi or pictured agaransi glazed on it.
It is a shaft of wheat or grain on the inside of the bowl. In his firing, in my bowl on the far side, it's fired upside down. There was a vase under this one and another bowl over this one protecting the bottom side.
In the firing cycle, he brings the temperature up and down three times during the five days, very, very slowly, so that there's different flow marks to the plane at each time he brings the temperature up.
It sounds like an arduous job to fire his kiln, but it's really quite humane. There are three people firing. Each one has a six-hour shift, so that each person is on one shift earlier in subsequent days.
They stoke only once every 15 to 20 minutes during the firing. It isn't quite so hard. In my kiln, I have to stoke between 15 and 25 sticks every three to five minutes for the little 10 to 15 hours of firing.
The cycle is a radically different cycle. I prefer his cycle over the cycle of mine, but the effects are, again, quite different.
The piece in my bowl was thrown around, and the reshaping of the lid took place during the firing.
Here are two cutlet-shaped bowls, pouring the bowls. They're like a suribachi bowl, and that's one of his most exciting forms.
He makes tiny ones, three to four inches in diameter, and the one on the far side is a huge one. It's something to live with. It's a big, heavy piece. Obviously fired in Karatsu and then in Vermont.
Here are two pieces of mine fired in Karatsu, one with the cutlet and one with a round lid, an un-ree shaped lid.
For me, I've made a lot of round bowls. I want to make some that are something to do with the flower shape.
Many people have said that this shape doesn't work fired in the Karatsu kiln, whereas the plain round shape works better fired in the natural ash kiln.
The opposite is true with my glaze kiln. I don't have an opinion. I like them both ways, in both kilns.
Here's one of my favorite pieces from his work on the near side that was in the show in Japan, and on the far side, my piece fired in Vermont.
These pieces were both in the exhibition in Tokyo, but that's about as minimal as it gets with a lid. Flashing on this are about as minimal as it gets.
He really likes a very, very dry, very black surface. This is not a piece in the exhibition, but it shows the same piece standing in two different orientations.
I'm intrigued by that possibility to exclude geometric shapes, that the piece really looks like a different piece, and is approached in a huge different way with flowers, depending on the orientation of the way it's standing.
Again, these pieces are not in the show upstairs. The near pieces are in the show in Japan, and represent a shape that I've made a lot of.
There's one upstairs, or two upstairs in that kind of shape, a difference of these pieces.
There is an example of a tall one in a glazed form, and you can see there's a big difference with the form when it's glazed.
It helps to have a professionally made photograph, as opposed to taking slides out of the catalog.
But the Japanese catalog has a beautiful illustration of that.
The near piece is his piece, with a series of brown packs of clay. It's quite traditional to put a patterned clay and a small either a sake cup or a sake bottle in such a piece.
In my piece on the far side, they suggested taking those holes, which I was keeping, and putting them in the bottom that would make a different pattern, a non-traditional pattern, on the inside of my piece.
The piece was made quite square and rigid, and in the firing it softened when changed.
Here's another example of how he rearranged his shape.
The near side is a piece he made in his own kiln, and with a neck that was thrown with the piece, or perhaps added and thrown after his, I'm not quite sure, and then fired upside down.
On the far piece, he took one of my extricate forms, laid it down on the side, and made this same kind of a shape with an added neck.
The near one is really a sculptured mallet, which comes from a wooden mallet shape, which is used for wood cutting with a chisel.
Here's the same piece you've seen before. It's upstairs in the gallery on the far side, made with two-thirds of two tools, and making a triangular kind of shape.
It's a different perspective of the piece.
But the piece on the near side, several Americans have commented, it takes a lot of courage.
Obviously, on the diagonal, you don't see it. The piece is not square. When you see it in the exhibition, you can see it isn't square.
To make it very non-square, Americans might do that, but they wouldn't make it a little awful square.
And again, that's the difference between Japanese attitudes and American attitudes.
That piece is really for power-ranging with a little bit of water and a so-called kenzan, the prickly thing for power-ranging.
It could possibly also be used for food. But we wouldn't think of it for power-ranging, by the way, in most cases.
In the exhibition right now, there are two baskets, one square and one round out of the line.
The square one is glazed and the round one is un-glazed. We don't have a slide to make that comparison.
But up in the gallery, you have to walk from one end to the other. You have to remember their juxtaposition.
And the piece on the near side, you can see a wonderful flash mark that you can't plan, you can't count on, you can't intend.
It happens once in a very, very long time.
Here are two recent pieces, three recent pieces, all fine. I just saw the pieces on the near side of the screen in Karatsu in May.
And the bowl on the right was fired on this very vase.
So in a sense, the decoration or the pattern that evolved from the firing changes from one side of the bowl to the other.
And so it does on the vase.
The piece on the far side is a piece that I've made more recently.
And it comes from a shape that I discovered in the weeks, going back months and years later, looking at old holes.
The negative of an original piece, and then shifted and changed.
They're just little slivers of light, how to get water into the piece, making a hollow.
That piece, he's carrying the bag to Japan.
And whoops, we've got one more slide of the giz.
There we go, okay.
I don't have new pieces of giz that he's made since his project.
But here are two of the vases that he made at the time that the piece upstairs was made.
They're about two feet tall, and he makes between six or eight and ten pieces at a time.
And he makes them over, in several sections, coiled to battle over the period of a week.
He lifts them on and off the wheel, takes them into a big nap room, and lets them set up overnight.
And the next day he comes back and adds some more and adds some more.
Coils, and then a panel on the inside, a panel on the outside, feeding very slowly.
And you can see the different lips that he's made on each one, and each series of these jars is very different.
The firing before these were made, he said he'd made, I think, eight and seven of the eight had broken.
He set it up with one piece, and that piece was sold for a million yen.
I think it was a million, I can't remember when it was that big.
But I asked him, is it the customer's fault?
I was teasing him earlier that seven of them broke and only one of them came out.
It's really the farmer's fault.
And what happens if all eight of these jars come out?
Are you going to lower the price?
So he had eight of them come out, and he laughed, and of course it didn't end soon.
A real remarkable piece that is very hard to see on these slides, which are taken from the catalog,
the natural deposits that occur during the firing, it's almost like looking at the stars at night.
And the pattern is just so exciting.
You can't dream of making anything that big anymore.
And that's the end of my slides.
After we get him started on the wheel, if you'll ask questions of him and of me during that time,
I think we can have more discussion at that time.
He says he doesn't want to answer questions, but maybe his English is better than my Japanese.
So he knows what you're saying exactly.
If I give a wrong answer to somebody else, if Ron answers a wrong answer for him,
he may give the correct answer.
I'll see if I can take some wrong answers.
Thank you.