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my hands and the potter's wheel
Tuesday, April 12 2016
This evening Nancy camer over to pick me up for the first day of a ceramics class Susan had somehow convinced me to sign up for. What with the life drawing classes (which Nancy and I have been skipping of late), the imminent beginning of my new job, and this, my days are becoming substantially more overscheduled than I prefer, making me wonder if I'm gradually transforming into a retiree desperate to maintain an active mind.
The class was at the Byrdcliffe art colony northwest of Woodstock and was taught by our friend Rich (whom I've known since at least 2003). Susan and David had taken the class before, but Nancy had never thrown pottery on a wheel and the last time I'd done it was in eighth grade art class (though there was a time in 1993 or 1994 when I, facilitated by my ceramically-inclined girlfriend Leslie, fired a few hand-built pieces). Also in the class was our friend Julianna (without her husband Lee), as well as several others. All of us, save for a fresh-faced young man who might have still been in high school, looked to be in our 40s or 50s. After showing us newbies the locations of the bathrooms, the secrets to getting into the locked doors, and how to wash our equipment without filling the septic tank with clay, Rich then showed us how to center a lump of clay on the wheel. He's been doing it for years, and he made it look easy (and a little like producing and disposing of an erect penis at will). Then we were sent to our wheels to try it ourselves. My mistake was not using enough water as a lubricant, causing the lump of clay to bind up with my fingers and torque free of the wheel. There were other flaws to my technique as well, which Rich did his best to help me with. I commented at some point that, absurd as it sounded, I didn't feel I had the necessary strength in my hands and forearms. Rich chuckled and said there was a 91 year old lady who has no trouble throwing pots on the wheel. So, while it might help to develop little-used muscles in my arms, it ultimately comes down to technique. (David later told me that, once the technique is mastered, it's amazing how little strength is required.) I should mention, by the way, that Rich (who deals with a great diversity of hands in his job as a ceramics teacher) said that my hands were "very large," something I've sensed (mostly when playing guitars) but which nobody has explicitly told me. I don't know that having big hands is a good thing overall, unless, that is, one is trying to present himself as the ultimate daddy figure to low-information voters.
Later Rich showed us how to poke a hole in the middle of the puck of centered clay to produce a hollow cylinder. I did better with this procedure, though I had a tendency to accidentally hit the spinning cylinder with an errant finger, either tearing out a divot or throwing off its geometry in a way that was difficult or impossible to correct. By the end of the class, I'd produced one little bowl worthy of firing.
After that, it was time to clean up, which is a rather involved process when dealing with clay. The tools needed to be cleaned, as did the wheel itself and the table near the wheel. Unwinding all the mess generated in two hours of unskilled pot throwing took at least a half hour. And it didn't help that there was no water available in the studio and only cold water available outside. In the chilly still-unseasonably-cold conditions, the cold water that needed to be sprayed on our hands to clean them was its own special kind of misery.
After we were all done cleaning up, Susan, David, Nancy, and I all went out to dinner at the Little Bear (the Chinese restaurant in Bearsville). We showed up just before the kitchen closed, and the waitress did what she could to hurry us along. Rich had jokingly told us to "keep politics to a minimum" in his studio, but we more than made up for it over Chinese food tonight. I said that I'd been sort of apathetic about politics during the Clinton administration, but that all changed with the craziness surrounding November of 2000, and with 9Eleven and the crazy turn it took our country, I've been a news junkie ever since. Whenever 9Eleven comes up, it's natural for people to recount where they were when it all went down, and so we all did. Nancy and Ray found out about it before they had a chance to set off for work, and Ray's job at a bar near the World Trade Center was lost for months. I'd tried to go to work that morning, but the subway had only taken me one stop before grinding to a halt. Gretchen had actually had a social call scheduled with a friend of her mother's (a self-declared African Jew) at Windows on the World (the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center), but it was canceled (or delayed) at the last minute, perhaps saving their lives. As for Susan, she'd been on the Upper West Side at the time. This was before she'd met David; I got the sense that he wasn't in New York City at the time.
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