NOTES & QUOTES

I saw this sign on the wall of an Amish man's shoe repair shop in Lancaster County:

"There is hardly anything in this world that some man cannot make a little worse
and sell a little cheaper, . . . and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey."

- John Ruskin

Here is response to a question I have often asked: how do special forms develop?  How do they come into the mind of the potter?

"I can only say that the creative ability is by the grace of God -- one neither deserves it nor can one expect it.  But man can open himself or close himself to that grace and that is the essential point.  That one can teach and learn; one can search for or reject that which is conducive to an open mind, to an imaginative response, to the developing of ideas, to a free unshackled imagination, to a wide human awareness in all things of art and of life."

Wildenheim, Pottery: Form and Expression, p. 100 

This excellent quotation found on a web site on Pottery.  It comes from Nadine Gordimer in an article entitled, "African Earth," in which she reflects on her collection of pots.

"Unlike other works of art, they (pots) do not attempt to re-create something in another medium: pigment on canvas creating a language of line and color that stands for shade, space, and light; marble standing for flesh.  They are the earth they are made of.  They are its colors - the colors of fields, swamps and riverbeds.  Their common materials are mediated only by fire, and on many of them fire has painted the only decoration, cloudy green black shadings and inspired black brushstrokes sparse as those of Japanese masters.  The fire is not the controlled one of a kiln, but the same open-air one where the cooking pots bubble.  they are shaped not on a wheel but by hands; their surface texture has the faint striations of human skin.  When you put your hand against my pots you are palm to palm with the artist."