The only potter who has ever made me cry

Artists, contrary to popular belief, don’t often experience sudden, profound inspiration. I always think of creativity as a muscle: you have to work it and use it or it will atrophy. Artists just happen to use their creativity muscles (in the context of art) more consistently than the average person, which makes it seem like they have a genetic predisposition for divine inspiration when they most definitely do not. (This is usually the point of the “creativity elevator pitch” where I insist that all people are creative, it’s an aspect of our humanity, so it’s blatantly false to claim “well, I’m just not creative,” but I digress.. maybe that will be a blog post another time).

In my classroom, I used to explain to students the concept of “creativity as a piggy bank” (which is not my original idea, but I don’t know where I picked it up). Essentially, you can’t withdraw money from your piggy bank if you haven’t deposited anything. Those deposits are the oh-so romanticized concept of inspiration. You don’t get hit in the head with inspiration, you search for it. Aside from using their creativity muscles consistently, artists are experts at seeking, observing, and being inspired by sources outside of their studios and artistic practices. Those sources can be anything from artwork (of various media), nature, or the mundane aspects of everyday life. There is beauty and inspiration to be found in all of it!

In college, many art professors, knowing what they knew about creativity and inspiration (even without using a piggy bank analogy), would encourage students to “find library books” so that our research would be tactile (aka not on the computer). Often, we’d have to find a few things to inform or use in upcoming work. One semester in pottery, the assignment was to find a historical or contemporary ceramic artist and make a presentation about their life and work.

So, I went to the university library and dug around for pottery books, eventually checking out 5 or more, and then lugged them to a local coffee shop (Thirty-Thirty, of course). After flipping through a few that made me feel a resounding “meh,” I opened one about Maria Martinez (I’m fairly certain the book was The living tradition of María Martínez by Susan Peterson).

Maria Martinez lived in the San Ildefonso Pueblo in New Mexico and grew up watching her aunt and grandmother make pottery in the traditional way. This technique involved pressing a patty of clay into a small, bowl-like mold to support the base of the form, and then building up the walls with coils, smoothing the seams with things like parts of a dried gourd (the equivalent to a throwing kidney or rib) along the way.

The unfired pots would be burnished (rubbed with a tool until compressed and shiny) and painted with slip (liquid clay). In all ways, this ancient, Indigenous technique honored the clay, which was harvested from the land and mixed by hand.

Eventually, after completing a few designs to mimic ancient motifs found in a nearby archaeological dig, Maria’s husband, Julian, started painting traditional imagery on unfired pots. It was a team effort—Maria crafting the forms and Julian adorning them with slip—that culminated in a celebration of their Indigenous culture and ancestry.

These ochre-red, burnished (and therefore, shiny), slip-decorated, sun-dried pots would then be fired. There was no glaze involved, so pots could be stacked on top of one another—they fired as many pots as possible due to the strenuous nature of the firing. Pots were placed on an iron grate with chopped wood below. Everything was covered with found metal items, from mess trays to license plates, and then with cow patties, which would insulate the pile, resulting in a higher firing temperature. When the fire was at peak temperature, (evidenced by burning cow chips), the whole pile would be smothered in dried horse manure.

Here’s where the magic happened: by smothering everything at a roaring temperature, carbon could not escape, so pots that entered the fire an earthy, ochre-color would exit a deep, shiny black (with a metallic sheen where slip had been applied).

I remember flipping the page, seeing the obsidian-colored pottery for the first time, and my eyes instantly filling with tears. Aside from the beautiful finished pieces, the context of it all made me weepy (and still does): clay cultivated by the potter from their ancestral land, traditional pottery-making techniques, forms adorned with ancient motifs, and the hands-on, manure-filled firing process resulting in a breathtaking color metamorphosis…

Eventually, Maria and Julian’s pottery sales bolstered the economy of their pueblo, and what was once seen as a dying art became the lifeline of a community (which is, perhaps, the best part of it all).

…So there I was, crying in a coffee shop over a smelly textbook that was older than me. I’ve never been moved to that degree by an artist or their work before or since.