What Potters Talk About

A potter named Conner Burns wrote THIS article for Ceramics Monthly. It ran in an issue at the end of 2009. I wrote the following response -- it can be found in the "LETTERS" section of the current Ceramics Monthly. I thought my blog readers might enjoy the contrasting views of two potters...



I understand what Conner Burns is talking about. Really, I do. I want to always be putting my best foot forward -- quality-wise.

But it appears, from my perspective as a functional potter who has made his entire living for the last thirty years from making and selling pottery, that Mr. Burns lives in a different reality from mine. Maybe his reality is a better one than mine, but it is surely different.

The "hundred years down the road" question was one of the key points of departure for me. Mr. Burns' perspective on it seems to ignore the way we currently view the past 6,000 years of ceramic history.

There is a great understanding of the many process-related difficulties inherent in clay throughout its history that I doubt that anyone would draw many conclusions about the level of perfection put out by a particular potter based on such process-related problems. Even so, still, what we consider perfect or imperfect will likely have little meaning to the world one hundred years from now.

Add aesthetic considerations to those process-related considerations, and I'm guessing there will really be next to no point of reference one hundred years from now.

But if Mr. Burns is right, then when I thus consider the view others might have of me and my pottery one hundred years from now, all I can say is "whoops."

I never had the luxury of putting out only the pots I was most proud of. I've been making my living as a potter since I was a college kid. By the time I was even 25 years old there were literally thousands of pots in circulation with my name on them. 15,000. That’s my guess. Most, if not all of them were pieces that would cause me a pretty good cringe if I were to see them today. If I wanted my name to go down in history conjoined to notions of perfection, that ship sailed about 35,000 pots ago.

But the funny thing about that progression -- and I think it's a universal among potters -- I was proud enough of my pots all along that I was at least self-assured that I was giving the people who bought them the value that they were expecting in the transaction. I didn't at any time think I was selling anything less than my best. But the judgments I made back then had a different basis. Less experience. If the twenty-five year old me were to write something like what Mr. Burns wrote -- about not letting go of his less-than-perfect work (And I could have written something like that back then. I did feel that way), I would look at that bit of writing with quite probably more embarrassment at my precocious hubris in the claims I'd have made it that writing, than any embarrassment I might feel at my less mature pots in the same retrospect.

So making probable landfill allowed me to advance my craft so that eventually time and error overcame my insufficient education, and I actually made a pot or two that I was thrilled to stand behind at my art fair booth.

Maybe it's different for artists who pop into this world with a full-blown vision of their creative goal -- coupled immediately to the skill to actualize that vision. Wow. Zounds. I'm pretty sure I’ve met those with the self-assurance that they are such prodigies.

And maybe I'm too comfortable with the inevitability that I will plod along rather anonymously -- happily bounding between the joy of clay and the reality of making a living -- to such an extent that, no more known than I am today, I will be even less known 100 years from now.

So, if someone finds a less than perfect Bauman piece one hundred years from now:

1. They're not likely to be an art critic/academic with the wherewith all to "properly" analyze the success or failure of the piece they hold in their hands, but...

2. If given such a second, academic/critical thought, no doubt the piece will be met with a

"Yawn...Oh yes, another late 20th century American piece of ceramic -- an
era of wild abandon when every Tom, Dick, and Harry Potter was setting up shop
in his garage or barn and making stuff because there was no regulating agency
telling them that they couldn't --- and there was a HUGE market of equally
unschooled middle class buyers predisposed to home decorating and gift buying.
They all thought of themselves as 'artists'. *Chortle*

Last year I went to a songwriting workshop. The leader was a fellow name Pierce Pettis whose songs -- whose writing -- I love. Mr. Pettis said something in that workshop that was so obvious that I was stunned to have not thought about it in exactly the way he framed it before. What he said is that a song never need be "finished". Oh, for the sake of recording or marketing purposes, of course an element of permanence is required and will be attached to it. But in reality, as a work, a song can be added to, improved, edited, re-framed in melody, rewritten in lyric. The possibilities are endless.

Seems to me that's how a working potter can approach clay. Pieces to market and ideas to expand on. The pieces to market aren't "perfect". They're marketable. Maybe they aren't even conceptually complete as yet. I know that the pieces I make -- that I believe to be successful enough to continue making -- still evolve. And that evolution happens as unconsciously as it does consciously. It's one of the many reasons I've chosen to remain a potter and not a manufacturer. The evolution is almost as impossible to stop as it is gratifying to witness.

I hope history judges me kindly. But if I were a betting man, I'd put the big money on the probability that "history" won't be judging me at all. Maybe some working stiff will still enjoy his beer in one of my steins, though.

LIVE!

When I was little and I saw those album covers with "LIVE!" plastered on the front, I always read "LIVE" as the verb, not the adjective. My misreading changed the meaning of the album covers enough that I couldn't figure out why the band producing the album cover was giving me the imperative -- complete with exclamation point -- to do what I was already fairly determined to do anyway. Live. So I assumed those album covers were meant to be read "LIVE (implied: WITH GUSTO)!" ...thereby reflecting a quality of life, and not just getting by with any old life living.

Boy, was I embarrassed to myself when I realized that the word echoing around in my head should have been read "LIVE!" and not "LIVE!” I blush just thinking about it. But since I never told anyone before, I mostly just blushed internally. You couldn't really tell by looking at me that I was or am blushing.

Scritch, Scritch, Scritch...

I and my most excellent mom and agility handler, Dar, took me to a agility match down in Lafayette, Indiana this weekend. Agility, as I have explained in the past, is where I get to run around, over, into, and under things as my mom runs beside me getting red in the face and screaming things and stuff.

Heh.

As it is my job in life to rearrange John Bauman's and Dar Bauman's priorities totally -- help them stop from time to time to smell stuff that should be smelled, scratch what needs scratching, as well as smile more often and broader and stuff...

...I decided to take a bit of a mid-course break on this agility run.



Since I still qualified with about 10 seconds to spare, Dar was happy with this run and stuff. Unfortunately, John Bauman stopped the camera before it could record our victorious end zone dance during which people clapped, hugged me and stuff, and gave me cheese and meat products.

heh.

All in a day's work, folks. All in a day's work.

Breeze Bauman

Influential Potter Series #1: Richard Aerni

Richard Aerni

Rhythm and order to interest my mind
Random and whimsy to satisfy my soul
Proportion and scale timeless enough to live with for a long, long time

As a young student making my first pots, I struggled (as seems common with beginning potters) at editing my work as a potter. I think that that editing struggle had its genesis in several factors:

1. As a beginner, each piece was more precious because each took an inordinately disproportionate time to create – too much effort produced not terribly spectacular results. Oh, the results were satisfying enough to at least move me on to my next attempt. And just as the effort was disproportionate to the resulting quality, it was also disproportionate to the learning – I learned much from each early pot. But I also needed to learn pretty quickly to get over the pots I was making and move on.
2. I was bombarded by all the possibilities – shape, texture, attachments, slip, glaze, color, surface, function. It was sort of overwhelming. And it was tempting to want to try everything on every piece. It was tempting to overdo everything as though more of anything would make a good pot or save a bad one

That self editing started – in my mind – to take shape after one visit to the college library during which I picked up an issue of Ceramics Monthly. There, on the back cover, was an advertisement for Cedar Heights Clay Company featuring a glossy full-page photo of a marvelous canister set created by Richard Aerni.

Richard is not that much older than I, but even thirty years ago his sense of creating timeless pottery was precocious because in that canister set I saw the best of pottery editing…

Rhythm and order to interest my mind
Random and whimsy to satisfy my soul
Proportion and scale timeless enough to live with for a long, long time

Soon after that library encounter with Richard’s canister set, I started up my pottery. I didn’t subscribe to Ceramics Monthly in the early years of my studio. The shows I was able to get into didn’t expose me to lots of great pottery, but I never forgot Richard’s pottery – those canisters and several other photos I’d managed to find from subsequent publications I’d find in the library or elsewhere

Finally, about 10-15 years into my pottery making I started running into Richard at the Ann Arbor Art Fair. When I did that show I used to make a regular practice of at least one day walking the show to see the other potters. And one of my first stops was always Richard’s booth. I never walked into that booth without being a bit awestruck. And I never walked away from that booth without being inspired. And a little intimidated. Richard sets the bar high


Over the years Richard has consistently made the same kind of timeless work – work with a flawless sense of proportion (I’ve only known three potters who have made big pieces worth making. Richard is one of them), and a musical sense of rhythm, all the while conducting the natural randomness of the glazes he’s chosen to use into a unified whole that I find -- and here is where only one word works -- and that word sounds like understatement, but it’s the word most accurate…

Satisfying

I contacted Richard about my intent to start this series on "influential potters" with a post about his pottery. When I emailed my rough draft to him, he responded with the following -- a note that I think is both interesting and instructive to all potters curious about the process and development of a potter:

All of us struggle as we begin to try to find ourselves, and clay is no exception. At the time you saw that image (which was the first pot of mine ever included in any publication) I was coming out of about 2 1/2 years of a "horrible lack of identity." I was growing out of my first bloom of potting, wherein you slavishly imitate those you admire, and growing the scale of my work and realizing that decorating bigger pots is a whole different ball game than small scale decoration, and hating my pots. I had a couple of things going for me...

First, I was surrounded and supported by good and generous potter friends...Michael Frasca foremost of all, and Brenda Brown-Tarbell and Greg Siegel also noteworthy, but there were plenty more, who gave me inspiration and lots of helpful conversation.

Secondly, like Mayo in _An Officer and a Gentleman_..."I had nowhere else to go!" I was all-in in the pottery game...no fallback plan. I had to make it work, or else...the gutter. So, I was young, stupid, hardheaded and persistent...

When Mike and I did the first ash glaze tests, it was love at first sight. We were starting to spray glazes and slips in the studio at that time, and that fit right in too. That cannister set was among my first ash-glazed pots, certainly in the first ten...that they came out that well was something of a miracle.

Right after that article came out, I was going to Columbus to do the Winterfair Show, and thinking that now, since I was published and famous, I'd clean up. Well, you can probably imagine the ending...it was one of my worst shows ever. I ate humble pie for a long time, but kept on working. I still have bad shows, but now don't take them as personally.

Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad that I was able to be of some help to you...clearly you are well down your own highly rewarding path, and I wish you the best. Hope to see you somewhere this year too!

You can contact Richard and see more of his wonderful pots any of the following ways:

Richard's Website
Richard's Etsy Site

he also has a facebook page

Scattered Seeds

Painting by Stephen Bauman

Like most families of my generation, my siblings and I grew up barely knowing our many cousins, aunts and uncles. Not a single nuclear family lived in the same State as another. We were spread out from Minnesota to Massachusetts to South Carolina. I have cousins whom I have never met. There's one family of cousins whose names I don't even know -- Jan, Somecousin, and Someothercousin. The Reids.

And as my siblings and I grew up, we made the same kind of life choices, leading us to distant cities where we raised our children apart from their cousins, aunts and uncles. And so the cycle continues.

Well from that distance I've been tickled to watch the development of a very talented nephew -- Stephen Bauman. I don't know Stephen. I imagine that the last time I saw him he was probably about five years old. Now I'm guessing him to be in his late twenties. But through the wonder that is the internet, I've been able to at least see the kind of work he produces, and stare at the images with amazement and just a little awe.

Landscape by Stephen Bauman

I think that most people would look at two creative souls -- me and Stephen -- and wonder at some sort of family connection -- some sort of "Creativity gene".

Me? ...I look at what Stephen does and I wonder how in the world did he end up looking at things in the manner he does? How did he develop not just a vision worth sharing, but the skill to share it so effectively?

When I look at Stephen's work, I see someone conversant in a different language -- a demonstration of someone raised in a different sphere of inspiration rather than a shared one that one might presume from our family relationship.

Still Life by Stephen Bauman

Some day maybe I'll meet Stephen and get a chance to ask him questions like that. For now, that meeting is unlikely -- for the past few years he's been teaching at Florence Academy of Art in Florence, Italy.

For now, I'll follow his blog and watch for his images as he posts them on the internet.

AKC CH SnoShire's Winsome Wind

We just got in at one-ayem-in-the-morning. We took the weekend off from the pottery making and selling to go up to Novi, Michigan and enter Breeze into the AKC conformation dog shows that took place this past weekend. I'm tired, but at least I didn't have to drive all the way...

It's a funny phenomenon: Ariel and Breeze are our third pair of malamutes. All six of them have pretty much gone with us wherever we go. And every time we step out of the truck, the dogs have always hopped up into the seats. And every time (with the current photo proving the exception) the male of each pair has always gotten into the driver's seat, and the female has always taken the passenger seat.

So, at first blush yer kinder inclined to think that the male is "taking charge" -- getting in the driver's seat. The human-thinking-based assumption being that whoever is literally "in the driver's seat" is the dog in charge.

Funny thing, though. It's actually the opposite. What's really happening is that the females have always been the ones in charge. The males defer to the females, and the females alway choose the seat that doesn't have that obnoxious wheel-thingy sticking part way into their comfort zone. Then, once the female has picked the choicer of the two seats, the male dogs hop up in what's left over -- the driver's seat.

Anyway, it was a great weekend. On Sunday, Breeze took his second major and won his breed championship!

The dog show was a big event. In addition to the conformation trials, they had obedience trials, flyball, and both herding and a weight pull demonstration that was hosted by the Malamute club that Dar and I belong to. Though Breeze has been in harness quite a bit -- skiing with me -- he's had very little experience with pulling dead weight. I mean.....he's had very little experience with pulling deader weight than me in a pair of skis. Here's a video of Breeze participating in the weight pull demonstration.

It was great fun!

Looking Back

1976 was my year of ceramic discovery. I was a junior in college and though I enjoyed studies in literature more than any other study, I couldn’t type. That weakness pretty much sealed my fate. Without the skill to type I wasn’t going to be an English major. But I also enjoyed being creative with paint and pencil. And so by default I ended up in the Art Department.

Curiously, by that time in my life (nearly 20 years old) I had still never even seen a potter’s wheel or a potter at work – much less ever worked with clay. I signed up for Ceramics I – a 3-D requirement for my degree. I’m not sure why, but I actually imagined the course would be about painting on cast ceramic pieces. I wasn’t thrilled. But I was about to discover how far from the mark those painting-on-casting imaginings were…

And what a discovery it was.

The small college’s even smaller ceramics department was in the cobbled up basement of a 60-80-year-old bungalow that was living out its final years of usefulness in whatever way the Art Department could utilize it until the college campus expansion plans would finally tear it down.

I entered the basement through the slanted cellar door outside entrance with just a few concrete steps down. That cinder block basement had barely enough headroom to walk beneath the first floor joists. Back in the corner room was just enough space for five kick wheels.

I remember clearly, to this day, watching by the light of a bare overhead incandescent bulb as the instructor threw a ball of clay onto the wheelhead with a thud, wet his hands, kicked the wheel to a whirring spin, and turned a pot completely out of nothing.

What had been -- not five minutes earlier -- an indistinguishable lump of clay was now a vase shape of distinction and beauty.

I bring up this history by way of introduction to a series of posts I intend to do on potters whom I have found to be influential in my life as a potter. In most of them you will see little if any connection between my pottery and theirs. But the gist of the posts – my introducing these potters to you – will be what it is about their work – or the way they work – that I found so compelling.

I intend to start with a post about the first potter – Richard Aerni – whose work I found so inspirational that to this day I clearly remember the first time – all those years ago in a college library -- I ever saw his work.

LINK TO RICHARD'S ETSY PAGE

In the next few weeks I'll talk about Richard and several other potters who have inspired me, challenged me, centered and shaped my direction in clay.

You Might Be An Artist If...

* You might be an artist if you can't explain something without drawing a picture.

* You might be an artist if you explain your low-to-lower income status as having already retired...

...while you are in your thirties.

* You might be an artist if more of your sentences begin with "What if..." than they do with "It is...".

* You might be an artist if, as a young kid, you knew which rocks worked for drawing on the sidewalk.

* You might be an artist if you watch sports for the beauty of the activity rather than the competition.

* You might be an artist if you remember the books of your childhood by their N.C. Wyeth Illustrations, but can barely remember their story lines.

* You might be an artist if someone asks you for the time and you look down at your watch and answer...

"Melty O'clock"

* You might be an artist if you are easily addicted.

* You might be an artist if you've ever noticed that you can taste a color.

* You might be an artist if, given a pencil and paper, you can draw almost any object with such accuracy that your friends can tell what you've drawn...

...but they can't read your handwriting.

* You might be an artist if your name is anything other than "Thomas Kinkade".

* You might be an artist if you've heard every single hilarious *cough* *cough* one-liner with humor is based on...

Dogs playing poker
Elvis on velvet

* You just might be an artist if you've ever tried to explain away a particular physical …er… shortcoming as…

"...Oh, that's just an illusion of perspective referred to as foreshortening."

* You might be an artist if you are missing one ear.

* You might just be an artist if you can say...

"In this, my most recent body of work, I employ the metaphysical ambiguity implied by the juxtaposition of negative spaces of the imagery of modern day icons with tribal and ancient totems in an amalgam wherein the totality becomes the lesser of two between the “outness” of inside, and the “insideness” of out."

...with a straight face.

* You just might be an artist if you know that "gesso" is not an ambiguous answer.

More Customer Connecting

I mentioned in this post that a customer had made my day by posting a photo of the tea set she'd bought from me. It's one of the nicer functions built into the Etsy site that a customer can upload a photo reply in their review/feedback. Well, she did it again. The above photo looks like it's been clipped from a magazine or a cookbook, but it's another photo posted by Susan from down in Georgia.

Thanks, Susan!

The Worthwhile Guitar

I wrote about the story behind this guitar a few years ago. The story goes on...


It's just an old guitar...

"Tell you what. If you're going to go ahead and buy the pugmill, I'll give you the guitar and banjo for an extra $100 if you want them," Dave said. "It's an old Harmony. I used to play coffeehouses with it back in my college years."

Never being one to turn down a guitar for $100, even if the banjo had to come with it, I said, "Sure."

I've known Dave for nearly my entire professional life. He's another potter.

When I was just a kid starting out – half way through my college years, just married and building a pottery from scratch – I headed toward my very first art fair in central Indiana. I had my '66 Buick Skylark loaded beyond full. Just 30 miles from home, the poor old car broke down on the highway that traces the Eel River ridge across Northern Indiana.


After road repairs, I finally got to the art fair a half a day late. Dave was the first person I met. I asked him if he thought it might be worth the extra effort of trying to set up overnight to salvage the rest of the show. A simple roll of the eyes was the first of a thirty-year string of good advice Dave has given me.

Dave has taught me the ropes of doing art fairs for a living. He has taught me much about pottery. And he has taught me much about jumping into life with both feet.

Life has kinda forced Dave into being a maverick. It's not like life is particularly cruel to Dave. Neither has he found the skids to be often greased. But Dave generally has to figure out his own way of doing things. Dave isn’t exactly “gifted” with the best physical tools to excel at the challenges that appeal to his intelligent, inquisitive mind.

For instance, Dave is not built like a potter. He is slight – he’s narrow-shouldered with fine-boned hands. Dave learned early on that he wasn't going to be muscling his way through turning 20 lb. clay pots. Instead, he figured out how to finesse his way through 5 pounders.

But Dave doesn't seem to measure the value of a challenge -- or his willingness to attempt to tackle it -- by how well equipped he might be to take it on. And time and again Dave shows character – the best of humanity – not in excelling at those challenges, but in trying, in enjoying those challenges.

And I've seen Dave get knocked down. Flat. Wiley Coyote meets the oncoming train in the tunnel. I see him continue to get back up. He doesn't bother to look around to see if anyone saw him topple. Why would he? He isn't attempting the challenge to impress others. He knows the intrinsic worthiness of "try."

"Try."

A life is only empty when it's devoid of "try." Sure, I've learned the art fair ropes from Dave. But the value of "try" is what I'll most take away from the friendship.

And Dave's tenacity has not just earned him my respect, but a career that has spanned four decades, selling thousands of pots a year in nearly every hard-to-get-into fine art fair throughout the Midwest. And there is a group of Midwestern potters whose work will always reflect Dave's influence.

Sometimes "Try" pays off extrinsically as well intrinsically.

So now here I am, looking at this $100 Harmony 1260 Jumbo that I got with the pug mill. It’s not a terribly "gifted" guitar. It's got a bad neck angle, cracked peghead, poor-fitting replacement tuners, and a pickguard that was poorly glued back on. And I'm wondering if it's worth the expense of trying to bring it up to real playability...

...And now there Dave is, looking at the last big challenge for which he's not been given quite adequate tools. There he sits in Florida. Pottery closed forever. One lung gone and the other almost completely ravaged by the cancer he can no longer fight.

I think I'll get the Harmony repaired.

**********

Dave died just weeks after I wrote that. I still think about him often. Not a few times I’ve wondered just how Dave would face the challenges of the changing marketplace. Curiously, the new market was right up Dave’s alley – something at which he really was “gifted”. He was heavily into computers way before the internet became big. I’m guessing Dave would have an Etsy site and I’d be calling him still – as I so often did for his wise advice.

The Harmony sat around the house for a while. I looked into the cost of repairs with a few reputable luthiers. The cost was always so prohibitive that I’d not pull the trigger on those repairs.

But then, through this wonder that is the internet, I met a guy who runs the repair shop of one of the top guitar shops in the country. What’s more – this guy’s passion is restoring old Harmony guitars. And he’s built a national reputation for the quality he puts back into those instruments – always making them even better than they were the day they left the Harmony manufacturer.

So, through a chain of similarly guitar-crazy friends, I handed the guitar off in Chicago and those friends transported that old Harmony up to my new friend, where it waits for its new life – hopefully, some day, in the hands of a new owner who knows the value of “try”.

Finding A Home

I mentioned in this post earlier last year that, counter to my fears of an impersonal, isolated means of selling pots -- via digital images and words on a computer monitor rather than the face-to-face meetings I had with my customers at art fairs -- I actually was connecting with a number of my new-found customers. I find that quite rewarding.

Well, it's happened again as a recent customer from down in Georgia posted the above photo -- a tea set nestled in its cozy new home.

I was actually very hesitant to get into selling online because of just that fear -- that it seemed so impersonal. I'm glad I was wrong.

Honestly, in all my years of selling pots via art fairs, I rarely ever saw my pottery in its final destination point. I really like that function of Etsy that allows a photo to be posted in the "Feedback" section of each site. It really enhances the connection made.

And thanks for the photo, Susan!

Stoneware Potter Talks About Rocks

I keep thinking about posting this....and then my smarter "why-post-it?" angel sits on my shoulder and asks ...er..."why post it?"

But tonight my other angel (sitting on my opposite shoulder. I conveniently have two shoulders for just such angelic polemic) has my ear and so I'm going to tell you. Okay, no big deal. Just maybe you'd get a kick out of it. Anyway, I get to type out stuff on this blog and post it for, like, totally free and stuff, so it doesn't even have to have any redeeming value (good thing, that).

At one time I was thinking about starting to write a story (or something like a story). I didn't really have any idea where the story was going to go as a story. It had no plot. It had no reason for the writing. Quite possibly that's the reason it never got written. But it had about a dozen or so vignettes that I really liked.

One such vignette I got from combining the stories of two friends of mine. One was an orchard man. The other was a guy named Doug Noreen.

I met Doug during his incarnation as a Shaker reproduction furniture maker. But I soon found out (as I got to know him) that he'd made a considerable "fortune" by inventing/engineering (as I remember it) some kind of underwater mining machine. But, no matter how successful, Doug didn't love his life as an engineer.

So Doug started making reproduction furniture and, before long, settled in the pastoral countryside near Shipshewana, IN -- one of the country's biggest Amish centers. He bought several hundred acres and, way back in the back of one section -- tucked discreetly behind a hardwood stand -- he started to build his family a log house.

Anyway, in Doug's endeavor to build the log house, he learned from the neighbors how to take the huge granite boulders left by the recession of the ice at the end of the Ice Age, and that year after year worked their way up to the surface in the fields and were discarded all along the windrows ..... he learned to take those boulders and, sometimes by sledge and chisel, and sometimes by fire and water, bust those huge suckers into manageable material to make the foundation of his log house.

When I first saw the log house, the Noreens had just spent the first winter living in it -- living in the stone basement. In the BEAUTIFUL hand-cut granite stone basement. Doug hadn't just learned to bust up the boulders. Doug had learned to cut that granite into very regular variations of squared-off blocks, and with those squared-off blocks, had mortared up a beautiful, subtly colorful foundation. He had finished that part of the house the previous autumn, covered it with the decking that would become the house's sub-flooring, and had further covered that with plastic sheeting. It had made them a wonderful, weather-tight winter house.

Two years later I went up to visit Doug and the log house was then complete. Yeah, Doug had taught himself how to hand-hew the logs and finish the corners into tidy dovetailed joints. He put everything he had into everything he did.

Anyway, Doug told me about how he worked the biggest, least manageable boulders -- the ones that he could only see the very tops of, but that extended far into the earth. He said that he'd un-dig them and haul them as much to the surface as he could. He'd then stack LOTS of firewood around them and get a long-burning fire going around them. When they were sufficiently heated through, he would pour water over them. The stress from expansion and sudden contraction split the huge rock, sometimes in half, sometimes in more pieces.

Next part of this story that never got written:

Then I had another friend tell me about his walnut stand -- a hand-planted "orchard" of walnut trees. He was (as he told it) planting his grandkid's retirement. I once played around with a bit of verse that reflected such forward thinking ... I don't remember it exactly, but it was something like...

In your twenties, plant oaks.
In your thirties, plant maples.
In your forties, plant poplars,
In your fifties, plant pines.
In your sixties, plant oaks with your grandkids.

Anyway, I'd gotten the next idea for this narrative that never got written from talking to this walnut grove guy. I thought it such a transcendent idea that he'd be planting a "crop" that he'd never harvest ......... and, further, that he had in mind his progeny. Impacted me, it did.

Anyway, when I saw this walnut stand, the trees and the rocks came together in my mind. No, I don't know why.

See, the walnut stand is, in some ways, not a terribly impressive or beautiful picture. Not like a wild and natural forest. It's purposely somewhat sparse where foliage is concerned because the higher the umbrella of foliage, the more useful lumber grows beneath.

But there are a few cool things about such a walnut stand. One of those cool (to me) things is the straight rows of a man-made "forest". It just struck me as interesting. Animated. I could walk in the rows and feel as though I was enclosed by walls.

Or I could walk laterally across the rows and have the feeling of walking through those walls. And when I walked thus across the rows, there was an ever-so-slight sensation like one gets watching the "running fields" that one first notices as a child riding around the countryside -- a passenger in the folk's car. Anywhere the rows of the field run perpendicular to the road on which Dad's driving, those rows appear to be "running" beside the car.

And this particular walnut stand was planted on a slight hill, such that I could look up the length of a row of trees and see clearly to a horizon line. That completed this vision I had of this story that I never wrote.

I thought about a family settling on this property and one of the first things done (by this family that thinks ahead) is to put in a walnut grove. And this walnut grove is planted (as the one I saw) on the side of a hill so that the horizon could be seen up between the rows.

And the man of the family (later to be the grandfather of the family) had built the house -- including the stone foundation. And while gathering and working the boulders for this foundation, he had the unusual happen -- an irregularly pointed boulder split virtually in half.

So, sappy sentimentalist that I am, I had the guy take one half of the boulder and position it, point up, at one end of one of the rows of the Walnut stand. He then took the other half and placed it at the horizon end of the same row in the walnut stand. And here was to be the sappy part: The two boulder's upturned points would line up with exactly where the sun rose every year on the anniversary of their wedding.

I think it never got written because, unlike Thomas Kinkade, I can tell (I hope) when I've painted my house a little too close to the creek.

Mole Wackery, Or "How I And Ariel Spent Winter Vacation"

The exhaustation of a well-spent day of inspirated work is, like, totally the greatest thing and stuff. I and Ariel have been working almost non-stop....one might even say, "obsessively" on getting a mole out of the back yard.

Usually such a project is light work and stuff. I or Ariel will cock a ear toward the ground. Then we will get ourselves totally and completely and positively and ....what's another synonym for "totally"? ...anyways, we get real still-like and wait for a scritchy dirt sound that only I or Ariel could hear. Or we detect just the ever-so-slightest movement in the ground. Then, suddenly -- and without warning -- we pounce. I should say, we POUNCE! I should say it that way because it more aptly depicts the aggressive use of force, speed, power, and stuff of which I and Ariel, acting as a two-dog mole-wrecking crew can reek on the unsuspecting blind dirt-dweller's world.

Carnage. That's what I and Ariel cause around the mole world.

I imagine that at the offices of the "Mole Times And Mole World Report" all the mole reporters and mole writers and mole pundits know I and Ariel by our names.........and those names bring dread and fear.

Heh.

But I and Ariel are going through a little dry spell lately. Speedy, sly, crafty though we may be in employing our mole killing craft, it seems that the latest mole must be, like, Supermole or something. Yeah, Supermole. That's it. And I and Ariel have not yet found the mole kryponite necessary to weaken the varmit.

So far the devastation I and Ariel have been able to rain down on this world has been, like, totally limited to John Bauman and Dar Bauman's back yard. Specifically, one of the flower beds they tend in their back yard.

We haven't yet broken the news to John Bauman and Dar Bauman. But I'm sure they'll be understanding.

Right?
Yours in blog-doggin'

BZ Bauman

On The Pages

A very nice Holiday treat for me -- Christmas Eve I opened my mailbox to find the latest issue of Ceramics Monthly Magazine and found two pages of Bauman Stoneware -- inside. The magazine recently started what will be a regular feature called "Studio Visits". I was excited about the project and even more excited that they chose to feature my studio early on.

Guitar Love Story

How To Breedlove

.........here’s the Lowden.

Martin thought Taylor was a Goodall around person but Stelling seemed in Klien to Fylde Wechter....
.....if she’d just Gibson instead of Takamine it’d Turner from her Guild and Greven....

Still, he Langejans for her.

McCollum up!

So Collings Epiphone – can’t get that Galloup his mind, she’s so Deering.

He Godin his car, Santa Cruz over, Campellone on her porch, Wingert love, and Guitar to Merrill him.

Soon he’ll Tacoma Breedlove, Hohner, Carruth Sand Charis her forever. Weissenborn to love her but Stella something that he learned and loved Doolin. She became the Laskin he’ll ever need.

And they’ Leach live happily Everett.....

......Martin, Taylor, Andersen….