A weekend with a master

It's Monday morning and I'm recovering from a two-day weekend workshop with the legendary ceramic artist Don Reitz. I love these weekend workshops at ACC, I've attended four or five now and they're always wonderful. Very often, I come away from them with ideas for new pots, and loads of information on tools and techniques. There's nothing like getting to sit and watch the way these brilliant artists work.

The Don Reitz workshop was a little different than all the others though. I didn't leave yesterday afternoon with a sketchbook full of new ideas and techniques to try. In fact, I didn't take hardly any notes at all. Instead, I was swept up in Don's immeasurable enthusiasm and passion for clay, and for its incredible qualities. Don and I make very different pots, and he's got forty years of pot-making on me, but I saw in him that passion that I feel in my heart for clay and the creative process.

My teacher Kathy specifically wanted me to attend this workshop so that I would be exposed to Don's confident mark-making abilities, his tendency to attack the clay surface with gusto and fervor. Using a variety of tools and his own bare hands, Don carved up his thrown sections, making slashes, crosses, indentations, tearing edges, and so on. I have been wanting to shake up the direction of my work, but I've found that I'm often scared of ruining an otherwise good pot with what I think will be bad marks or alterations. As a result, I make the same pots again and again, and they're not bad, but eventually I lose a bit of that passionate creative flame that drives an artist in the first place. Nothing kills the creative spirit like boredom, I guess.

Don is in his eighties, and he had not been to Colorado for a workshop since 1987, so it's unlikely that I will ever have the opportunity to be in his presence again. I'm so glad that I had the chance to spend a weekend with him, even as just a spectator, sitting in a plastic chair with fifty or so other clay fiends. I take away from this weekend my new mantra, Don's voice in my head saying what he said over and over as he feverishly played in the clay and tried whatever came to mind, "It's ok though. It'll all work out."