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by L o u a n a M . Lackey
With A Foreword by Peter Voulkos
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by L o u a n a M . Lackey
With A Foreword by Peter Voulkos
Published by The American Ceramic Society 735 Ceramic Place Westerville, OH 43081 www.ceramics.org
The American Ceramic Society, 735 Ceramic Place, Westerville, Ohio 4308 1 0 2002 by The American Ceramic Society. All rights reserved. Published 2002. Printed in the United States of America.
06 05 04 03 02 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN: 1-57498-144-7
Executive Director and Publisher W. Paul Holbrook Senior Director, Publications Mark Mecklenborg Acquisitions Mary J. Cassells
Developmental Editor Sarah Godby Marketing Assistant Jennifer Hereth Production Manager John Wilson
Design by Melissa Bury, Columbus, Ohio. Photographs appearing in this book are reprinted courtesy of Christofer Autio, Lar Autio, Rudy Autio, Jaap Borgers, Bill Brown, Dave DonTigny, L.H. Jones, Louana M. Lackey, Hiromu Narita, Joan K. Prior, Bruce S. Rose, Roger Schreiber, and Howard Skaggs. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in review. Authorization to photocopy for internal or personal use beyond the limits of Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law is granted by The American Ceramic Society, provided that the appropriate fee is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 0 1923 USA, <www.copyright.com>. Prior to photocopying items for educational classroom use, please contact Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. This consent does not extend to copyright items for general distribution or for advertising or promotional purposes or to republishing items in whole or in part in any work in any format. Requests for special photocopying permission and reprint requests should be directed to Senior Director, Publications, The American Ceramic Society, 735 Ceramic Place, Westerville OH 43081 USA. Every effort has been made to ensure that all the information in this book is accurate. Due to differing conditions, tools, and individual skills, the publisher cannot be responsible for any injuries, losses, and other damages that may result from the use of the information in this book. Registered names and trademarks, etc., used in this publication, even without specific indication thereof, are not to be considered unprotected by the law. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData Lackey, Louana M. (Louana Mae), 1926Rudy Autio / by Louana M. Lackey ; with foreword by Peter Voulkos. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57498-144-7 1. Autio, Rudy, 1925- 2. Potters--United States--Biography. 3. Autio, Rudy, 1925---Catalogs. 4. Ceramic sculpture, American--20th century--Catalogs. I. Autio, Rudy, 1925- 11. Title. NK4210.A93 L33 2002 730’ .92--dc21 [BI
2002019766
For more information on ordering titles published by The American Ceramic Society or to request a publications catalog, please call (614) 794-5890 or visit our online bookstore at <www.ceramics.org>.
Dedication To Frederick R. Matson, who introduced me to ceramic studies
as an undergraduate, guided me through the pitfalls of graduate school, saw me through to the successful completion of my dissertation, and graciously continues in his role of mentor.
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Contents Foreword by Peter Voulkos Preface
ix
xi
Acknowledgments
xiv
Becoming a n Artist
I
At the Archie Bray
21
Teaching and Making A r t in Missoula An Artist Abroad
79
In the Studio
103
More Time for Art Plates Chronology Appendix
151 247 249
Bibliography Index
127
255 259
47
Rudy and Pete, New Jersey, 2000.
I Know Rudy
eing in Rudy Autio’s presence is to experience the greatness and humbleness we all seek. The time we’ve spent together i s extraordinary, to put it mildly. Rudy and I have been friends and colleagues for fifty-five years. Rudy’s vastly diverse talents, enhanced at times by his wife Lela’s remarks, amazed all. From the beginning we had a lot in common; we had clay, music, guitars, art, Montana, immigrant parents, new families, no money, military service, the G.I. Bill, athlete’s foot, and a passion for making stuff. At the Archie Bray we also had the chance to collaborate and build something together. We were the ”Kids,” according to Archie. H e called what Rudy made ”horses and babes,” and what 1 made ”ribs, guts, and belly buttons.” We were a good influence on each other. We had give and take. Rudy is the consummate artist. I am constantly astounded and jealous. He can paint, draw, sculpt, and play the accordion; he’s a real renaissance guy. Our relationship has taught me a world of ideas. I respect Rudy as one of the finest artists and teachers, and
hold him as my best friend. -Peter
Voulkos
IX
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Preface
ceramic artists working in the United States during the last fifty years-his
ceramic sculptures,
both in the round and in relief, can be seen in the permanent collections of the American Craft Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Carnegie Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Applied Arts Museum in Helsinki, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, and the Aichi and Shigaraki ceramic museums in Japan. He is also known for his work in bronze and other metals, concrete, glass, graphic design, prints, painting, and tapestries, some of which he designed using computer tec hno Iogy. Many awards have honored his art and his teaching, including a Tiffany Award in Crafts in 1963, the American Ceramic Society Art Award in 1978, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts that enabled him to work and lecture at the Arabia Porcelain Factory and the Applied Arts University in Helsinki in 1981. A gold
XI
R U D Y AUTIO
medalist and Fellow of the American Crafts Council, he also is an honorarv member of the National Council on Education for the
/ ygh I,“”
2
,rts and has been the director and a trustee of the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts. Rudy also was honored as the first recipient of the Montana Governor’s Award and named outstanding visual artist in the state in 1981. In Japan, Rudy Autio’s life work-his art, teaching, lectures, demonstrations, and honorswould have earned him the title of Living National Treasure. If there were such a title in the United States, Autio would certainly have received it. How did the son of poor Finnish immigrants attain such success? How did he escape becoming a miner like his father? How did he manage to cross the social, economic, and educational boundaries that separate the world of
his childhood from the world of art? How did he move into the art world and also rise to the top? Rudy Autio was born in Butte, Montana, and was educated in the Butte public schools. He discovered art at Montana State University at Bozeman, where he
earned his undergraduate degree in 1950, and was awarded
his M.F.A. in Sculpture at Washington State University in Pullman in 1952. From 1952 until 1957 he was Artist-in-Residence at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana, which he co-founded in 1951 with Peter Voulkos. In 1957, he founded the Ceramics Department at the University of Montana in Missoula, where he taught until his retirement as Professor Emeritus in 1984.
Preface
In addition to his teaching, he has given lectures and conducted more than one hundred workshops in the United States and other countries. Through installations of his public art works and his teaching, he has exerted considerable impact on art in Montana, but
his influence extends beyond Montana, beyond the United States, and around the world. This book is a history and a celebration of Rudy Autio’s work and life. Since pottery no longer plays the same necessary part in our daily lives, one recurring question for present-day potters is whether what they are doing is art or craft, and whether they are artists Many contemporary potters prefer to be called ceramic artists, and Rudy Autio is one of the best of these. By document-
ing Rudy Autio’s life and work, this book explores questions of the role ceramic artists play in contemporary American culture, how one becomes a ceramic artist, h ow ceramic artists make their work, how has technology changed their medium-and,
most importantly-why
these
artists do this work at all.
Xlll
A ck nowledgmen ts
any people helped in the research for this book. First, of course, was Rudy Autio himself, who gave hours of taped interviews, patiently answered questions, and promptly responded to other questions by phone and e-mail. Rudy let me observe his ceramic production processes in his own studio and during demonstrations as a visiting artist in other venues, never complaining about interruptions. Hugh Warford, Rudy’s longtime assistant, was equally patient and helpful. Rudy’s wife, Lela, and their sons, Lar and Christofer, also gave many interviews and added additional dimensions to the story. Frances Senska, who still works daily in her studio, shared memories of her first class of students at Montana State University, one that included Rudy, and his future wife, Lela Moniger, and Peter Voulkos, who became Rudy’s friend and colleague for more than fifty years. Peter Voulkos, as well as other colleagues and students of Rudy’s, provided important information. Three of Rudy’s former graduate students-Doug
Baldwin, Dave DonTigny, and Jim Stephenson, whose
idea it was to write this book-have
given help and support
throughout the writing process. A familiar clich6 says, “This book would not have been possible without the help of ....” In this case, that person is Lela Autio.
Lela, the family archivist, shared more than fifty years of catalogs,
XIV
Acknowledgments
clippings, and photographs of Rudy's work, as well as photographs of friends and family. Christofer Autio also copied and restored many of the older photographs and took many new ones. Other images were provided by Dave DonTigny; Frances Senska; Peter Held, director of the Holter Museum in Helena; and Josh DeWeese and Marcia Eidel of the Archie Bray Foundation.
I should also like to thank Joel Eide for clearing up some details of the "From Flagstaff to Helsinki and Back" exhibition, the "Clay AZ Art" conference, and the trip to St. Petersburg. Peter Callas, my gracious host let me observe a workshop given at his studio by Rudy, Peter Voulkos, and Don Reitz. Other friends who gave generously of their time include Marcia Selsor, who drove me through almost all of Montana to visit museums, galleries, and artists in their studios; Karen Cowgill and Lorna DonTigny, who transcribed some of the interviews; sharp-eyed Linda Stephenson, who caught the misspelled names of some of the faculty at the university; and Katy Capps, who shared her editorial expertise.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to the American Ceramic Society-to
Mary Cassells and Sarah Godby for putting up with my
quirks and foibles so gracefully while, at the same time, guiding this project through to conclusion. The Design and Production Departments should be commended as well. Finally, this book would never have been written without the help of two men, Norman Anderson, a 1950 graduate of the University of Montana, and Edward "Ted" Trimble a man who was always open to questions, and who offered solutions to many problems.
xv
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Becoming an Artist
men spend their days hunting, fishing, or playing golf, but he
did not retire in 1984 from twenty-eight years of teaching at the University of Montana for any such idle pursuits. He retired to work at his own art-rather
than teaching
others how to do so. Since his retirement in 1984, he has been busier and more productive than ever before-working at his ceramics, his sculpture, his prints,
his drawings, and his writing. He embraces aspects of new technologies he finds useful, particularly the computer. One common interest Rudy shares with other men his age is pride in
his family: his wife Lela, their four grown children, and five grandchiIdren.
Rudy painting a watercolor in Dave McCosh's class, 1947.
R U D Y AUTIO
Growing Up Rudy’s parents had emigrated from Finland separately as young adults and had met in the Montana mining town of Southern Cross. His father, Arne Salomon Vanhatalo (who had been renamed Autio at Ellis Island), worked as a miner in the gold mines; his mother, Selma Wayrynen, was a cook and maid at a boarding house. They were married in Butte, Montana, where their three children were born: his sister, Kerttu ”Gertie” Tellervo, in 1917; his brother, John Kauko, in 1922; and Arne Rudolf, on October 8, 1926.
Grant School playground, Butte, Montana, in the 1950s.
2
Becoming a n Artist
Rudy was educated in the public schools of Butte. Many of his generation remember Depression-era school days as extremely unpleasant-long
days in dreary, sour-smelling school rooms, with
constant memorization of poems, dates, and multiplication tables; boring, repetitive dri IIs; and stupid, irrelevant ”stories.” For Rudy, the schoolroom was a place of discovery. School was where he discovered art. Sociologist Mason Griff
(1970: 148) couId have been describing Rudy when he wrote: Public-school art teachers begin to exert their influence quite early in the career of the artist, generally in grammar school. Impoverished or misguided though their teaching may be, they may introduce the youngster to the satisfactions and delights of drawing and painting. These teachers serve to keep interest in art alive throughout the
school
years
by
bestowing
approval upon the child, singling him out for special honors, placing his work in public view, or assigning him honorific tasks, such as decorating the blackboards. Some students mention that, as early as kindergarten, teachers singled them out for praise and isolated them from their classmates so that they could concentrate on their art.
The Grant elementary school was two blocks downhill from Rudy’s home. Rudy remembers it fondly. There was always something interesting going on-a
field trip, a visitor, a film, or a
Rudy a t about the age of three, wearing a new suit made by his aunt.
3
RlJDV A U T I O
Some members of the Grant School fourth-grade class, dressed for a minuet in a Washington‘s Birthday program, February, 1935: (left to right) June Maki and Bill Jolly; Carmen Brostrom and Victor Radoman; Hazel Trupekka and Rudy Autio.
school play. When Rudy was in fourth grade, he and some of his classmates learned the minuet for a Washington’s Birthday production. He still remembers thinking that his partner, Hazel Trupekka, was “the cutest girl in history. Even in the fourth grade, she stirred nascent interest in a young boy’s hormones.” Art was Rudy’s most exciting class. He found that he could draw well and could understand the use of perspective. He admits
4
B e c o m i n g a n Artist
neglecting his arithmetic while he was out of class decorating blackboards for Ha1loween, Thanksgiving, and other school holidays. Rudy remembers the kindness of his first art teacher with affection. It was M i s s Chamison who introduced him to painting with tempera and let him use her own special camel’s hair paintbrushes. When he was about nine, Rudy began to take art classes sponsored by a Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) program, which sent artists into public schools to teach evening classes. These artists took a classic academic approach to teaching drawing. The students’ first assignment was to copy illustrations from magazines; later, they learned to draw from plaster casts and still-life arrangements. Rudy loved the classes and the exercises. He learned to copy without using proportionate squares, he learned about black-and-white values, and he learned how to do shading. His teacher would return to school to check on the young artist’s progress, and he even took some of Rudy’s drawings to an art center across the state in Billings.
This was Rudy’s firstexhibition, and it made him very proud. Rudy was becoming more aware of the art around him. He admired prints by Charlie Russell that were on display in the post office, and one day noticed a watercolor in a bookstore window, an image of Teddy Roosevelt taking aim at a bear. This painting, he remembers, was “so sublimely beautiful I would shiver with pleasure when I looked at it.” He began to visit exhibits by W.P.A. artists who were working in silk-screening and other printmaking techniques.
These prints were fascinating to Rudy but were beyond the boy’s ability to understand, and he thought them “very flat and washy compared to real painting.”
5
R U D Y AUTIO
The first “real paintings” he saw were displayed in an art show at a department store. Rudy had never seen anything like them: “Big paintings. Big globs of paint. If you stood back you could see they blended into trees and mountains or people. It made the hair stand on your neck. Did people really paint this way?” He was too young to know where they came from, or who made them, or what they were about, but they were the most wonderful things he’d ever seen. At Butte High School, Rudy studied under two art teachers, both with excellent credentials. Caroline Busch Jacobs had studied in Paris as well as at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. John ”Pop” Weaver was a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago and a member of the Ashcan School of painters. ”Pop” Weaver was tough talking and irreverent, and Rudy felt a little intimidated by his gruff manner. Weaver was a master of the poster, using bright colors and bold lettering in an art-deco style. In the 193Os, posters were a popular form of advertising used to announce upcoming athletic matches, movies, plays, and theater productions. The theaters in Butte always displayed a brilliantly colored poster outside the box office, often one done by Weaver. Weaver was a very good draftsman who assigned demanding drawing exercises, including pencil and charcoal portraits. Members of the class took turns posing; sometimes the class was asked to do a half-length portrait or a full figure, but the usual assignment was a portrait. Weaver taught Rudy how to do subtle work with charcoalshades and shadows, and dark and light patterning. Caroline Jacobs offered a broader spectrum. She taught her students to draw with pen and ink and exposed them to painting in oils
6
Becoming a n Artist
and pastels, as well as several printmaking techniques, including silkscreening. All through high school, Rudy spent most of his time draw-
ing. H e recalls that he not only drew a lot of figures, but he also became ”pretty good at portrait
draw ing.”
Navy Shortly after finishing high school in
1944, Rudy joined the navy. H e was first sent to boot camp in Idaho, and then to Norman, Oklahoma, for further training at an aviation machinists mates’ school. After five months in N.orman, he was assigned to an aircraft repair
shop at a naval station across the bay from San Francisco in Alameda, California. The base was considered ”good duty:”
Rudy with his parents, Selma and Arne Salomon Autio, 1939.
In Alameda, we had good food, wonderful facilities, a good work atmosphere. Movie stars like the stunningly beautiful Gloria DeHaven would visit, and we had other free entertainment. Crafts and hobby shops were on the base; I took a drawing course. There were other organized university courses-/
took a course in
American history there and got college credit for it-and
of
course, wonderful San Francisco across the bay, which we could reach by water taxi or by the A train from Oakland.
Despite these diversions, Rudy yearned for sea duty. When a call came for volunteers for an aircraft carrier unit, he stepped forward. 7
R U D Y AUTIO
Somehow, he was instead sent to the Fallon Naval Air Station in Nevada, where he would spend the major part of his time in the service. So it was that he served all of his time in the navy inside the United States, and, he says, “except for a voyage or two by water taxi
to San Francisco, out of harm’s way.”
Bozeman When World War II ended and Rudy was discharged from the navy, he returned to Butte to decide what to do next. He was encouraged to think about college by his glamorous and interesting sister Gertie,
who, on one of her rare visits home from her school, had begun to talk to him about “good books, about science and evolution, and atoms.” Their mother was against college, because ”that’s where you read the wrong books-like
philosophy.”
While Rudy was in the navy, he had noticed that officers were a privileged class because they’d gone to college. By chance, Rudy ran into an old high-school classmate, Matt Thornton, who asked him if he’d be interested in going to Bozeman to attend Montana State College, because he needed a roommate. Since the G.I. Bill meant free college for four years, Rudy decided to try it, and went along with Matt. The G.I. Bill paid Rudy seventy-five dollars a month and tuition-not
much different from military pay.
The campus at Bozeman was teeming with war veterans, most of whom had returned from the war in Europe, and many of whom were still wearing parts of their uniforms. As in postwar campuses all over the country, there was not enough room at the university or in town to house this huge influx of students. Students occupied
8
Becoming an A r t i s t
every possible square inch. Rudy remembers going to the Student Union, where ”coeds housed in temporary quarters were running through the hallways in their nightgowns, carrying toothbrushes.” Rudy and Matt shared a furnished room with two other veterans and ate at a boarding house with the eighteen or more boarders. Rudy used his separation pay from the navy to buy a secondhand model A coupe, ”a beautiful car with a rumble seat, although it wasn’t in very good shape. Still, there were pretty girls around, the beer joints were fun, and life was very exciting.” Matt enrolled in the pre-engineering program, and Rudy in architecture. Now that he was planning to become an architect, Rudy thought that his mother had changed her opinion of college somewhat and was even a little proud of him; after all, architecture was an honorable occupation that she considered to be a higher level of carpentry and construction. His father thought it was safer than mining. Rudy was required to take a remedial math class at seven in the morning. He also registered for Architectural Drawing,
Shades and Shadows, History, and Chemistry. All of these classes were enormous. There were 250 students in Rudy’s chemistry class, a subject he found ”totally mystifying.” Lab was another mystery; he doesn’t think he would have passed without the help of his lab partner. After only one quarter in the architecture program, Rudy began to suspect that his future did not lie in that field. He began to think seriously about transferring to the Art Department after he spilled coffee all over his architectural drawings. Besides, he admits, he had ”noticed the girls over in the Art Department, and I liked it better over there.” Rudy even designed some posters for the winter Beaux
9
RUDY AUTIO
Arts Ball so he could finally meet a fellow student named Lela Ruth Moniger from Great Falls. Rudy had long admired Lela from a distance. She was “talented, energetic, and fun. She was cute with an impish quality about her, and she was majoring in art.” Lela remembers the day they met: Rudy wasn’t a handsome guy, but I noticed right off he was handy with his hands, and that impressed me. We were giving a Beaux Arts Ball, and I was head of the Art Club, and nobody knew how to do anything. We were trying to build the interior of this gym into something that looked interesting. All these architects just stood around and didn’t know what to do, but Rudy, who was in the architecture program at the time, just went to work and started making things and climbing up on ladders and hanging them up and doing this and doing that, and I thought “Geez, this guy knows what he’s doing.” So I was impressed. So I guess, to use the old phrase, I set my cap for him and I caught him. He wasn’t hard to catch.
Rudy thought, “Lela was the cutest thing I ever saw. I was really amazed that she was even remotely interested in me.” After Rudy transferred to the Art Department, his new adviser recommended that he register for Drawing, Design, Art Appreciation, and College Algebra. It was difficult to keep up with the engineering students in his algebra class, but Rudy persisted and eventually completed his math requirements with an A in Calculus. In the process he even “discovered that mathematics was really a beautiful science, and if you fed the right ingredients into the formulas, the answers came out of the end like magic.” His success with math was due in no small measure to his admiration of a teaching assistant in the math department who, like Giotto, “had the amazing ability to
10
Becoming an Artist
draw a near-perfect circle on the blackboard with one hand” while postulating theorems and clarifying equations. Rudy’s next adviser in the Art Department was Cyril Conrad, a sculptor who chaired the department. Conrad had been Lela’s highschool art teacher in Great Falls and had helped her win a scholar-
ship to Bozeman. At Bozeman he taught art history, art appreciation, drawing, and sculpture. His life drawing classes-held locked doors-became
behind
some of the most popular classes in the art
program. Rudy remembers that when he studied with Mr. Conrad he ”kept a sketchbook going, and I’ve been drawing ever since. I don’t know that I have made any significant leaps in drawing, but I’ve done a lot of drawing.” Drawing has remained an important part of
his work and his life. He uses drawing on his pieces and has written two articles about drawing for Studio Potter (Autio 1985 and 1987). He draws cartoons and caricatures of friends and foe alike. Cyril Conrad’s standard exercises in drawing were easy for Rudy after ”Pop” Weaver’s assignments, but Conrad’s course in beginning sculpture made Rudy begin to appreciate the possibilities of three dimensions. One of his first influences was Car1 Milles, whose gaunt, flowing figures were much copied by sculptors of the time. An early ceramic piece of Rudy’s, a man holding a dolphin, was inspired by photographs of Milles’ Orpheus series. Today, Milles seems overly stylized, but when Rudy saw his work on-site many years later in St. Louis and at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, he still admired its classic airiness and rhythms. The Art Department faculty at Bozeman also included Frances Senska and JessieWilber. Frances Senska taught design, ceramics, and the history of costume. JessieWilber, who had studied painting
11
R U D Y AUTIO
at Colorado State University, taught crafts and watercolor as well as printmaking. She was a flawless printmaker, and Rudy remembers her course in lithography as the best printmaking course he ever
had, although lithography was not her special interest: “1 never had any problems with lithographic technique under Jessie, but 1 had all kinds of problems later in grad school under less skilled instruction. Jessie had a magic touch.”
In addition to JessieWilber, the painting faculty included Don
Boyd, a graduate of the University of Oregon, and Dave McCosh, who came one summer to teach watercolor painting. McCosh was one of the best painters Rudy had ever met, and Rudy still remembers some of his talks about painting and his exercises in warm and cool colors. McCosh took his class out into the majestic landscape around Bozeman to paint, and they had a wonderful time. Lela Moniger was in the class, and Rudy admits that he was “madly in love with Lela by this time, and so there was romance in my life as well as art. Lela was a star in painting, easily the best in our class and probably McCosh’s favorite.” Peter Voulkos was another student in McCosh’s class, and Rudy recalls that both he and McCosh were taken by “the lively and scrubby things painted by Peter Voulkos,
whom I was just getting to know well. H e made some wonderful watercolors, which he later translated into silk-screen prints.”
Rudy and Peter Voulkos became close friends. In his junior and senior years at Bozeman, before he became interested in ceramics, “Pete made some wonderful paintings,” Rudy said. “He made a
luminous and interesting self-portrait that bung in our bathroom for a while. It was a very strong portrait painted with a palette knife. It 42
Becoming
an A r t i s t
was psychologically large, portending his career. He also made a
night scene, an intimate little gas station with gas pumps and illuminated by a streetlight above, all with thick and globby color. Another was a grain-elevator painting, later translated into a silk-screen print during a course with Jessie. Pete was a fine painter with a highly energetic graphic sensibility in those years.” In the late 194Os, Don Boyd left Bozernan’s faculty and was
succeeded by Robert DeWeese. Bob and his wife, Gennie, had studied painting at the Ohio State University and at the University of Iowa. Later, Bob had taught at the University of Texas at Lubbock,
where he had even taught a course in ceramics, as he would later joke. Everyone loved the DeWeeses; Rudy and Lela visited them often and became lifelong friends. Rudy says that: Bob was as much a presence as he was a teacher, and, though we had formal classes at school, we seemed to learn more about art
by being around him and Gennie than hanging around the school. Of course, the school was our studio, so it was where we went to make art when we weren’t at the DeWeeses.
Ceramics The ceramics program at Bozeman was begun in the basement of Herrick Hall by Frances Senska with the help of a graduate student, Charlie Stablein. Frances Senska had studied ceramics with Maija Grotell when she attended the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and she also had studied with Edith Heath and Marguerite Wildenhain. Although she had been hired to teach design, she managed to persuade the head of the department that it would be nice to start a ceramics class: “So we did. And it took off, you know; everybody
13
R U D Y AUTlO
wanted to take it. Except the advert is ing majo rs-t hey d idn ’t like to get their hands dirty. Everybody else liked it very much. And it just kept growing. As our staff enlarged and w e had to hire more people, I managed to slough off everything else except ceramics.” The pottery shop started modestly with two homemade stand-up kick wheels; somewhat later an electric wheel was added. The glaze room was basic but served for teaching the rudiments of glaze chemistry and batching. Soon the ceramFrances Senska, 1954.
ics department was humming
with activity. Peter Voulkos, who thought of himself as a painter, enrolled in ceramics only because it had become a required course. Almost immediately, he became completely converted from paint to clay. By today’s standards, Pete’s earliest work in clay was that of any beginner-simply glazed eight-inch cylinders-but
decorated and
within a year, his work was winning
prizes in regional competitions such as the Oregon Ceramic Studio.
14
Becoming a n A r t i s t
Rudy, Lela, and Pete practically lived in the Art Department. Pete remembers how they would creep in through the windows on the ground level of Herrick Hall after hours, until he and Rudy learned how to pick the lock on the door. Soon everyone was picking the lock, sneaking in, and working at night. Officially, students weren’t allowed to use the building after six p.m., but the faculty was tolerant, and the janitor let them alone to work in the basement. Rudy’s interests in art were still very broad. He studied ceramics and enameling with Frances Senska, printmaking with Jessie Wilber, and painting with Bob DeWeese. He had some facility for watercolor painting and, although he was irritated that he was required to specialize, he began to think of sculpture as the direction he should take. He felt that he needed a generalized background because his goals included teaching art at the high-school level. He had taken the required education courses but found the exercises in educational theory so boring that he “almost threw in the towel.”
Marriage Rudy and Lela had grown serious. They were married on St. Patrick’s Day, 1948, in Choteau, Montana, where Lela’s sister lived. The couple barely made it to Choteau, driving an old Franklin borrowed from Rudy’s roommate. Rudy remembers: It was a great, great, crazy wedding. I was scared; I damn near fell out of my suit. After the wedding we took off for Great Falls in this car; I was driving, and we damn near ran into a freight train. The lights on it were so dim that I barely saw these sparks flying ahead of me, and I realized I was coming to a railroad crossing that didn’t have the thing that comes down. Then I saw these freight cars moving across the road. I thought, “My God, we damn near got killed on our wedding night!”
15
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Back in Bozeman, the couple started married life living in a trailer. That fall, Lela became pregnant, and, because Rudy still had a year of school after Lela graduated, they moved from the trailer to college housing. Their first baby, Arne, named for both his father and his grandfather, arrived in June. Time passed quickly. School was very exciting, and Rudy and Lela enjoyed everything about it. Rudy observes that both of them developed great friendships in college that have lasted all their lives: ”Our teachers were close to us, as were our colleagues in
the art department. W e have shared each other’s lives and supported one another in our respective careers. In that way, I think our life in college at Bozeman was the most formative time in my life.”
Pullman Upon Rudy’s graduation, money from the G.I. Bill stopped, and
with no job in sight, his situation Pregnant Woman Drawing, Pullman, Washington, 1952.
16
soon became desperate. He tried
Becoming a n A r t i s t
going from door to door in Bozeman drawing portraits. He painted the Burger Inn for Peter Voulkos, who worked there frying hamburgers.
With his new college degree and teaching credentials, Rudy wanted very much to teach high-school art. He applied to several school districts, to no avail. There were vacancies in Anaconda and Kalispell, but he was rejected by both. Rudy found the same solution as many other recent college graduates who were unable to find employment: He decided to go to graduate school. He applied to the University of Washington at Seattle, the University of Oregon at Eugene, and Washington State University at Pullman. All three accepted him, and all three made offers. He accepted a teaching assistantship at Pullman because Washington State made the best offer-$1,200
a year. He thought it
would be enough to live on, but he had no idea what he was going to have to do in order to earn this meager sum. For the next two years, Rudy would serve as the departmental flunky, doing just about every grungy job for every member of the faculty. He recalls that he
”did my apprenticeship teaching classes, hanging shows, packing crates, grading papers, and sorting slides until I thought my work would never end. There was no time for the family, and it seemed there would never be enough time to get my own work done.” Rudy also was disappointed by the facilities he found in Pullman. As an undergraduate at Bozeman he had wanted to learn how to become a bronze caster, and he was especially interested in the work of Italian sculptor Marino Marini. One reason he had selected Pullman’s Master of Fine Arts program was that he had
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heard that the sculpture teacher there was good at bronze casting. As
it turned out, George Laisner was not interested in bronze, and the facilities were very limited. By the time Rudy discovered this, it was too late: He was trapped. With a wife and child to support, he had to
stay in his teaching assistantship until he finished his M.F.A. Throughout graduate school, Rudy recalls, he and Lela were “very short of money, ate badly, and were always cold.” From time to time they managed to earn a little extra money. Lela made illustrations for the county extension services, and Rudy made posters. Rudy remembers that the best thing that happened to them at Pullman was meeting a fellow student, Harold Balazs. Harold was a gifted and energetic art student who became a lifelong friend. When Harold graduated, Rudy and another friend, Jonny Jackson, inherited
his silk-screen poster business. They jumped at the chance to make some extra money, Rudy explains: lonny got the contracts to make the posters, and I designed them. The Drama Department paid us $65 for a run of fifty The runs were two colors usually, and were done with paper stencils and glue-touche stencils. We became proficient at it and got it down to a smooth system where we could design, run, and make the posters in a few hours and take them to the Drama Department advertising their current play; then they would distribute the posters around campus. The income made it possible to survive, as small as it was. We made a poster run approximately once a month.
Still, according to Lela, they ”damn near starved to death.” She found life in Pullman difficult for other reasons as well: “We lived on the edge of a golf course, and so you couldn’t let kids out to play
18
Becoming a n Artist
because the golf balls were always zinging around the place and would kill you if you walked into one. It was a weird place; I never
got used to Pullman.” After Rudy completed his first year of graduate school, the couple spent the summer in Montana. Then they returned to Pullman for one more year. For his final year, Rudy was given new duties in the department: He was assigned a class of his own in drawing and sketching. He learned that teaching could be interesting and fulfilling, but also very demanding. He learned about the responsibilities of being a teacher. He also learned about the agonies of ranking students and the games students play to earn good grades. Rudy thinks he did a pretty good job of teaching his first class, although he remembers being overly conscientious about grades. He devised a system of grading based on categories of attendance, growth, and achievement that highly impressed the senior member of the department, Worth Griffin. At the end of his second year at Pullman, Rudy had completed the requirements for’his M.F.A. in sculpture. He was so poor by the time he finished his thesis project that he could barely afford to pay Zaner Miller to take thesis photos of his work. But he was finally finished. He had completed a body of work in a variety of media. He had “run the gamut of influences of Moore, Marini, Tamayo, Picasso, Rivera, and everybody else’s.” There were sculptures done in plaster, cast stone, cast aluminum, wire, clay, wood, and multimedia. He also had done some watercolors, silk-screen prints, and lithographs. After he finished the project, he wrote a thesis paper he describes as ”SO
pedantic no one but Worth Griffin ever read it. At least I hope
not. I suppose he looked on it as some kind of punishment for being
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a professor. I was grateful he went over it with me word by word so that the library accepted it. My dear wife Lela typed it word by word on a lousy portable until all seventy or more pages were letter-perfect by KateTurabian’s standards. Lela endured this hell on my
behalf; it may be another reason she’s hated Pullman to this day.” Turabian’s Chicago Manual ofstyle had become the final word in academic writing at colleges and universities across the country, which was reason enough to “hate Pullman.” Lela had disliked Pullman so much that she swore she would never go there again as long as she lived: Then one day-it’s
been a while back, twenty years ago-Rudy
had to go there to pick something up on the way back from Seattle. So we drove into that town; I knew I shouldn’t have gone. Rudy picked up the thing we had gone for and drove out of town the wrong way, so we had to go back again, and I thought, “God‘s going to strike me dead:” After I vowed never to go to Pullman again, I went there twice in one day
When he graduated, Rudy had no job, although, he recalls, the Art Department “had the cheek to offer me an extension of my assistantship-at
the same pay-for
the next year if I wanted it.” He
said ”no thanks” and headed back to Montana to take his chances. Rudy was worn out: “Little Arne was growing, and I had bad teeth that needed attention. Lela was pregnant with Lisa. I was glad it was over. I had been the peon of the art school.” Rudy may not have had a job, but at least he knew where he was going and what he was going to do when he got there-he
was
going back to Helena and back to Archie Bray’s brickyard where he
had spent the previous summer. 20
At the Archie Bray
t the end of Rudy’s first year of graduate school in
1951, he and Lela went back to Montana for the summer. Lela and their baby stayed in Bozeman with Bob and Gennie DeWeese while Lela took classes in lithography at the university. Rudy and Peter Voulkos, who also was back in Montana after his first year of graduate school, went to Helena together hoping to find summer jobs and a place where they could
do their work. They found both at the Western Clay Manufacturing
Shoji Hamada decorating a bowl a t the Archie Bray, 1952.
R U D Y AUTIO
Company in Helena. The firm’s owner, Archie Bray, hired both of them to work in his brickyard and to help him build a pottery for the art center he wanted to start. Archie Bray was not just a simple maker of brick. H e had a degree in ceramic engineering from the Ohio State University, and he played the piano, sponsored concerts and theater productions, and owned a modest art collection. Archie dreamed of building a place where artists and musicians could work, and he talked about his idea
of an art center with his
f r iends-B ranson Stevenson, and Peter and Henry Meloy. All three were enthusiastic about the idea. Stevenson, an
oil company executive, was an amateur artist. Peter Meloy and his brother Henry Meloy, were interested in pottery. Pete was an attorney in Helena and an amateur potter. Henry ”Hank” Meloy taught Hank Meloy, with his portrait of his brother, Peter, ca. 1951.
painting and life drawing at Columbia University in New
York City, and returned to Helena in the summers to make pottery
with his brother. The Meloys had unsuccessfully tried to build a kiln
22
At the Archie Bray
on their ranch, so Archie had been letting them fire their pots on top
of the bricks in his brick kiln. The first phase of the projected art center would be a pottery. The projected center would begin with ceramics. Painting, sculpture, weaving, and possibly, a music conservatory could be added later. A high-school friend of Rudy’s, Kelly Wong, who had also studied art at Bozeman, joined Rudy and Pete in the brickyard. The three worked from early morning until late at night. They shoveled raw clay onto conveyer belts to be crushed and fed into the pugmill; they sometimes would relieve the regular “nippers” to pick up brick as it came from the extruder; at other times, they were assigned to help with the firing. When they weren’t working in the brickyard, they laid brick for the new pottery. They did not labor alone at this; Pete Meloy and many other volunteers helped to build the pottery. Frances Senska (I 982:35) reports that ”So many eager amateurs laid brick for those walls, it’s a wonder they remain standing. But the experts managed to compensate for the wavering rows, and the roof plate landed on a level course.” By all working together, they managed to construct a building with a showroom, a workroom, and rooms for clay mixing, glazing, and kilns. When the pottery was finished, Archie and PeterVoulkos built a large downdraft kiln for highfire reduction wares, the first gas-fired kiln in the state. Under Archie’s guidance, Rudy built the twenty-five-foot chimney stack. While they were building the pottery, Rudy, Pete, and Kelly did their own work at night in a corner of the tile-drying shed. Pete made pots on the wheel while Rudy made hand-built sculptures by coiling shapes together. Until the new kilns were built, they fired their work
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R U D Y AUTIO
on top of the brick in the big beehive kilns, just as the Meloys had done earlier. That first summer at the Bray, Rudy and Pete shared a shack with Kelly behind the present pottery building. The following summer, 1952, after Rudy and Peter Voulkos finished graduate school, they returned to the Bray as resident artists. Rudy and Lela bought a small house in Helena, and Pete and Peggy Voulkos moved into an old chicken house behind the pottery. Although Archie paid Rudy and Pete a modest wage, money from the sale of their work was used to help support the pottery. Rudy and Pete and the other resident potters made work for the shop-gift
store items
such as planters, fruit bowls, and nut dishes-nothing
that could be called art. They
had barely enough money to live on, and Rudy says he still doesn’t know how Lela made do on his small salary. Lela and Peggy made enameled ashtrays for the shop and taught pottery classes. Lela found some of the customers and students difficult to deal with: A lot of rich people would come and look at
Lela Autio, 1952.
24
the stuff, but they would never buy anything, and that made it difficult. Sometimes the rich people would come and work there and then they’d leave and write letters and ask us to glaze all their stuff and send it on and send us a ten-dollar bill.
A t the Archie Bray
Rudy and Pete, Helena, Montana, 1953.
Lela continued to do her own work by painting in an attic studio of their little house, and she also painted sets for theater productions. Helena’s active arts community included painting, pottery, music, theater, and even ballet. There were parties with home brew, and guitar music played by Rudy, Pete, Peter Meloy, and the DeWeeses. Poor as they were, Rudy and Lela found Helena an interesting place to live.
Hamada, Leach, and Yanagi That fall, the first of many workshops held at the Bray, and probably the most famous, was given by Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada, and Soetsu Yanagi. Bernard Leach, who had been born in Hong Kong and had studied in japan, explained the philosophy of the humble
25
R U D Y AUTIO
potter whose roots were in the earth, and who found great satisfaction in the repeated making of pottery objects. Leach had philosophical support from Soetsu Yanagi. Yanagi, a visiting lecturer in Zen philosophy at Harvard, discussed the “thusness” of Korean wood turning-just pen-as Peter Voulkos, Rudy, and Pete Meloy watching Shoji Hamada‘s demonstration a t the Archie Bray, 1952.
letting it hap-
compared with Japanese
wood turning, which was so precise, so exact, and so perfectly
done that it lost its spirit. It was all a new experience for the native Montanans. For Rudy, who later confessed that he had some problems with Bernard Leach as a ”humble potter,”Yanagi’s lectures on Zen were liberating ideas. He thought Dr. Yanagi was “very interesting, insightful, an aesthetician. He talked about Zen. We had never, ever heard about Zen.” Although Rudy didn’t entirely accept this philosophy, he began to understand the way of thinking that is the essence of Zen. Hamada was a ”doer” whose workshop had a profound and lasting effect upon Rudy. Watching Hamada work was a great revelation; at this point in his life Rudy really didn’t think much about clay, it was just something you made nut dishes, knickknacks, and pottery dishes out of. But Rudy was especially impressed when Hamada demonstrated how to throw off the hump. Shoji could take a lump o f clay and throw a whole teapot set off
o f one lump o f clay, and we admired that ancient technique. Most o f all, though, I think that I began to discover that pottery making 26
A t the Archie Bray
Rudy watching Hamada trim a bowl. was not just a matter of throwing pots and selling them in the trade world, but from the way he handled things and examined them, turned them around, held them, and communicated with the work that he was doing, I began to sense that there was a kind of a spiritual connection to it, that it was more than just making a pot to make a few bucks on the sale.
To see someone like Hamada working with it was to infuse it with a spirit that was as good as anything that could happen in painting or drawing and fine arts. I could see that in Japanese eyes this was a very important, almost a spiritual kind of experience when they worked with clay. The economy of movement, everything that he did, the way he considered the piece before he painted on it. All of those things had great impact on me.
For a while Rudy even tried to throw like Hamada, and he believes that the experience made a lot of difference in the way he approached working with clay.
27
R U D Y AUTIO
Change in Leadership In the winter of 1953, as work continued on the arts center build-
ings, Archie was injured in the brickyard. Then he developed pneumonia and other complications. Two weeks later his son, Archie Jr., came to see Rudy in the drying shed where he was pressing clay, and
told him ”The old man i s gone.” Rudy was stunned. For a while, it looked as though the foundation would be buried with Archie. But then, according to Senska and Douglas
(I 993), ”Archie Bray, Jr., who took over the management of the brickyard, kept it up at the insistence of his mother and sister. The brickyard continued to absorb the overhead.” Rudy remembers the relief he felt: Archie Jr., whom we all felt was against all this foolishness in the brickyard-pottery, bohemians, artists, and everything else we stood forsaid he wanted to carry on the work his dad had started, and told me he wanted me and Pete to stay as long as we wanted-to Archie Bray, 1952.
carry on
the work of the Archie Bray Foundation. It seemed that we’d just gotten things going. Things looked pretty gloomy. As I look back on that day, it’s possible that if Archie hadn’t died, things may not have continued.
With the future of the Bray assured, other workshops followed that of Hamada, Leach, and Yanagi. Among the visitors were Rex Mason, a potter from San Francisco; Marguerite Wildenhain, also from California, and one of Frances Senska’s teachers, who drew an
28
A t t h e Archie B r a y
enormous crowd; and Tony Prieto, who taught at Mills College. There were many others, and Rudy learned from them all. H e says that Tony Prieto was full of hell, and taught me a lot of things about firing and glaze application as well as surface decoration. He communicated ideas about his contact with Artigas, the Spanish potter, and Mir6, who was starting to work with clay. Tony would periodically visit them in Spain.
Rudy learned a great deal about high-temperature glazes from Carlton Ball who worked at the Bray one summer on a Ford Foundation grant. Rudy thought Carlton was a great guy: He could throw very well; he taught us a lot of wonderful, simple things about glazes-you can do this, add feldspar to this; a lot of wonderful simple things to do with materials. / think
I learned from him that there was a sense of
Three 21 in. X 14 in. X 14 in.
experimenting, and trying, and testing and all kinds of things that are importantly related to anyone working in clay. Carlton taught us that. He was verygenerous with his information, no secretiveness like a lot of potters.
Working on a Bigger Scale Aside from the production work Rudy did for the shop, most of his work at the Bray was sculptural. Examples include Three Musicians and his large, salt-glazed bust, Archie Bray, now installed in Robert Harrison’s Potters’ Shrine on the grounds of the Archie Bray Foundation. The bust was fired in a salt firing on top of the bricks in the brick kiln.
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Rudy also had begun to make smal I, decorative architectural pieces, such as plaques, that the brickyard gave away with orders for brick. Many of these plaques were designed for fireplaces; others, designed for a kindergarten, were based on fairy tales and nursery rhymes. Rudy’s plaques with various decorative motifs were shipped all over Montana. He even created a bison skull and recreated Charlie Russell’s signature on a plaque he made for the C.M. Russell Gallery in Great Falls. He remembers, ”The bison’s skull was an idea foisted on me by Branson Stevenson. I hated it, but finally made the damned thing.” He had had problems; his clay was full of grog and difficult to work with, and he made about fifteen attempts-pound-
ing about fifteen molds-before
he finally patched one together.
One of Rudy’s earliest large architectural commissions was done in 1953 for the south face of the Liberal Arts Building at the University of Montana. This large, circular, terra cotta medallion has a relief of a Native American writing on a skin. Archie, Jr. asked Rudy to design the medallion using traditional terra cotta techniques. These techniques would serve Rudy well in his later work, First, he created a design showing a Native American intent upon writing. Then. he made the medallion in plaster and cast it some n ne and a half feet in diameter, to allow for shrinkage to the finished size of eight feet. Then Rudy divided the medallion into twenty-four sections and cast a negative mold of each section. Next, he pounded clay into these press molds. Rudy removed the clay when it was leather-hard by inverting the molds onto plywood bats. Finally, he touched up the sections and smoothed them with a trowel. Peter Voulkos helped develop colors and glazes for the piece, which is still in place on the university campus at Missoula. Through his work at the brickyard, Rudy developed a technique
30
A t the Archie Bray
Medallion, Liberal Arts building, University of Montana, 1953.
that he was to use again and again. He noticed that one method of making decorative brick was to carve fired brick, and he wondered why the technique couldn't be used with unfired brick. So he removed some of the cutting wires from the brick-cutting machine so that he could make large blocks rather than individual bricks. He used this technique to make a large relief, Sermon on the Mount, ten feet tall and thirty feet wide, which he designed for the First Methodist Church in Great Falls, Montana in 1954. Unfired bricks of clay measuring 3 '12 in. by 8 in. by 9 in. were set on easels that leaned just enough to keep them in place. After carving the blocks,
31
R U D Y AUTIO
Sermon on the Mount, 1954. Carved-brick relief, 10 ft. x 30 ft., First Methodist Church, Great Falls, Montana.
Rudy stained them by rubbing iron oxide into them and, after they dried, sprayed them with borax to seal the stain. Next the blocks were numbered for placement on the wall, fired in the brick kilns at the brickyard, and installed at the church by brick masons. Christ is portrayed preaching to the multitudes with His arms outstretched, and a self-portrait of the artist can be seen in front. Several of Rudy’s
32
A t the Archie B r a y
friends also can be seen in the crowd, including Peter Voulkos and CyriI Conrad, Rudy’s advisor at Bozeman. The carved figures are blocky, echoing the form of the brick, and giving a linear feeling that carried a swinging movement across the thirty-foot wall it covered. Both Rudy and Peter Voulkos had been experimenting with new techniques, and they each entered work in the Eighth National Wichita Decorative Arts-Ceramic
Exhibition. Rudy’s ceramic
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R U D Y AUTIO
Bird and Egg, early 1950s.Stoneware, 13 in. x 23% in. x 9% in.
sculpture, Bird and Egg, is pictured in Ceramics Monthly on page 19 of its July 1953 issue. Pete took first prize for a brown- and grayflecked tureen with wax-resist decoration pictured on the facing page of the same issue. Pete had made wax resist very popular with potters at the Bray after Branson Stevenson brought them a new liquid wax emulsion that made the process very easy. Rudy tried
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A t i-he A r c h i e B r a y
the technique on a few pots, and took full advantage of it in a large repeat motif wall mural he designed for the C.M. Russell Gallery in Great Falls in 1957. The committee rejected Rudy’s original proposal, a wall of running horses. Rudy then designed a mural sixteen feet tall by thirty feet wide, based on a stone with Native American pictographic writing. The pattern on the stone is thought to be a maze meant to confuse evil spirits, to keep them from finding burial grounds in eastern Montana. The overall pattern of this work is a checkerboard with tiles alternating in black and natural terra cotta. He scratched in the line drawing, and inlaid the design in white engobe, using the new wax-resist process. Rudy then fired the hollow construction tiles to cone one in the brickyard kilns. For Peter Voulkos, the year
1953 was a turning point. His
Mural, 1957. Glazed a n d unglazed terra cotta, 16 ft. X 30 ft. C.M. Russell Gallery, Great Falls, Montana.
35
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work had begun to change shortly after he returned from giving a three-week summer workshop at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. At Black Mountain, Pete ”acquired a fresh outlook on art and an attitude toward experimentation that were to release his own adventurous spirit and fierce energies” (Slivka and Tsujimoto 1995: 37). After Black Mountain, he visited New York, and was exposed to
the heady atmosphere of Abstract Expressionism. His classical pots of the early fifties were now replaced by large, dramatically shaped and dramatically made forms-forms
that were torn, flattened, com-
bined, and recombined. He returned to the Bray at the end of the summer but spent only a few more months there. When Pete was offered an opportunity to set up a new ceramics department at the
Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, he and Peggy and their young daughter, Pier, left Helena and the Bray in August 1954. Rudy was kept busy with architectural commissions. In 1955 he designed a large (eighteen feet by thirty feet) carved brick, terra cotta wall relief, Christ and the Disciples, for the Hope Lutheran Church,
in Anaconda, Montana. Rudy felt that the project had lost some of its integrity because it was separated by a glass wall. That same year, he made a series of stoneware reliefs, Fourteen Stations ofthe Cross, for Saint Gabriel’s Catholic Church, in Chinook, Montana. This series of partly glazed, 20 in.-square, stoneware reliefs, shows Christ’s journey to the cross. As part of this commission Rudy also made a relief of the Crucifixion for the central altar area. In 1956, Rudy was asked to create a relief for an exterior wall of the Glacier County Library in Cutbank, Montana. He made a terra cotta relief twelve feet high and four feet wide, partly glazed in
36
A t the Archie B r a y
white, turquoise, and light blue, along with the natural terra cotta tiles. For the design, Rudy chose animals symbolizing three periods in the history of the lands of the Blackfeet: a bison to symbolize prehistory, a horse for exploration, and an ox for the early settlement of the west. Contours of the hollow, hand-built sections of the relief follow the curves of the animals’ figures. Rudy was to use this technique to emphasize important lines and curves in his compositions again and again in later reliefs and wall murals. Although Rudy spent most of his time on large commissions or clay sculpture, he continued to make a few pots for sale in the shop. Lela continued to paint at home, but
she also was at the Bray much of the time teaching classes and making enameled ware. Interesting people came to the pottery all the time-as
students, as residents, to give
demonstrations and workshops and, of course, to buy its ceramics.
The Montana Historical Society Museum Except for his architectural commissions, Rudy did not earn very much at the brickyard. Fortunately, just when he needed money
Exterior Wall Relief, 1956. Glazed terra cotta, 12 ft. x 4 ft. Glacier County Library, Cutba nk, Mont a na.
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for a new car, he found temporary work. The Montana Historical Society, one of the institutions that contributed to the teeming cultural activity in Helena, had built a new museum building on the grounds of the State Capitol and had hired K. Ross Toole as its director. Toole was young, energetic, and ambitious. In his first three years at the museum, while finishing his doctoral dissertation in history at U.C.L.A., Toole began to implement his plans for the museum. These included permanent exhibits with dioramas depicting the development of the West. For these Toole needed artists. Peter Meloy, a volunteer director of the museum, was in a position to make recommendations, so he introduced Toole to Rudy. Meeting Toole solved Rudy’s immediate financial crisis, and was to have
Iong-term importance. Toole hired several other artists, including Gardell Christiansen, Robert DeWeese, Shorty Shope, Clarence Zuehlke, and JohnWeaver. With help from the museum staff, these artists and craftsmen made most of the dioramas in the museum. JohnWeaver, a sculptor who had studied at the Chicago Art Institute, was the son of “Pop” Weaver, Rudy’s high-school art teacher. Rudy remembers that Weaver had an uncanny ability to cast plaster into all kinds of unbelievable objects-horses,
cars, figures-so
he also began to
make a series of dioramas based on the oil industry, which donated funds for the making of their series of exhibition cases.
Gardell Christiansen created a dramatic and very popular exhibit of a bison drive that showed bison being driven over a cliff, hanging in mid-air, and falling, as Native American hunters chased them to their deaths. The fact that none of the suspension wires could be seen added to the effect. Christiansen also made, fired, and painted
38
At the Archie Bray
several terra cotta figures at the Bray to use for dioramas of Native American costume and related exhibits. Rudy was assigned the task of making a large Lewis and Clark diorama. Toole wanted him to illustrate the expedition on the day in
1805 when Lewis set out to discover a route to the Pacific while Clark was left behind with a larger group to reconnoiter the headwaters of the Missouri. Rudy was no expert on dioramas. In fact, I’d never even heard of them. The dioramas he had in mind were exhibits showing bucking broncos, wild buffalo exhibits, scenes from Virginia City-small
accurate models of buildings-a
kind of childlike fantasyland with exhibits of various kinds. I had no skills along these lines, but I was confident I could model
Lewis and Clark diorama, 1954. Mixed media, 7 ft. X 10 ft. x 9 ft. Montana State Historical Society Museum, Helena, Montana.
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R U D Y AUTIO
figures. After looking at the painful efforts of some of the artists Ross had hired earlier, I knew it wouldn’t be difficult, so I modeled
some sample studies. Ross loved the studies and his staff was joyous. Here was an artist who could create the figures they needed.
The historical society did the research for Rudy, who took leave from the Bray for the project. H e began by developing the figures from beeswax. They started to take shape at home where he could keep the beeswax warm and malleable on the kitchen stove. For weeks afterward, Lela worked to get the stove burners unclogged. Rudy later switched to petroleum wax, which was easier to model than beeswax and didn’t crystallize or become moldy. He constructed the figures over wire armatures, which made them rigid enough to place into
position in the exhibit. In addition to modeling the figures with authentic costumes, Rudy had to paint the diorama, model its landscape, and fill it with figures, canoes, tents, camping gear-the
works.
He did a great deal of improvising to build ground forms, rivers, and canoes, and to find indigenous grasses and colorful material typical of the site on the Beaverhead. Muriel Guest from the Bray and Bob Morgan helped him with some of the basic work. Morgan was a sign painter and exhibits designer who later became a popular wildlife artist. Les Peters, also a wildlife painter who had a good sense of the western landscape, painted the background, successfully merging it
with the foreground and the three-dimensional figures. People began to drop by to watch the progress of the work. Once the figures of the Lewis and Clark expedition were finished and painted, they were put into place in the exhibit. When the exhibit was finally finished, it was seven feet high, ten feet wide, and nine feet deep. Rudy describes the scene, which depicted
40
At t h e A r c h i e B r a y
Captain Clark taking a compass reading as he waves farewell to a group of three men in the middle distance. Sergeant York, Clark’s manservant, held a map of the area beside him. Sacagawea, with her papoose on her back, sat cross-legged on the slope near the hunter who was carrying into camp a deer he shot that morning. In the middle distance the party of three-Lewis, Charbonno, with Scanlon, the Labrador dog-were
Shannon, and setting out to
find the Shoshones. Under a small hummock in the foreground I made a little mouse for my daughter Lisa, who couldn’t see above the sill, being only three years old at the time, but it was for her and the other little kids to look at.
Rudy had been happy working at the museum, but his work was finished. He went back to the Bray where he found that things had not been going well. The new tunnel kiln at the brickyard was a disaster, and Archie Jr. was losing money. He and Rudy had had an understanding that they would split any net profit from the pottery at the end of the year. Rudy’s books showed a profit of $3,000, but the bookkeeper’s records of the pottery’s accounts showed a loss. When the discrepancy was discovered, the bookkeeper was fired. Rudy began to think about moving. His family was always on the edge of financial disaster, and he was desperate. He didn’t know where to turn.
Leaving the Bray Petervoulkos had urged Rudy to come to California to make architectural ceramics, so Rudy finally wrote to Pete to say he was coming. pete was becoming increasingly well known and successful in California, and Rudy wanted to get in on the good life too. So, one bitterly cold day in the winter of 1956-57, Rudy kissed Lela and his children goodbye, promised to send money as soon as he could, and set off for California in his rickety old truck. He moved in with
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Pete and Peggy Voulkos and ”tried not to eat too much” while he looked for a job. For Rudy, California was no promised land. He found a part-time job in Whittier setting bricks into kilns at the Advanced Kiln Company for a friend, Mike Kalan. Meanwhile he continued to search for a way to work at his art. He made some designs for stained-glass windows for a synagogue, but they weren’t accepted. He sat in line with many other artists, trying to make connections with architects. He had sample photos of his carved-brick reliefs, and some designers expressed interest, but Rudy couldn’t afford to leave a portfolio. Engineers at a plant in Pasadena interviewed him and offered him a job doing their lab work, but he seemed to be getting farther and farther away from art. Another job prospect was being a foreman in a ceramic plant, supervising the manufacture of electrical parts. Rudy turned it down: ’’I don’t think I would’ve made a good foreman.’’
The last straw came one day as Rudy was turning off the freeway exit to Whittier on his way to the Advanced Kiln Company: A motorcycle cop pulled me over just to inspect my poor old 794 7 pickup truck. Everything worked on it, thank God-wipers, brakes-but
it was an old truck that didn’t have turn signals. I got
a warning to take it to a state traffic inspector for a check. This was
the end. I was homesick. I missed my kids. I had no money. I called Ross Toole and asked him for a job at the Historical Society.
Ross said, “Come on home.” He wired me a hundred dollars. So I drove home and ended my big California adventure.
Meanwhile back in Helena, Lela was having her own problems: It was a horrible winter, and all the pipes froze and it was about fifty below, and the kids got chickenpox and measles, and my dad had to come and help us because we were having such a horrible time.
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A t t h e Archie B r a y
Rudy rejoined the museum in Helens as an assistant curator, although the position was only part-time and temporary. Rudy had given the brickyard notice before he went to California, so he decided to work freelance from his own studio, but in cooperation with the brickyard. Archie Jr. agreed to the idea. One of Rudy’s college roommates at Bozeman, Harold Godtland, who had become an architect, asked him to design a carved-brick relief, Christ Surrounded by
Children, for the Gold Hill Lutheran Church in Butte. Working at home, Rudy made a carved plaster model to present to the committee. He envisioned a monumental figure of Christ facing the children as He blessed them, with the figures concentrated into the shape of a cross, and framed by areas of glazed tiles at the corners. It took several weeks and many studies, but he received the commission. Rudy used unfired clay blocks for the project and rubbed iron oxide and rutile stain into them after they were carved in order to highlight the carving. The relief was then partly glazed with borax and fired to cone one in the brick kilns. Rudy thought it was a perfect
job technically. The blocks had fired well in the brick kilns at the Bray, and the glaze also had worked well. One of Rudy’s friends from the museum staff, Clarence Zuehlke, went to Butte to help him install the sixteen- by eighteen-foot relief on an exterior wall of the church’s educational wing. The shape fit the space exactly as planned. The Gold Hill relief was Rudy’s last architectural project while he and his family lived in Helena. With no new projects or commissions in
sight, Rudy once again began to look for a teaching position for the fall of 1957. Once again, Ross Toole came to the rescue.
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Christ Surrounded by Children, 1956. Carved brick, 16 ft. Lutheran Church, Butte, Montana.
44
X
18 ft., Gold Hill
At t h e A r c h i e B r a y
Car1 McFarland, president of the University of Montana, was
looking for someone to start a ceramics program, and he asked Ross Toole if he knew a good potter. Toole answered that he knew “the best one in the whole world” (Pietala, 1977: A2). Car1 McFarland remembered Rudy from his days at the Bray, four years earlier, when he had chosen Rudy’s design for the medallion for the Liberal Arts Building at the university. Now McFarland thought that Rudy could start a ceramics department, teach, and also add ceramic decora-
tions to some of the other campus buildings, starting with studies for the Main Hall, and the old science building; later, possibly, he might
do some terra cotta murals for the planetarium based on Native American star legends. McFarland offered Rudy the rank of Instructor at Missoula with a starting salary of $550 a month. Rudy accepted, not realizing that the way he had been recruited was extremely irregular: McFarland had circumvented all the written and unwritten rules and rituals of academic hiring practice. Little wonder that the Art Department faculty was cool to Rudy when he arrived, and for a long time afterward.
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Detail, Early Days a t Last Chance Gulch.
46
Teaching and Making Art in Missoda hen Rudy arrived in Missoula to prepare for the
1957 academic year, he was given space to set up the ceramics program in an old army barracks at the edge of campus. These were cramped quarters for a pottery, but he managed to lay out a workshop with sinks, a glaze room, and a
kiln room. Equipping the facility was another problem. Rudy found some burnt-out electric kilns in the basement and replaced the elements. The chairman of the art department, Walter Hook, contributed a kick wheel he had made, and Rudy built others with the help of a machinist he had met-downtown. Rudy found a used dough mixer at a bakery to mix clay, and he made plaster wedging tables. The university’s physical plant director, Marcus Bourke, found a variety of war-surplus objects for use in the new studio-large
glaze vats,
stirring spoons, screens, cooking vessels, and other items. Finally, Rudy drove around until he found native clay near a brickyard out
by the airport. H e tested it, and it seemed to work. The ceramics department began to take shape. Rudy also was able to buy a large new gas updraft kiln with a guillotine door at cost from his old friend, Mike Kalan, who had given him a job in Whittier. The new
kiln didn’t arrive until the spring of 1958; the first time it was fired,
a burner burned out, and everything stopped until it was fixed. It was an experimental burner, a perimeter burner made of square tubing with holes drilled through it, and the heat of the kiln had eroded it during the first firing. Rudy wrote to M i k e and said, ”This isn’t going to work.” After M i k e wrote back with instructions, Rudy installed new perimeter burners of the traditional type. The kiln then worked so well that it
i s still i n use at the school Rudy a t t h e n e w kiln i n t h e University of Montana’s Ceramics Department, spring 1958.
after having been rebuilt many times.
Teaching Even before the new ceramics facilities were ready, Rudy started teaching. H e took his new responsibilities very seriously, making lesson plans and working many long hours to get the program started. The first year was difficult, as he found himself trying to teach ceramics without a room and no clay, kilns that didn’t work, and a class of interested adult students eagerly waiting for information:
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T e a c h i n g a n d M a k i n g A r t in M i s s o u l a
Undaunted, I started to teach them glaze theory and calculation, about which I knew next to nothing. I was paralyzed with stage fright, and I often wonder what exactly did the students so copiously write in their workbooks those first few days when I babbled about empirical formulas and batch recipes!
One day when Rudy was trying to teach glaze formulation, a
physics student sitting in on his class spoke up and said, “Well, Rudy, your molecular theory isn’t quite right in there; you don’t get the right atomic weights, so your equivalent weights would be something else, so I don’t see how you get that figure.” Rudy replied that he didn’t “know a goddamned thing about this stuff, but here’s a glaze formula-make
it like you make a cake recipe, and you’ll
make a liquid out of it, put it on your pot, and it’ll work just fine.”
He adds that “It was the most humbling experience I’ve ever had, when I tried to teach glaze formulation. I never did it afterwards. So much for that.” American ceramics artist Kenneth Ferguson frequently quotes his own teacher, Wesley Mills, who once said, “Teaching art is like teaching gym without a whistle.” But Rudy didn’t seem to need a whistle; soon he began to gain momentum: Brimming with ideas as my confidence grew, I’d run to the blackboard, sketch ideas quickly, and turn to new ideas and solutions all around me. I taught everyone who got in my way-special students, grad students, everybody It didn’t make any difference.
I was a college instructor now. 1 taught them everything I knew, and I never seemed to run out of projects for the students to do. My mind bubbled over. The students liked my enthusiasm, I think, and I was able to turn to my main interest of ceramics.
His own work was not neglected: Rudy worked along with the students. He and his students were so productive, and were making
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R U D Y AUTIO
Rudy with some of his pots in 1962.
such large pieces, that they constantly ran out of clay. They managed to augment the supply with local clay and river sand. These were
mixed with a micaceous Lincoln fireclay and Kentucky Ball Clay. Rudy added straw to the mixture to make a sculptural claybody that had excellent drying properties and made the sculptures tough enough to handle through all stages of forming and drying. This new claybody was so rough that it would cut anyone’s hands who tried to
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Teaching a n d Making A r t in Missoula
throw pots with it. Peter Voulkos called ‘it a “real Zen-type clay,” but the students did not seem to realize that they were using a very unusual mixture. Rudy encouraged his students to enter their work in regional and national exhibitions. By the early 196Os, he and the Ceramics Department were gaining national reputations, and the quality of his students’ work was attracting undergraduate majors and graduate students to the department from all over the country. At the same time, many of the department’s undergraduate students from Montana were art education majors who planned to become elementary or high-school art teachers. So, Rudy was given the job of teaching art education, too: I was the only one on the whole staff who had teaching credentials; I had earned them at Montana State many years ago, but they were still effective. They looked at my credentials and figured
I could teach art education. I taught it badly, but I did teach.
In an interview thitty years later, Rudy said that he had often regretted that these art education students had such a limited time to study ceramics-not
enough time to learn about glaze chemistry,
claybodies, and everything else he felt was essential for a ceramics student to know. There just was not enough time, he said, for these students to acquire a devotion to or a good understanding of ceramics: I just was able to give them a skeletal knowledge of what they could do in a classroom, and then hoped they continued to get the necessary technical information on materials and equipment from good, reputable suppliers. I wish our K-72 art teachers had the time to develop a commitment to clay so they could pass it along to their students [Gamble, 1995: 461.
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Some students in Rudy’s art education classes were graduate students working toward certification, and among these was Lela.
She had gone back to school in 1959, two years after the family moved to Missoula. Although she had a bachelor’s degree from Bozeman, she knew that if she ever decided to teach she would need a teaching certificate as well. She was required to take a class from Rudy, which she found to be very strange, but she recalls that it “worked out okay, after a few blowups.” Despite having to contend with Rudy as her ceramics instructor, Lela finished graduate school and later taught art in Missoula’s high schools for many years.
Ways of Working Early in his teaching career, Rudy’s approach was quite structured. He gave the students a reading list, and he took roll call so that he could learn the students’ names. Rudy’s philosophy of teaching included seeing that his students had ”good coffee and a clean wedging table. From there on, you let things happen.” He tried to teach the fundamentals: He showed students how to wedge clay, did handbuilding demonstrations, and showed them how to coil pots. Even though Rudy’s own specialty was handbuilding, he thought the best way for students to start was to try to throw some pots, so
he taught them how to make a 16-inch cylinder. After their pieces dried and were bisqued, he would show them how to decorate and glaze them. When beginning students saw their first finished work come out of the kiln, he recalls, ”Some of them became completely wild about the whole thing, and the good ones would come to work
all the time. They’d be in that studio, and pretty soon it would get to be a problem because the watchman would come by and say 52
Teaching a n d Making A r t in Missoula
”We’ve got to get these people out of here, it’s midnight.” That didn’t sit well with Rudy. He would say “NO, they’re here because they’re firing kilns, and they have to stay here.” So he would give them a key: ”We’d hide the key, and pretty soon everybody in the world knew where that key was.” The students would let themselves in and work whenever they wanted to. Some even began to live in the studios, and in retrospect Rudy thinks he should have drawn the line before the students began ”sleeping there, and eating there, cooking on a hot plate, building themselves little shacks. Well, that was
Iater.” In addition to learning how to make and decorate a pot, Rudy thought that by the time his students finished the beginners’ program, they should know how to mix clay and fire the kiln. After that, he says, ”It was a matter of getting better at what you do.” Rudy tried to teach his advanced classes, including the graduate students, on a one-to-one basis. He enjoyed working with them: ”Build it up a little higher.” ”Let’s see you make it a little bigger.” ”What you’re doing here is promising, but it hasn’t arrived yet.” ”That’s coming along.” ”Don’t build it too thick. Build it thinner.” “Here’s how you do that kind of handbuilding.” Some of his earliest graduate students wanted to do architectural projects for their master’s theses, and Rudy worried that he had excessively influenced their directions. Harrington (1979: 103) discussed the work of some of these students. The early work in the 7960s was characterized by its large scale and rough-slab or combination slab and wheel-thrown construction, sometimes with a moderate use of colored glazes, and very close in feeling to Autio’s work. Examples of such artists are James
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Stephenson, Leonard Stach, Brian Persha, and Martin Holt, who staggered the viewers of the Northwest Craftsmen‘s Exhibitions of
7 965 and 7 967 with their entries of large, freely formed vases and other containers, all with a definite Abstract Expressionist bent.
Yet Rudy did not believe in turning out a lot of “little Autios.” In
his reply to a survey by the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts in 1980, he stated that his program “emphasized individual expression in ceramic art with encouragement of students to develop their own concerns in terms of contemporary expression in ceramic art.” Rudy’s graduate students learned a philosophy of teaching and a way of working. This “way of working” did lean toward Rudy’s techniques; indeed, some of his students suggested putting boards over the wheels so that they could use the space for handbuilding. One of his students, David DonTigny, says that ”Every time he demonstrated, I’d learn something: I still do, even now.” Doug Baldwin remembers “a lot of energy in the ceramics area; it was a happy studio, with lots of laughter. Rudy kept the ceramic studio quiet, calm, and free from tension.” Rudy’s students remember him and their days in his classes with affection. Many have kept in touch with him, some for more than forty years. Rudy exposed his students to many other influences and ideas, and he brought slides into class to show what other ceramics artists in other places were doing. When he showed slides of Jim Melchert’s work, it was the first time many of his students had seen such bright colors on ceramics. There were workshops with visiting artists, and seminars with faculty visiting from other departments, including poets and philosophers. Peter Voulkos came to give workshops in both ceramics and sculpture during the summers of 1958
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Teaching a n d M a k i n g A r t in Missoula
and 1959, and was a frequent visitor in later years. When Pete was there, there was such an electric atmosphere in the pottery barracks that it was almost like old times at the Bray.
The students also were influenced by other faculty in the Art Department, including Henry Takemoto in ceramics, and Rudy Turk, who taught art history. When Rudy Turk left in 1959, he was suc-
ceeded by Jim Leedy, a painter with an M.A. in art history from Michigan State University. Jim’s responsibilities were in art history, but he did a little of everything: Every night he would do a little painting, and every few weeks, would produce a number of large, exciting, and important canvases-colorful,
dynamic, linear paint-
ings. The students would join him. He taught them how to mix their own colors and paints so they wouldn’t have to be so frugal. Abstract Expressionism was in the air, and paint was thrown around-literally.
Rudy recalls the day he invited Jim Leedy over
to the clay department ”to make some stuff:’’ He came over and started to throw stuff on the wheel and make some sad little thrown pieces. Then he noticed we were having a
lot of fun doing “bentware” so he took to that like a fish to water and did some pretty interesting things while he was there.
Everyone usually worked for ten or twelve hours a day making art, and would then talk about art long into the night over beers in the bars on Woody Street.
Making Ceramics By the spring of 1959, when Rudy had a show of his work on the
first floor of the university’s art building, his work had begun to change. There were a few pots, but most of the pieces in the show
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Henry Takemoto in the ceramics studio, University of Montana, ca. 1963.
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were abstract sculptures, but even these still had a strong reference to pottery. Rudy had carved many of these pieces from leather-hard clay, just as he had carved the bricks at the Bray. This technique reflected the cubist influence of the California School. Taken as a whole, the work in the show was dark and somber, with heavy iron browns. Rudy thought he could have used brighter colors in his work, especially on some of the smaller pieces. The first large project Rudy undertook after he moved to the university was a 1959 commission to make a ceramic-tile mural for Helena’s Union Bank and Trust Company (which later became the Norwest Bank and then the Wells Fargo Bank). The location of the bank, Last Chance Gulch, had been the site of gold-mining activity during the nineteenth century. Early Days in Last Chance Gulch was to be a mural six and a half feet tall and seventy feet long, and would be placed on the wall behind the tellers’ counter. Shortly before he received the commission, Rudy had seen a documentary film about gold mining in theYukon, and he wanted to develop a similar mood in the bank mural. He wanted to show miners, claimjumpers, prostitutes, gamblers, teamsters, prospectors, merchants, freighters, horses, wagons, and anyone and anything else one might associate with early mining Once his design was approved, Rudy set up easels in a shed behind the barracks on campus for laying out the relief in clay. He hired an assistant to help him mix the clay, throw it against the easels, spread it evenly, and trace the cartoons over its length. He built the mural in eighteen sections that would cover the length of the room and reach nearly to its ceiling height of eight feet. First he
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carved the tiles in relief, about one and a half inches thick, using engobes for color. H e then glazed the panels with lead glaze and fired them to cone five. The unique properties of the Lincoln Fireclay caused a greenish-gold color to dominate the work when it was fired, but the mural also has shades of blue, deep browns and black, as well as the white and natural buff tones of the clay. After the tile panels were taken down from the easels and fired, Rudy had to join them. He attached each panel to heavy plywood
with mastic cement, metal staples, screws, and nails. The panels were then ready to move to the bank and be hung in place. But Rudy discovered that ”There are things you don’t expect at the time when you start doing things like this.” For example he wondered, ”How am I going to get it over there? It must weigh tons.’’ In fact, each panel weighed about six hundred pounds before being crated. In order to pack the heavy sections into wooden crates to transport them to the bank in Helena, Rudy found he had to devise some kind of a jig. He had made the mural so that each section could be dragged into the next one by means of a winch. So he built a narrow track and slid each finished panel along it onto a wooden board that would become the base of a crate, sort of a framework: So it slid onto that, and then I was able to attach the rest of the parts of the crate, and I could crate it right there. Once the crate was done, and all the screws were driven, then I could lift it up and on rollers. With some help I was able to move it into the truck. Crated, they weighed about eight hundred pounds each. It was a massive j o b of moving, but like the Egyptians moved on rollers, that’s the way we did it. Eventually we got all of these huge crates loaded into this special truck. Finally, the panels could be moved to the bank and hung in place.
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Teaching a n d Making A r t in Missoula
A section of the mural, Early Days in Last Chance Gulch, in the crating jig Rudy built for the purpose.
Two years later, in 1961, Rudy was asked to make three reliefs to
fill niches in the front exterior wall of Montana State University’s Library in Bozeman. This time he built the project on the floor, forming the panels in high relief, with the highest points projecting fourteen to sixteen inches from the background plane. The reliefs were
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Early Days in Last Chance Gulch, 1959. Stoneware tile mural, 6%ft. X 70 ft., Wells Fargo Bank, Helena, Montana.
ten feet tall and five feet wide and were made in the form of trees to symbolize the three branches of learning-the
social sciences, the
sciences, and the humanities, each one characterized by variations
in the design. Rudy painted the negative areas with light blue and white engobe, applied a thin lead glaze over all the parts, and fired them to cone five. Rudy had asked to be advised when the mason would install the reliefs in the library, but a few days later he learned that they were 60
r e a c h i n g a n d M a k i n g A r t in Missoula
Library Relief, 1961. Ceramic t i le, 10 ft. x 5 ft. Montana State University Library, Bozeman.
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already in place. He had specified that a border of brick be set next to the casing of the niche so that the jointing would be minimal, no larger than a half-inch in thickness. But this wasn’t done, and the mason had put in mortar joints more than two inches thick. Rudy was disappointed, feeling that the sensitive balance and subtle relationships he’d worked for several months to achieve had been lost. The summer of 1963 was busy. Rudy’s youngest son, Christofer was born, and as Saint Anthony’s Catholic Church was being built in Missoula, Rudy was asked to submit designs for the main niche on its exterior faqade. The monsignor selected a drawing of Saint Anthony holding the Christ Child from the several studies Rudy submitted, but wanted Rudy to remove Saint Anthony’s beard: “Saint Anthony didn’t have a beard,” he told Rudy. Rudy wanted the commission, so he took it off. Rudy’s oldest son, Arne, then fourteen, spent his school vacation helping his father with the project. The two worked in a rented chicken coop in east Missoula where Rudy could lay out the work on the floor. They built the sections in high relief, contoured to fit
the compositional line and design of the image. By handbuilding two sections a day, they completed the work in record time. Rudy painted the negative areas of the composition with engobes in a variety of colors-blues,
greens, white, and earth tones-then
applied lead glaze over the completed relief and fired the sections to cone five. He fired it too quickly, and some of the pieces cracked, but somehow it worked. When finished and installed, the vertical relief was thirty feet tall and five feet wide.
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Teaching a n d M a k i n g A r t in Missoula
Saint Anthony and the Christ Child, 1963. Ceramic tile relief, 30 ft. X 5 ft. Saint Anthony's Cathol ic Church, Missoula, Montana.
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“A New Bronze Culture” Meanwhile, Rudy’s old friend, Peter Voulkos, together with some of
his friends and students, had been working in bronze in a large studio Pete had equipped for the purpose in Berkeley. These facilities
have been described by Slivka and Tsujimoto (1995: 52): Donald Haskin, an experienced art foundryman, and sculptor Harold Persico Paris joined the faculty of Berkeley’s art department. With Voulkos, they started the “Garbanzo Works” in a small rented corner of the Engineered Alloy Foundry in Berkeley. The trio built their own furnace with a crucible of 7 90-pound capacity. They spent the first year experimenting with wax formulas,
molds, and burnout materials. They cast anything and everything that could be cast into molds and then burned out-chairs, branches, rope, paper napkins-and
tree
they learned. The foundry
and its fiery moment of the white-hot pour became the center of a new bronze culture.
Rudy had wanted to learn bronze casting ever since he had been an undergraduate at Bozeman. So, during the Christmas holiday break of 1962, Rudy went to visit Pete to learn about bronze casting. Rudy and the others in Pete’s studio used slabs of wax to model their sculptures, made plaster and vermiculite molds from the wax originals, and melted out the wax in the ceramic kiln before pouring the bronze. They worked and partied until late into the night.
The bronze technology Rudy took back to Missoula was one of very simple, very direct techniques, using vacuum-cleaner blowers
and furnaces made from used oil drums lined with firebrick. Rudy was soon casting bronze with his students back in Montana. Not until he was back on campus did he learn how dangerous bronze casting could be: With no better foundry facilities, they had 64
T e a c h i n g a n d M a k i n g A r t in Missoula
Rudy pouring bronze, outside the barracks on campus.
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RUDY AUTIO
to pour outdoors. One cold day, they were working in the snow when a bronze melt blew up. The hot metal spattered on Rudy, badly burning his hands; another spatter hit his forehead, just missing his eyes. Because bronze is so labor-intensive, and because of
this experience, Rudy eventually lost interest in bronze and went back to clay.
The Fighting Grizzlies Soon after Rudy began to work in bronze, he was asked to cast a series of small ”fighting grizzlies” for the university to use as a symbol of its newly organized Council of Fifty, or Order of the Grizzlies. These small bronze sculptures were to be presented to prominent University of Montana alumnae in New York and San Francisco and elsewhere in order to raise funds for the university. One evening, a few years later, Rudy and Robert Pantzer, then president of the university, were up at theTop of the Mark in San Francisco after a meeting, “enjoying what was left of a very good evening,” as Rudy recalls. In the course of the conversation, Pantzer asked Rudy if he would make a life-sized bronze grizzly for the campus oval. Rudy replied ”Hell yes! 1’11 do it,” with an enthusiasm that he shortly lost. Thus began ”a whole year of grief” for Rudy. When he agreed to the project he also took the opportunity to acquire an abandoned hockey rink for his department, volunteering to personally do the little renovation the space needed. Later, Rudy admitted that he didn’t even know what a grizzly bear looked like when he started to make studies for the campus sculpture:
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T e a c h i n g a n d M a k i n g A r t i n Missoula
Every bear I looked at, every bear was different. Bears don’t look alike; you see one, it’s very different from the next bear, and the next bear is very different from the one I looked at before. The only real bears I ever saw were the ones in the Kansas City Zoo. I went down to see Jimmy Leedy, and we went over to the zoo. One bear was very skinny; he looked like a poor old scruffy dog. H e didn’t have any hair at all. The next grizzly bear was real fluffy and cuddly look-
So that con-
ing-huge.
vinced me that I didn’t know
what
looked like.
I
home;
bears I went
looked
at
Charlie Russell’s stuff
and
kinds
Of
stuff. I
just Couldn’t get my
Grizzly Bear, 1969. Bronze, 7 ft. high, University of Montana, Missoula.
head into that way of working.
Rudy struggled to make several mid-size clay models of grizzly bears, which he arranged around the studio. When a faculty committee came to look at them, the usual committee discussion took place.
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Fighting Grizzly, early 1960s. Bronze sculpture, 9 in.
X
7 in.
X
5 ’x in.
“Which one do you like?” “Well, I don’t know if I like this one.” “I like that one over in the corner.” “Which one do you like, Rudy?” “I don’t know. I think this one is about as good as I can do.” So that’s the one that got built. M y friend Brian Persha assisted me, along with another young student up there. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to enlarge this small model, trying to devise an enlarging machine. When you start making something nine feet tall from a little model, you sort of have to know where you’re going to bend the metal armature and everything else.
Once Rudy worked out the technical problems, the finished plaster model was shipped to the San Francisco Art Foundry in a large beer truck, which Rudy thought was “very fitting.” Although the
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Teaching a n d M a k i n g A r t in Missoula
foundry was trying to get established and charged only $1 1,500, the price seemed high at the time. Part of this cost was met by trading tractor parts and bronze bearings for the bronze used for casting. Many individuals and groups, including honorary organizations at the university such as the Bear Paws and the Spurs, contributed the rest of the funds for the project. Rudy went to the foundry to look at the model of the bear and make a few minor changes before it was too late; he “put some teeth in it, and made it look real fierce.” Although it consumed a year of his life when he didn’t get much other work done, Rudy’s grizzly bear has become the campus icon, and can be seen on everything from shirts to headgear to letterhead, and even bumper stickers.
Sculpture in Cement and Steel During his years at the university Rudy made a number of large sculptures in metals other than bronze and in other materials. Some of this work was in relief, and some was freestanding. For his freestanding sculpture made for the university campus in 1966, Rudy cast the work in cement and bolted and cemented its separate parts together. The sculpture’s legs hold a superstructure of related shapes and circular parts, some with small glazed and goldlustered ceramic tile inserts. This sculpture is approximately four feet by six feet by nine feet. In 1968, artist Helen McAuslan commissioned another freestanding, welded metal sculpture. Later given to Montana State University at Bozeman, it was located in front of the art building for many years before it mysteriously disappeared. In
1970, The Farm Credit Bank of Spokane, Washington, commissioned
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another freestanding metal sculpture. This work, made of Cor-ten and stainless steel, is thirteen feet high, eight feet wide, and eight feet deep, and symbolizes the elements of nature, such as clouds and rain, that affect farming. Rudy also chose metal when he was commissioned to create a large relief for the Metals Bank and Trust Company in Butte in 1968. Here, too, he used symbolism, this time from Butte’s historic past as (Lower right) Freestanding Metal Sculpture, 1970. Cor-ten and stainless steel, 13 ft. X 8 ft. X 8 ft. Farm Credit Bank, Spo ka ne, Washington. (Below) Freestanding Sculpture, 1966. Cast cement and ceramic, 9 ft. x 6 ft. x 4 ft. University of Montana, Missoula.
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Teaching a n d Making A r t in Missoula
Freestanding (McAuslan) Sculpture, 1969. Steel, 66 in. x 43 in. Present location unknown.
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Detail, Mural, 1968. Metals Bank and Trust Company, Butte, Montana.
Mural. Steel, copper, brass, and enamel. 8 ft. x 60 f3. Metals Bank and Trust Company, Butte, Montana. 72
T e a c h i n g a n d M a k i n g A r t i n Missoula
a copper-mining town. Two separate but related sections show
varied images of mining activities-miners
working underground,
the gallus frames of the mines, smoke from the smelters, and stylized masses of the mining landscape. The work is eight feet tall and
sixty feet wide, made of overlapping sections of mild-welded steel, brazed copper, and brass, with scattered highlights of colored enamels on copper. For two later architectural projects, Rudy turned to clay. In 1971 he was commissioned to do a mural for the Security State Bank in Polson, Montana. For this mural he chose ceramic tile. He made an eight- by fifty-foot mural with a low-fire talc ball clay, fired to cone
08. Under images of sun and clouds there are deer, antelope, bears, beavers, wild sheep, wildfowl, and streams with fish, all brightly painted with low-fire colored engobes and glazes. An art teacher in Polson, Ward Devlin, worked on the project as associate artist. Rudy again used brightly colored, low-fire slips and underglazes in a tile mural he made for the Blue Ridge Elementary School in Walla Walla, Washington, in 1983. The eight- by thirty-five-foot porcelain tile mural was made in two sections, painted with images
of jumping, tumbling horses in colors of dark green, red, orange, and turquoise against the dominant white background of the porcelain.
An Abstraction in Stained Glass Slab glass had become very popular in the late 1960s, and early 1970s. Rudy tried his hand at the medium in 1969 in a project he did for the chapel of the Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana. Rudy’s first design for the project included themes he thought
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Interior Window, 1969. Chapel, Malmstrom Air Force Base, Great Falls, Montana. 74
T e a c h i n g a n d M a k i n g A r t i n Missoula
appropriate-”air
and clouds and power and all kinds of things like
that.” But when he went up to the air force base to discuss the project,
he met a very interesting general who told him, “I don’t want to see this stuff. I want to see good abstract art.” He was knowledgeable about art and abstract painting, and Rudy thought, “Well great!” Rudy made new designs-very
abstract ones to suggest wind,
clouds, and the drama of flight. These new designs were approved and sent to a glassworks in Minnesota that interpreted them and enlarged them to meet the needs of the installation. The slab glass was about an inch and a half thick and had to be cut to shape with
a diamond saw. The spaces between the pieces were filled with epoxy rather than lead, resulting in very heavy stained-glass windows. When it was finished, the work was shipped to Great
Falls, where it was installed in the chapel by masons. Two windows were placed at the entrance, each one eight feet wide and twelve feet tall, and a window fourteen feet wide and nineteen feet tall was placed in the chapel sanctuary. Although slab glass is strong and very suitable for heavy construction, it is not as popular as the traditional, lighter form of stained glass, which has a very different look. The Malmstrom Air Force chapel was Rudy’s last and only commercial experience with stained glass.
A Return to Ceramics Although Rudy is best known for his work in ceramics, he produced little work in that medium throughout the 1960s and 1970s: I was doing too many things and didn’t become very good at any-
thing. I was a little bored with clay, a little infatuated with other
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things; there was travel and so many things starting in my life that it was hard to keep track of things. So I didn’t do much clay in those years, just enough to keep my hand in it.
The ceramics work Rudy did do during the period was primarily architectural. Some of his other activities included, in addition to his teaching and other responsibilities as an academic, an increasing number of workshops. He also learned to fly a small plane; Rudy is seen in this role in one of the first photographs taken by his son, Christofer, then 6, who is now a professional photographer. Rudy’s primary interest during this period was working in metal. Rudy is nothing if not pragmatic: In some ways it was a good thing for me to give up clay I was at some kind of dead end. You see, in those days clay wasn’t any kind of rewarding in a financial way. I could make an important piece and not get $35 for it. It was just caught in a certain price syndrome, if it was clay. But I could sell metal stuff. If you did a big mural you could get $10,000 for it, so that’s why I got interested in metal. But even that didn’t take of( because I didn’t believe in it really I couldn’t weld very well. You have to have steady hands to hold two or three things’ and get a little spark going. So whenever I did metal work, I had to hire kids with steady hands who were good craftsmen.
Although Rudy did a lot of interesting work during his metal period, including the famous bronze grizzly on campus, he made a discovery in the process: It was a hell of a lot of work, and I found that something I had wanted to do all of my life really wasn’t that interesting. By now I recognized the beauty of clay There was definitely an attraction that clay had for me that bronze didn’t have any more.
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Teaching a n d Making A r t in Missoula
Rudy the pilot. 1969.
Although Rudy was never completely away from clay, he was drawn back into the fold by such events as workshops with Peter Voulkos and invitations from Dave DonTigny and Jim Stephenson to demonstrate at Supermud, which he found very stimulating. Today Rudy acknowledges his debts to Dave and Jim, and to Doug Baldwin as well: ”Good students who went out there and carried the energy, while I had kind of lost it. And I owe them a lot.” In the early 1970s, John Armstrong, a friend of Rudy’s and a former graduate student in printmaking at Missoula, became the first director of
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the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana. Armstrong asked Rudy to put together a show for his museum, but Rudy replied, “John, I don’t work with clay. I haven’t done it for quite a while.” Armstrong persisted until, according to Rudy, he came to Missoula, looked around my yard, found a group of discards and “porchies,” and said, “Say, these are pretty good.” Armstrong’s invitation to show his work revived Rudy’s interest in ceramics. Rudy feels that he owes a lot to John, because “He brought me back to clay.” Rudy’s work was still very abstract when Armstrong invited him to have a show. Little by little it started to change, until by the end of the 1970s his work began to move toward the figurative. He is not sure exactly when this direction changed “from a creek to a river,” but he was increasingly dissatisfied with the nonrepresentational character of some of the work he had been doing. He felt a need to return to something more substantial, even something riski-
er. For a while, Rudy’s style wavered, but gradually figurative became more relevant to him; it offered more possibilities. Abstract Expressionism was nearly twenty-five years old, and it had hardened into cement; it was dead. The real turning point for Rudy’s return to ceramics came a few years later, with an NEA grant that enabled him to travel.
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uring the twenty-eight years he taught at the University of Montana, Rudy gave workshops in nearly every ceramics center and art school in the United States. No matter where he went, what he saw, or with whom he worked during a demonstration, he would take something from the experience back with him to Missoula. These times away from campus-conferences,
workshops, spring ”breaks,” holiday “breaks,”
three to four free months in the summer, and sabbatical leaveswere anything but leisurely.
Most academics put in long days advising students, reading and correcting papers and exams, preparing new courses and lectures, and attending meetings. In addition, scholars are under a great deal
of pressure to do research and to share their findings-to
”publish or
perish.” Academics who are artists are under similar pressure, but for them the mandate is “show or go.” In some institutions, an artist must produce enough work for a one-person show at a prestigious gallery at least once every five years, not including group shows and faculty exhibitions. Scholars usually use their time away from their institutions for library or archival research, field research, or attending meetings to exchange ideas with colleagues who have similar interests. Artists also need new and creative stimulation; to avoid the
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criticism, ”He always paints the sanie picture.” Artists visit galleries and museLinis to look at other artists’ work, sketch new images, and take new ideas back to their o w n studios.
Ituly Some of Rudy’s niost stimulating experiences away froni campus occurred during the academic year of 1963-64 when he took a year’s leave without pay for a trip to Italy with his family. H e had received a Tiffany Award for Crafts earlier that year and this grant, together with the commission he hacl received for the Saint Anthony mural, gave the family the funds they needed. They spent most of their time i n Florence, admiring the city, its great paintings i n the Uffizi, its Michelangelos, and its other artistic and architectural treasures. Later, Rcrdy rented a car and they drove to Pisa, where the children climbed around on the Leaning Tower. They stopped at Carrara to watch marble being quarried. They even visited a pottery, and when Rudy went inside to talk to the potters, he was astonished to see them making copies of everything from Etruscan-style jars to
”bentware.” They drove through hill towns and through Rome, where they toured the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel. The Vatican Museum’s collection of Egyptian art was the finest Rudy had ever seen, w i t h stone animals and bowls carved from diorite, “so polished and beautiful that they looked like they had just been made.”
In the spring of 1964, the family began to think it strange that they were seeing Italy but had never seen New York, so they returned to the States and rented an apartment near the Brooklyn Museum. They learned to get around on buses and subways, and visited the
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Lisa, Arne, and Lar on the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Italy, 1964.
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Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum, as well as the Museum of Natural History, and the Bronx Zoo. They ate knishes for a dime and pizza by the slice for fifteen cents. Rudy was able to share David Askevold’s studio in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn and did some painting there. They returned to Missoula in May 1964, along a roundabout route that included stops in New England, a visit to Harlan Goudie in Illinois, and a drive through Yellowstone Park. The family still remembers the trip very fondly and never tires of looking at the slides. Rudy arrived in Missoula full of energy, brimming with new images and ideas, and eager to get back to work.
Finland By 1981, Rudy was once again ready for a complete change of scene. H e began to think of going to Finland. He knew little about
his parents’.early life there, and even less about their family background, but as a child he had been completely immersed in Finnish language and culture. He had spoken the language at home and in the neighborhood; his family had lived in a section of Butte called Finntown, an ethnic enclave with a Finn Hall, churches, and about
2,000 Finns. H e and his family had attended the Finnish Gospel Church, where Rudy learned to read and write the language at the church school, using a textbook that had been written by a Finnish monk in the fourteenth century. Rudy had always been interested in Finland’s great ceramic tradition. H e even had a ceramic ”ancestor,” as his teacher, Frances Senska, had studied at Cranbrook with Maija Grotell, a Finnish
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potter. He admired the work of Kyllikki Salnienhaara, another distinguished Finnish potter who was still teaching at the University of Helsinki. The Arabia Porcelain Factory was also in Helsinki. The Arabia factory had been focinded in 1874. Since the 1 9 4 0 ~ ~ the factory has offered selected artists a salary, private studios, and materials; artists w h o work i n the factory “may freely use its facilities for their o w n experimentation” (Axe1 ancl McReacly 1981 : 37). A number of American ceraniics artists, including Howard Kottler, have worked at Arabia. I<enneth Ferguson thought that Rudy might be able to work i n a studio there and suggested that he apply.
The Arabia Porcelain Factory T h e opportunity to go to Finland came when Rudy received a niajor grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1981. The grant could be used for any purpose that wocilcl “further the artist’s interests,” so he decided to go to Finland. Rudy began to revive his nearly forgotten childhood Finnish. H e wrote to the head of the design department at Arabia, Tapio YIi-Viikat-i, expressing h i s interest in working at the factory studios. He had
labored over the lettel; thi171\’ing/ must write in Finnish for some dimb reason. In my very bad F i m j s h I exp/ained m y parents had moved to the United States as iinmig~a~its diie to the civil war ii7 Fida17d; m y Finnish, as I used it, described the “Sisa’llys sota” as an htestiid distiii-bmce.Tnpio has i-emi17dedme of t h i s wheii he needed a /augh. Tapio sent Rudy a warni, friendly response, saying that he w o u l d make all the arrangements and prepare everything for his arrival. Once again, Rudy took leave without pay from the university, and
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since Lela was teaching and by then all of his children were older,
this time he went alone. Tapio met Rudy at the airport when he arrived in Helsinki and invited him to spend the night at his home. The following day, he took Rudy to the factory and introduced him to the director and other executives. Rudy was provided with a partially furnished apartment in the neighborhood, a fully equipped studio on the fifth floor of the porcelain factory that included a kick wheel, and even a salary. Tapio took Rudy downtown to the art supply stores and bought him drawing paper and the other materials he needed, and then gave him a tape player and radio. Everything seemed perfect. Rudy felt he was ready to embark on new adventures and new ideas. As he settled into his new studio, he hung the walls with dozens of his drawings-nudes
and horses-to
make it seem more
homelike. Technicians from the factory laboratories downstairs began to bring him pots of glaze, underglaze, slips, and half a dozen different clays to try-some
from England, some from the
Netherlands, and some local. They also brought various porcelain bodies from the factory to try. Rudy began to experiment, testing these unfamiliar substances, trying different approaches and combinations, trying to get a feel for the materials the Finnish craftsmen
had to work with. His first and biggest problem was the clays. None of the imported clays seemed at all suited to his handbuilding techniques; nearly
all the pieces he made from these claybodies cracked and checked. In the end, he found that the factory porcelain would be his best
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Rudy giving a demonstration a t the Arabia Factory, 1981. Tapio Yli Viikari, wearing a white shirt, is behind Rudy a t right.
choice. Although this body had been designed for making utilitarian ware on factory machinery, and was not at all suitable for making hand-built sculptural pieces, Rudy found it to be his best choice. He could make it work if he forced it. The porcelain body did have advantages: It was in abundant supp y and it was familiar to the technicians. With patience and hard work, Rudy began to master the unfamiliar.
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Rudy made small test pieces-about one-eighth inch-of
six inches by one inch by
the different claybodies, painting them with the
various glazes and underglazes he had been given. When he had finished, the firing engineer took the test pieces. Later, Rudy was astonished to learn that his small number of tests had been placed on a kiln car all by themselves: It must’ve cost them thousands of Finnmarks to fire my tests this way I just wanted to squeeze my samples between the saggars. The kiln cars usually would carry several hundred saggars filled with porcelain dishes. It’s possible he didn’t want to risk some kind of accident, not knowing what might’ve been painted on my test tiles. Still, it seemed such a waste for my few tests.
The clay and glaze tests turned out well, and gave Rudy some idea of the color range he could work with. He began to develop a new appreciation for porcelain. The engobe colors had fired beautifully, were technically tight with no visible crazing or crawling, and were dazzling on the white porcelain under a transparent cover glaze. Rudy had never really worked with porcelain except in a very minor way but now, because of its wonderful color possibilities, it began to interest him. The luminosity of porcelain was unlike anything he had ever experienced before: The color you put on just glowed on top of the porcelain clay Even though the factory’s porcelain was difficult to work with technically, it was great for color, and that made a big difference in my color thinking. I made several pieces when I came back; porcelain pieces, and they’re probably among my best-known pieces; Bull from the Sea is one.
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Rudy working in his studio a t the Arabia Porcelain Factory, 1981.
Rudy also discovered that porcelain offered other advantages. Once porcelain was dry, you could draw on it. And it was like drawing on parchment. You could take a pencil and draw on it, and define everything very carefully. Then I would take a black slip and go over those lines, recreate those lines, and then put the color on. They were mostly slips and engobes that I had mixed myself. I could add increments
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of colorings, or stains, and it worked very well. But then I also refired them with bright color after they’d been bisqued. That was the technique that I’m still using today, more or less. Fire them high, and then refire them at low temperature.
It took time, but in the process he found a whole new way of working. Later, back in his own studio in Missoula, he adapted some of these techniques for use with a stoneware body. As he looked out his studio window across the street over his new neighborhood, Toukola, Rudy felt supremely happy. He was away from the university and its committee meetings, faculty jealousies, and all the other problems of academic life. It was wonderful. Rudy was not working in a vacuum. His fellow artists on the factory floor were kind and helpful, demonstrating the use of the strange equipment and showing him how to get around. Most of them spoke English, and they all were amused by Rudy’s archaic Finnish. Visitors often came by the studio, including Rudy’s most prestigious,visitor, Anker Jorgensen, the Prime Minister of Denmark: He commented on my drawings on the walls-”You I see.”-and
like Matisse,
knew about Montana, where the cowboys and
Indians were. Other tour groups came by, but we weren’t obliged to receive them.
Once his clay and glaze tests were completed to his satisfaction, Rudy began making pots. Before he knew it, he had a deadline, too: Tapio notified him that a show of his work was scheduled to begin downtown, at the Arabia showrooms, on June 1. That was about six weeks away. It was time to get moving. There was much to do. Among the things Rudy had to do was a workshop he had been invited to give in Helsinki. He had thought that it would be the same
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as those he was used to doing in the States: He assumed that people would bring slides of their work, or watch him show his slides. Instead, they were very confused about the workshop idea, so they came there and sort of looked at each other silently for a number of hours until I finally suggested things that we should do, and one of them was that I could demonstrate how to build pots the way I do it, and they could see how I worked. And they sat around over a very warm kiln room all day making pots, and I don’t think it went over very well. At least they had their first exposure to a workshop, and it warmed up after that, and people fit into the situation and started to show their work. They didn’t have slides; they passed around photographs of what they did, and it was kind of strange to me that people in a smalt country didn’t already know what other people were doing. They were kind of shy about presenting their work to each other, and it was done mainly for my benefit and not for theirs.
There was similar confusion later, when Rudy lectured at the University of Helsinki at the invitation of the famous Finnish potter and teacher, Kyllikki Salmenhaara. Rudy found her to be a very structured teacher who kept interrupting his lectures: I was showing some very advanced American crazy ceramics like Bob Arneson, and of course Voulkos, Marilyn Levine, and all those wonderful people. She kept breaking into my lecture and admonishing her students that ”Yes, this is all very well and good in America, but first of all you must learn the fundamentals.” She did that to me two or three times till I thought, “Well I’m not doing any good here.’/
After his lecture, Rudy went to a little coffee shop nearby. Soon, students began to gather around him rather timidly. Finally, one asked, “Do you really let students do work like that over in America?” Rudy answered ”Of course,’’ adding that he encouraged
his students to enter exhibitions as much as possible. The Finnish
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students were astounded that he encouraged students to start being artists as soon as possible. Rudy worked diligently in his studio at the factory, making pieces for his upcoming show. Porcelain continued to be difficult to work with. He had losses; some pieces cracked in the firing, and Tapio brought him epoxy to repair them. Nevertheless, he was excited by what had happened to his work; he loved the bright colors he could produce with porcelain, and he persevered. Finally he was ready for
his show. It was an event that made him ”immensely proud.” It was an enormous success. The showroom of Arabia’s sales gallery downtown on the Esplanade had been torn out at great expense and made into a proper gallery for his drawings, which were now framed beautifully under glass, and for his pots, which were displayed on freshly painted stands. I never lifted a finger. The factory people did all the firing and taking care of things. I felt that this is the way artists ought to be treated. Artists in Helsinki were treated with respect.
The show was a success both critically and financially. Critics from al I the papers interviewed Rudy. The reviewers asked questions and wrote good, original, if somewhat noncommittal, reviews. An American collector bought several pieces, and the rest were placed in good collections at the Arabia Factory and at Helsinki’s Applied Arts Museum. Rudy donated one piece to the museum, which, like many museums, had no funds for acquisitions. When Rudy returned to the States, he felt as if he’d seen the Promised Land: “I had a new skin under my Marimekko shirt. Life was never as good as this. I had met some wonderful people and wanted to return.’’
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Returning to Helsinki Rudy was still bubbling over with enthusiasm about his time in Finland when he ran into Peter Voulkos, who also became interested in going there. Pete told Rudy that he’d go to Finland with him if Rudy could arrange a workshop there. So Rudy set up a series of workshops with artists in Helsinki and Jarvenpaafor the following year. But, Rudy recalls, ”Lela didn’t trust us to behave, so she got ahold of Jim Leedy and asked, ’You want to go along and look after these guys?’”
Tapio had arranged for the three artists to give their first demonstration in a temporary workshop in the basement of the museum building. Although the facility was to close for renovation immediately after the lectures and demonstrations and could provide no storage facilities, it was centrally located and would be able to accommodate more artists attending. The three Americans showed
slides and talked about their work before demonstrating their own techniques. Pete threw several plates, Jim made constructions, and Rudy started several slab pots with figures. One of Rudy’s pieces turned into a community project, with everyone decorating it and painting it with slips. Rudy’s old engobes from the previous year had dried up and were now as hard as rocks, but everyone helped restore and mix them. Then the painting of the pieces began, and it was all good fun. When the demonstrations were over, the projects were taken to the studio of another artist, Anna Maria Osipow, where they were covered with plastic until they could be finished. By chance, American sculptor Dale Eldred, who headed the Sculpture Department at the Kansas City Art Institute, was in Helsinki
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at the same time. He had just finished a huge installation of suncapturing sculptures all over the city-down
the Esplanade, in the
park, floating in the lakes, and even on the Senate building. All four artists were invited toTuusula, a small town in central Finland just north of Helsinki, to celebrate midsummer night. It was a joyous
Finnish celebration, with feasting, dancing, partying, and wreaths of summer flowers. Pete became ill and had to leave for home ahead
of schedule. Jim and Rudy went back to Helsinki to finish the work-
shop pieces in Anna Maria’s studio. Jim decided to finish some of the plates Pete had thrown and others that both had started to decorate. Jim and Rudy also made some pieces together, although, as Rudy remembers, ”It was more like funning around-it
wasn’t like
we were doing some serious collaboration.” The following year, in 1983, Rudy went back to Helsinki for an exhibition organized by Joel Eide, who was then director of Northern Arizona University’s Art Gallery at Flagstaff. Eide wanted to collect the Helsinki workshop pieces for an exhibition, ‘‘From Flagstaff to Helsinki and Back.” Rudy was a little embarrassed, because he had given away some of the work and had to ask for it to be lent for the show. Tapio again provided his invaluable help
with packing and other assistance from the Arabia Factory.
Homeland That year, Rudy’s son, Lar, was in Europe and he joined Rudy in Finland to help with the show and to see the land of his ancestors for the first time. After joel Eide returned to Arizona, Rudy and Lar drove to the town where Rudy’s father, Arne Salomon Vanhatalo,
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had been born almost a hundred years earlier, in 1894. Rudy said that when they reached the small village of Honkakoski, I began to get a strange sense of d6ji vu, as though I’d been here before. At the road intersection leading to the village, there was a pottery. We stopped there to ask directions. Even this was a strange coincidence-that
our first stop would be a potter’s studio.
When Rudy asked the potter if he knew anyone named Vanhatalo, the potter waved his arm toward the village and replied: “Vanhatalos? You’re looking for Vanhatalos? There are lots of them. Which Vanhatalo are you looking for?” Rudy and Lar were to discover that almost everyone at that end
of the village was related-and,
in fact, related to them. They drove
around until Lar found a mailbox with the name “Risto Vanhatalo” painted on it. They found Risto on the porch. Risto greeted them effusively, said that he had known about Rudy, and immediately took them to meet the rest of the family. During their visit, Rudy met many other relatives, some of whom remembered his father: In fact, they all looked like Father, each in some small way. We sat in the living room where my dad was a child. We looked at old photo albums and heard stories of how mischievous he’d been. I recognized his picture as a young boy of perhaps eleven years of age. I could identify a family scent-the
same as my Father’s-a
powerful and moving memory.
Rudy was taken to see the fields and forests where his father had grown up. He saw the house where his father was born, the ruins of
his grandfather’s mill, and a millstone partially buried in the soil of the yard. Rudy felt almost as if he had come home. It was “a healing and interesting visit,” It would not be his last.
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Montana Horses In 1984, the University of Montana commissioned Rudy to make a ceramic installation for the main entrance hall of its new performing arts center. The structure was already nearing completion when Rudy returned to Finland ”just for the hell of it,” with the responsibility of the commission still hanging over him. He had looked at plans for the site, but hadn’t come up with a concept other than a general idea of an inverted trapezoidal shape. He was still mulling design ideas in his mind when one of his friends suggested that as long as he was in Helsinki, he should visit the Friends of Finnish Handic rafts Center. Rudy had always loved the traditional Finnish tapestries, called ryas, or ryijys. When he saw them, he was impressed with the work the weavers were doing there. After his visit, as he sat outside the center waiting for his bus, his mind again returned to his design problems. SuddenIy: A light bulb went on. I thought why don’t I propose this to be made as a ryijy, a woven tapestry? Clay wasn’t right for the site in the Performing Arts Building anyway After seeing this work, it had to be a weaving.
When Rudy returned to his hotel room, he began to draw. The trapezoid became filled with horses-inverted,
tumbling horses-
very similar to the ones he had made for the Pine Ridge Elementary School in Walla Walla. The design seemed to fit the space perfectly. He knew that the idea was right; from the very beginning, everything seemed to click.
The next day, Rudy went back to the handicrafts center with the sketch he had made and met with the center’s director, Eeva
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Pinomaa. He asked her if it was possible to produce such a design in the size required. She looked at the sketches and said: ”Sure we could do it-it’d
be big, but we could do it. Do you want us to
interpret this sketch, or are you going to do more work on it?” Rudy replied that it was only a rough idea of what he wanted, and that he
had simply wondered if the idea was at all feasible. When Pinomaa said they would be able to do it, Rudy promised to send her improved draw ings. After Rudy returned to Missoula he went to work on the drawing, although he did not depart very much from his original. When
he was satisfied, he took it to the university and showed it to the dean, Kathryn Martin, and to the president, Neil Bucklew. Both of them loved it-even
after he told them that it would cost $40,000 to
execute. They told him to go ahead; they would raise the money. When Rudy had picked what he thought was the best of his final drawings, the dean took it to a printer and made a limited edition of three hundred prints of fhe design to give to donors of the project. Rudy wrote to Eeva Pinomaa that the funding was in place and the design was ready. She was delighted; she told Rudy that she would assign her best weaver to the project and that it would take more than a year to complete. Rudy prepared to go to Finland. He found a cheap flight that would depart from Calgary, to Oslo, to Stockholm, where he would take a
ferry to Helsinki. But by the time he got to Calgary he was so tired that
he dozed off while waiting for his plane. Twenty minutes before his flight was to leave, he woke up to find that his tube of drawings was gone-all
the mechanical drawings, specifications, and plans.
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Someone had stolen it, probably thinking the tube held a fly-fishing rod. With the help of airport personnel and the Canadian Mounted Police, Rudy searched the airport, but the tube of drawings was not to be found. Rudy was beside himself. How could he fly to Finland without his drawings?He decided he would have to go anyway. After he arrived in Helsinki he went to a small art-supply store near his hotel and bought supplies. Then he taped newspapers to the walls of his hotel room, taped drawing paper to the newspaper, and went to work. Using a hand ruler to measure, he copied the proportions from a couple of small sketches and a snapshot of the original that he had brought with him. The working drawings that showed the actual size and placement of the finished tapestry had been stolen along with the designs, but he had already sent the sizes to Eeva Pinomaa, so he could easily enlarge his new cartoon to the required dimensions. Working frantically in his hotel room, Rudy used pastels to make four or five interpretations of the design as he remembered it. Finally, he picked the one drawing he thought was the best, took it to Eeva, and asked, ”Can you do it?” She replied that of course they could do it, but, she commented, “I don’t remember it being this colorful. Did you add more color to it?” So Rudy thought to himself, ”Maybe it was a better job, who knows?Maybe all that panic came through, and made it better.” In a few days, all the plans and arrangements were completed, and the project got underway. Eeva had told Rudy that she would appoint her best weaver to the project. She called on Anneli Hartikainen, who had been a weaver for more than twenty-five years and had woven more than
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A n Artist Abroad
Anneli Hartikainen weaving the Montana Horses tapestry, 1984.
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four hundred ryijys. She had both the technical skill and the artist’s eye for color that were needed for such an ambitious project. Rudy’s original sketch had been done with pastels, so he used his fingertips to shade the colors, and to model the horses. In order to duplicate Rudy’s effects, Hartikainen used more than one hundred colors of yarn, some of which had to be dyed by hand. It was an enormous undertaking for one person, and she worked on the assignment for about fourteen months. It became the largest tapestry ever produced at the Friends of Finnish Handicrafts Center: The finished work,
Montana Horses, is twenty feet tall by thirty feet wide and weighs 440 pounds.
When it was finished, Montana Horses was put on display for a month at Helsinki’s Museum of Applied Arts. The museum arranged a gala opening and invited artists and dignitaries from all over
Europe, including the U.S. ambassador to Finland. Rudy gave a speech in Finnish, giving special thanks to Anneli Hartikainen for
her splendid work. The tapestry received a great deal of attention from the media, and thousands of people, including some rug weavers from Turkestan, came to see the work before it was flown to Missoula. When Montana Horses arrived at the university, the curator of the Performing Arts Center, Dennis Kern, hired a sign company to install it. The university then held its own celebration once the ryijy was in place. No one now can imagine any other art form that would fit the space so well. At night it is illuminated, its brilliant colors presenting a spectacular appearance through the two-story glass wall of the building. A year after its dedication, Eeva Pinomaa
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A n Artist Abroad
Montana Horses, 1984. Woven ryijx 20 ft. of Montana, Missoula.
X
30 ft. Performing Arts Building, University
and Anneli Hartikainen were flown to Missoula as guests of the art department, and Anneli called the tapestry a "fantastic" one.
A New Dimension Rudy returned to Finland again in 1986, when Joel Eide arranged
with Tapio to collaborate with Northern Arizona State University to
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The "Clay AZ Art" conference was designed to be an exchange of ideas between people from both the fine arts and the design industry, and it attracted an interesting mix of people. More than fifty ceramic artists came to the conference from Finland, other European countries, and the United States. The lecturers and demonstrators were equally diverse; they included Arne Asa from Norway, Anna Maria Osipow from Finland, Bente Hansen from Denmark, U la Viotti from Sweden, Gudny Magnusdottir from Iceland, and Barry Brickell from New Zealand. Americans included Don Bendel, Frank Boyden, Thomas Emmerson, and Kirk Mangus, as well as Rudy. In addition to the demonstrators, some other of Rudy's friends and colleagues also came, including Ed Roberts and Harry Dennis. Rudy's assistant, Hugh Warford, was commissioned to create a special motif for the campus of the University of the Applied Arts in Helsinki. Twenty-nine other artists contributed works that were exhibited at the Arabia factory and later given to the Museum
of Applied Arts in Helsinki for its permanent collection After the conference, Rudy, together with John Takahara, Frank Martin, Don Bendel, and Joel Eide, and several others took a fourday tour of St. Petersburg, which was then still called Leningrad. There they visited with Russian ceramic artist Vladimir Coroslavski, took a trip on a riverboat, saw Saint Isaac's cathedral, and, most
important to Rudy, toured the Hermitage Museum with its superb Matisse collection. Rudy made a discovery about Matisse: He remembers that "the Matisses I saw there suggested to me that he sometimes painted peripherally and never lost focal concentration on the wholeness of what he was doing."
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Rudy with Horses, Helsinki, 1990.
Four years later in 1990, Rudy made another trip to Finland, this time with Lela. Reader’s Digest magazine had built a new office building in Helsinki and commissioned Rudy to design a ry ijy f o r its executive offices. This work was also done at the Friends of Finnish Handicrafts Center, and once again Eeva Pinomaa asked Anneli Hartikainen to do the weaving. Although similar to the Montana
Horses r y i j ~ the new ryijy was much smaller-five
and a half feet 101
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tall and eight feet wide. Lela and Rudy traveled to Helsinki for the opening celebration when Horses was installed in December at the magazine’s offices, and they were given red-carpet treatment, with dinner parties nearly every night at Eva’s or Maija’s or Tapio’s. The magazine’s editor, Raimo Moysa, and Hannu taakso, its graphics specialist, took them to the fabled Kosmos restaurant. During this trip, Rudy finally had an opportunity to visit his mother’s birthplace, Suomussalmi, a small town near the Russian border. When he and Lela went to the area, they found no one with
his mother’s family name, and little else remaining from his mother’s day. The church she used to attend had burned and had been replaced by a small park. The church had been next to a lake, and Rudy remembers his mother telling him, They would get up in the morning to go to church on Sunday, and they would get in this big rowboat, a huge church boat, and the oarsmen, several of them, would row the people across the lake to church. And I looked around the lakeshore there and I just could imagine my mother as a little girl running around there and picking up stones and possibly playing on the lakeshore while people were getting out of church.
Seeing the places made familiar by his parents’ stories was a moving experience for Rudy, and finding some of his father’s relatives had established for him his place in the scheme of things. Almost every aspect of working and traveling in Finland had added a new dimension to Rudy’s art, but the return to ceramics as
his primary medium was one of the most important. His interest in clay had been rekindled.
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or several years after the Autios moved to Missoula in 1957, Rudy had to do all of his own work at the university. When Lar was born in November of that year, they bought a three-bedroom house using money from the Gold Hill Lutheran Church mural along with a loan from the Union Bank in Helena as a down payment. At the time, the house seemed much too expensive, but in the more than forty years that Rudy and his family have lived there, it has grown and changed along with them. The first change they made to the house, when they could afford it, was to remodel the garage as a spare bedroom and Rudy started using it for his studio.
Their first major building project was a real studio for Rudy. He wanted a studio "large enough to serve me the rest of my days." His experience in bricklaying at the Bray gave him the confidence he needed to build it himself, and in the summer of 1965 he dug a trench, poured the footings, and started building the structure. Some of his students-Leonard Joel Smith-helped
Stach, Jim Stephenson, Dave DonTigny, and
put on a roof. The finished studio, twenty feet by
forty feet, has served him well for more than thirty-five years, although it has become very cramped.
R U D Y AUTIO
Work Areas Today, Rudy's studio is comfortable, well organized and easy to work in. Fluorescent shop lights provide abundant light, and daylight streams through the high windows above walls covered and recovered with notes, phone numbers, announcements of openings,
glaze formulae, posters (including one of Albert Einstein), and even an old Supermud bumper sticker.
Rudy's studio-the
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workbench area.
In t h e S t u d i o
Over the years Rudy has acquired all the tools, equipment, and facilities he needs. Some of these tools and equipment were purchased, and some were made by Rudy or his part-time assistant, Hugh Warford. Part of the studio is used as a woodworking shop, where Rudy and Hugh make easels, modeling stands, dollies, bats, and storage shelves. This area has a workbench with small hand and power tools; large power tools, including a band saw, a grinder, and a drill press; and bins with nuts, bolts, screws, replacement parts, and other hardware. Rudy does most of the "honeydew" projects-as "Honey, do you mind fixing this lamp?"-while
in
Hugh makes the
Styrofoam-lined crates used to ship finished pieces to museums and galleries. An electric hoist is attached to a cross beam so that the pieces can be lowered into the crates; after they have been packed, the hoist is used again to lift the crates onto a scale to be weighed for shipping. Other specialized work areas in the studio include a booth with a compressor nearby that does double duty for sandblasting and for spraying glaze. A glaze preparation area has shelves that hold oxides, stains, and other ingredients, all neatly labeled in bottles, jars, and plastic tubs; finished glazes and underglazes, also neatly labeled; as well as brushes, scales, and numbered, fired test tiles. A clay preparation and storage area has raw materials, a pug mill, and a slab roller. Rudy fires both indoors and out. There are two electric kilns next to the door leading into the back yard, one is a large, toploading kiln; the smaller of the two is used only for test firing. A
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large, front-loading, natural gas-fired kiln is just outside the door. Kiln shelves, other kiln furniture, and pyrometric cones are stored behind the two electric kilns, although the larger of these has computerized contro Is.
M ateriaIs Some of Rudy’s early architectural pieces were made with approximately equal parts of four ingredients-local
clay, sand, fireclay, and
bal I clay. Since he needed cheap materials, especially large amounts
of clay, he went looking for a free supply. He discovered a very
good source of clay near the Missoula airport: “Well, I won’t say it was great, but it was suitable. it was plastic and it seemed to be a good filler. And then I’d go down to the river and get sand, then I would order fireclay and ball clay.” One of the first things Rudy learned was that putting fibers into clay would make it tougher in the green stages and in the drying stages: Now for fiber I used straw, and that too was readily available around here. I would go to the feed and grain houses and get a bale of straw, which was also useful for packing. Then I’d use these
slabs to build these pots. The claybody was a very good one. I’ve made a lot of big pieces with that-it
was suitable for making such
large pieces as for Saint Anthony’s Catholic Church here, and the big large piece for the Helena bank, a large ceramic frieze. And I made some big pots, the great big Fleshpot, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Although Rudy worked with a porcelain claybody in Finland and continued to use porcelain for a while after he came home, he found it very difficult to use for large sculptures. The pieces either
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Rudy's studio, 1982.
cracked and had to be repaired with epoxy, or they broke completely when he refired them. He lost so many that he went back to using a stoneware body that was more amenable to multiple firings. He still uses the porcelain techniques he developed at Arabia, but he uses them with stoneware bodies. For many years he used a claybody that he worked with at the university and which he modified for intermediate temperatures by adding Redart to lower the fluxing temperature. He currently uses a totally new claybody that seems to
dry better, made from a formula he had used in Omaha at ceramic
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artist Jun Kaneko’s studio. The basic difference is that, in addition to the normal ball clay and fireclay, it also contains Goldart, and has a different dispersal of grog particles from large, to small, to fine. Rudy
finds that this formula does have one problem: It’s coarser, as well. I don’t mind a coarse claybody, but if I’m doing very delicate painted surfaces it’s a little bit disturbing. For example, if you work on them, if you do any kind of cleaning out, or scraping off, or changing, as you often do when you’re decorating or painting, then it exposes the grog particles and you have a hard time covering that if the piece is dry at all. It’s like painting on sandpaper, but it will also affect the luminosity of the glazed surface.
Work boards and work easels, with turntables attached.
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Methods Rudy began to develop his pottery techniques in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These techniques evolved from some of the meth-
ods he had polished earlier at the Archie Bray, making ceramic sculpture and architectural terra cotta. Unfortunately, he no longer has records, or even good pictures, of some
of his pieces from this period, a time when he made some rather large freestanding sculptures in sections, not reliefs, but pieces. H e recalls: My pots and my vessels were very controlled. That is, I could control their volumes and shapes. They were very organized shapes, almost geometric solids. Then, somewhere in the mid-I96Os, I became very loose with the work and started
to emulate the freedom of
the Abstract Expression is ts.
To handbuild his pots, Rudy uses clay slabs. Recently, these slabs have been made by Hugh Warford, who comes to the studio periodically to mix clay, roll slabs, build and pack crates, and give assistance. Using a slab roller to prepare the slabs, Hugh then cuts them into boardlike rectangles using a pattern. When finished, the slabs are gently laid one on top of another, covered with plastic
Rudy building a pot.
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to keep them pliable, and stacked near Rudy's work station to be easi-
ly reached. The slabs are almost always the same size-21 in. by about 5/8 in. thick-a
in. by 7V2
size that enables Rudy to build pieces in a
wide variety of shapes, using a variety of techniques. He can join the slabs on their edges, use them like bricks, or lay them into molds. Before he starts to make a pot, Rudy assembles everything he
will need-slabs,
tools, water, a stool to s i t on as he works, a model-
ing stand or easel to hold the work, and a bat or work board. These work boards are made by screwing lazy Susan hardware to the bottoms of eighteen-inch squares of heavy plywood. Rudy uses these work boards to turn the piece as he works on it and to carry it to another place in the studio when he is not working on it. Rudy starts a pot by cutting a slab into a circular shape for use as a base. He makes the bottom of the vessel concave, to keep it from cracking. To do this, he lays the slab over a convex form, such as a dome-shaped piece of Styrofoam, which he places on the work board. Around the base, he adds narrower slabs, wetting and joining the ends, and standing them on edge in a circle so that, Rudy says,
"It looks like a dog bowl, a large dog bowl." Next, he scratches the edges of the slabs a little with an ordinary, stiff-bristled kitchen brush, a quick and simple way to roughen the surfaces. Rudy then puts the slabs together, edge to edge, joining them
with his fingertips, knitting the clay together by applying pressure from
both the inside and the outside. He works very rapidly, using his fingers to support the pieces both inside and out. t i e finds this a very versatile way to shape the form-sometimes
the result is a cylindrical
shape, sometimes conical, and sometimes even a truncated cone.
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In t h e Studio
Rudy uses a thin construction as he has found that the thinner he builds the pieces, the stronger they are during the building stages. They dry more quickly and can sooner support the structures that he puts on top. Rudy continues to work around the vessel, adding levels until the piece looks about ready to collapse. He will then stop for a while, possibly starting another piece while the first one is setting up, or go to another area of the studio and start building parts that he calls "ears" or "attachments." These attachments, which he also forms from slabs, are built in the form of an envelope open on one long side. These also must be allowed to dry somewhat before they are ready to be attached. By that time, the center section of his first cylinder will be dry. Then, usually with help, Rudy will lift the appendages and attach them to the cylinder. After the "ears" are in place, the cylinder begins to assume its final shape. Two or three sides-sometimes
four-will
emerge,
depending on the number of attachments. With two or four of these, the piece will have a front and a back; with three, it becomes asymmetrical. After the attachments have set, Rudy begins to cut away the clay between them and the main cylinder-hollowing
out those
areas underneath, and smoothing the joint until the piece has a continuous, even-sided wall of uniform thickness. As it continues to dry, the body becomes tougher and is easier to work with. To finish the top, Rudy then adds more slabs, refining the shape of the piece as he does so. A day or two after he starts the piece, Rudy removes the Styrofoam base; if he is careful, he can reuse it. He then cleans the bottom edge of the leather-hard base with a rib.
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In his studio, Rudy may have two or three unfired pots in progress at the same time. Here he can add a level to one pot and go on to another while he sets aside the first to dry a little. By the time he has worked on a second or third piece, the first will be ready for his attention again. When he gives a workshop, Rudy does not usually have the luxury of this waiting period, and he or a helper must use a propane torch or electric hair dryer to speed the drying process.
Plates Recently, Rudy has started to make plates, though he hasn't sold very many yet. Often Hugh, or another helper, throws them on the wheel. Otherwise, Rudy uses a drape mold similar to the Styrofoam domes he uses to form the bases of his pots, only larger. He simply takes a piece of clay, flattens it with the slab roller, and forms it over one of the Styrofoam domes. When Hugh throws the plates, he will add a folded-in rim, but Rudy makes rims by adding a slab. At first, Rudy didn't always use rims on his plates, but he began to think of them as interesting. Now, to Rudy, the rims are like a frame on a painting. You can schmaltz them up, or keep them simple, but more often than not, 1 like to kind of do something with them, the thought being that this edge, if you do some magic with it, then it kind of leads you into what's happening in the plate.
His "happenings" include scenes and profiles of faces. Before he paints each plate, Rudy adds projections on the back with holes for hanging wires. As Dennis Parks has said, "If it sits on the table it's craft, but if it hangs on the wall it's art, and you can get more for it."
In t h e S t u d i o
Decorating When Rudy finishes forming a piece, whether it’s a pot or a plate,
his next step is to paint it. He does not usually have in mind a particular drawing or design as he shapes a pot; rather, he fits the drawing to the sculpture. Before he starts to draw or paint, he places the piece on a modeling stand and studies it on all sides, turning it as
he does so, to see where to put his figures and animals. Sitting on a low stool with the pot at eye level, he blocks out the figures and images in his mind: Where will he draw the figure?Where will he put the head and body? “Where do these arms go?” he wonders. “Around, or what? Maybe I’ll need an animal or two to fill the spaces.’’ The figures that dominate Rudy’s work have been women, though horses, sometimes a man, a dog or two, an occasional bird, or another creature will be fitted in. He has used these themes for more than twenty years. One day, years ago when he was demonstrating at a workshop’ in Boise, Idaho, a woman suggested that he draw figures on the pot he was working on. He thought about it then, but couldn’t bring himself to do so in front of an audience. Later, he got up the courage to try it at a workshop in Victorville, California, in the late 1970s. Rudy dates the beginning of his figurative period to the resulting pot, Victorville Ladies, which would prove to be the first of a long and successful series of figurative works. He remembers that he felt scared to death to draw figures in front of a bunch of artists. But I was part of the demo, and I tried gouging with my thumb and carrying a lot of things through that I used to do before. I was confronted with the problem of dealing with multi-sided pieces, and
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Rudy incising the lines of a drawing through the slip. how does this side relate to the one I just did, when I can’t see it any more.
The creative problem of carrying the composition around the whole piece is one that potters have always had to contend with, and one that Rudy still faces every time he starts to decorate a pot. Once one side is developed, he says, and you’ve turned it around and don’t see it any more, you have to rely on memory, or turn it around a lot to make the thing consistent. k’s really, really hard to make a thing that works on all three sides. Let’s say it’s a three-sider: There’s always one weak side or something. That’s the side you put against the wall.
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Incising a drawing.
Once he has made his initial design decisions, he works very rapidly, painting slip on the piece in great cloudlike swirls that fol-
low the lines of the sculpture, the white of the slip standing out against the dark unfired clay. Rudy then draws his images on the work with one of his favorite tools, a bricklayer’s four-inch pointing trowel, using the point to incise the lines through the slip. Rudy usually draws directly on the unfired pots because he likes the clay surface: “It’s very forgiving-you
can just rub it out if you don’t want it.
Unlike paper, clay is always fresh and you can start over, up to a point.” H e may redraw a head in a different direction, or change the
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A hoist over the kiln is used to lift large pieces.
angle of an arm or leg. When he is finally satisfied with the drawing, he scrapes off the extra slip outside the outline of the figures, smoothes the surface with the flat of his trowel, and paints the background outside the figures with contrasting slips and underglazes.
Firing When Rudy thinks the painting is satisfactory, he lets the piece dry and then fires it, usually after spraying it with a clear glaze. He uses a glaze called 31 24 frit, which has about 10% ball clay added, which seems to work well on his claybody. Rudy usually fires
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In t h e Studio
between cone 1 and 5, temperatures that are hot enough to sufficiently vitrify his claybody. He warms, or candles, his kiln overnight for up to fifteen hours, a process that expels the water and completely dries the piece. In the morning he starts to raise the temperature very slowly by turning it up in very small increments every twenty or twenty-five minutes or so. With the gas kiln he does this manually, using a fuel valve, a standard petcock that gets the fire working briskly in about four or five or six hours. By the time he has it on full burner, the perimeter burners will be on as well. He may
use one, two, three, or four perimeter burners, all going at full pressure. He uses city gas, rather than propane, but does not get as much pressure as he would like: Most people who fire with gas usually have industrial pressure, but
I don’t; I only have house gas pressure. if I had greater pressure, I could probably fire higher easier, but I just go to temperatures that are satisfactory between cone I and 5. When I get to peak temperature, I look at the cones I‘ve put into the kiln. I usually put in cones I and 5, or perhaps I’ll put in cones I , 2, 3, 4, and 5.
Rudy will fire at any one of these temperatures, depending upon
how he feels about the piece. After a piece has been fired for the first time and has cooled off, it must be removed from the kiln. Rudy
finds it relatively easy to unload his gas kiln, as it is a front-loader. However, loading and unloading pieces that weigh between seventyfive and one hundred pounds from a top-loading electric kilnwithout damaging them or throwing out his back-presents
a real
challenge. Rudy solved the problem by devising an electric hoist
with a hand control. Here the pot’s attachments, or ”ears,” become functional. Rudy places a length of wood inside the piece, stretching
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Unloading the kiln with the aid of the hoist.
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from inside one ear to inside the other, ties a rope to the wood, and pulls it up with the hoist. H e says this works fine for most of his pieces, ”but with a three-sided piece, that’s hard to do, so I made a Rube Coldberg type of picker-upper that has three prongs to it, and it’s adj u stab Ie .”
Refiring When the kiln has cooled and the piece has been removed, Rudy
will examine the color again. H e studies it carefully on all sides to see what it may still need. Sometimes he applies more color, painting directly on the bisque with underglazes. Although underglazes are not supposed to fit fired clay, he finds that he can get away with it to a certain extent if he paints a borax wash over the bisqued piece so the slip will stick. H e may decide to apply one or more low-fire glazes. H e mixes these glazes himself, using a frit different from that
in the clear glaze he used earlier. H e bases these low-fire glazes on
Rudy’s “Rube Goldberg picker-upper.”
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3600 frit, a Ferro frit that has cadmium, selenium, and other hazardous materials, including white lead. Because these are all in fritted form, they are safe to use, provided they are fired in a well-ventilated kiln and used only on surfaces that will not come into contact with
food or beverages. He usually adds a very small amount of bentonite and gum for a good low-fire glaze. To this formula he adds a minute quantity of commercial stain for turquoise and other bright colors, but to get a good red, he must add up to 4% of a red stain. For these low-fire glazes he refires to cone 010, or possibly 08, but for very, very bright reds he finds cone 010 more satisfactory. If all goes well, the piece comes out right after the second firing. It’s not surprising that it takes three or four months for Rudy to fin-
ish two or three pieces, once he builds a piece, paints it, lets it dry, gets it into the kiln, waits for the firing and cooling process, looks at it again, makes changes, and repeats the cycle several more times. Rudy fires a piece as often as he feels is necessary-twice, times, or even more-until
three
he is satisfied. Although he doesn’t like to
do so, he has fired some pieces as many as eight times. He refires if he has had to make changes in the drawing, or if the colors are not bright enough, or even if they’re not quite satisfactory. Sometimes he makes these changes by sandblasting away whole sections and reglazing them before firing a piece again. Sometimes he just adds a tiny bit of color to one small section. He will repaint and refire as many times as it takes to make the piece ”come around”: I wish I didn’t have to do that. Life was much simpler when i was younger and just threw glaze on them with a broom, and threw them into the fire. They were probably just as good as what I’m doing now.
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Several versions of a computer-altereddigital photograph in use in the studio.
If a piece has presented major difficulties, Rudy might take digital photographs from all sides of the work. He then puts a sheet of tracing paper over the photo and traces the parts that need a little more development. He then redraws and recolors the design until he is happy with its appearance. The tracing paper gives me an image that I need to improve, so I’ll draw over that, then make a few little changes. Maybe the head isn’t right; maybe it should be facing the other way. Maybe it should be in profile. Maybe I can do it better, so I can quickly develop it in relation to the parts that work. So little by little, it starts to change, improve, and it starts to fit.
As he considers the design possibilities and looks at the colors, he asks himself how he can achieve those colors. This may lead him into another phase of the work: You have to get a little technical and start thinking about what kind
of greens; I have to start limiting what kind of greens, let’s say, or reds or pinks. Those colors are a little more difficult. I’ve developed
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The unfinished vessel shown in the digital photograph (previous page) awaits changes in the spray booth. a palette that in my mind’s eye 1 think will be something I can deal with, that I can mix approximately with engobes or underglazes, eventually overglazes. That becomes part o f the creative process as well, the technical side of it.
In addition to his own critical eye, he says, there is Lela’s. She’s a pretty good critic; she’s always letting me know when I’m screwing up. It helps me, but at the same time, 1 get madder than
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hell. She says things like “The face on that figure looks like George Washington.” That’s a deflating thing. I will go into a blue funk for several hours and try to pull the piece out. Sometimes it gets better and sometimes it gets ruined, totally ruined.
Occasionally, nothing Rudy can do will save a piece, and he has to give up on it. Most artists destroy their work when it doesn’t meet
their expectations; painters repaint their canvases, and metal sculptors melt down the piece and reuse the material. Many ceramic artists break up their rejects, and piles of shards accumulate behind their studios. Rudy keeps pieces that don’t pass his inspection on his back porch, and he has a large collection. My son Lar first called them “porchies.” This is his description of this sad array of pots that didn’t make it. Some potters have shard piles. I have porchies. I put them there in hopes that an act of God will happen to them and make them better when I’m not watching. As it happens, God refuses to have anything to do with them, and they sit there to remind me of my shortcomings. One day they will get hit by the lawnmower, pets will desecrate them, or weeds will mercifully hide them from view. (NCECA 1998:14)
The porchies are not a permanent collection. When their numbers expand beyond their allotted bounds, Rudy and Hugh break the “sad array’’ into little pieces and take them to the dump.
Naming the pieces Before the work can leave his studio, Rudy must find a title for each
pot and plate. He can’t remember exactly when he started to name them, but he thinks it was in the late 197Os, because around that time, using the subject as title, such as Two Horses and Ladies, or Two Ladies, Dog, and Horse, seemed “silly and redundant, almost
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Some “porchies” in the shed.
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Hugh inserts a Styrofoam brace to protect the work in a shipping crate.
as redundant as using Untitfed.” By the mid-I980s, he says, his titles became ”more interesting, and, I think, matured and became an important part of the event-the
piece.” Rudy spends a lot of time
thinking about and discussing names for his works with his family. In fact, he says, ”The act of titling sometimes comes to near blows and heated arguments-most
of which I lost. The arguments I lost
have bad titles.” Lela will make a list of names and ask Rudy, “Do any of these appeal to you?” Sometimes Lar brings a word game for Rudy to play, and he will find a word that seems appropriate. Place names often play a role, especially places in Montana-streets,
towns, rivers,
valleys, and mountains. If a piece was made in a workshop, Rudy might include the name of the town where the piece was made.
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Sometimes, when Rudy reads a magazine article, he finds that words “seem to come to you that seem sort of magical, seem to have their own relation to what you’re thinking about.” For example, when he read an article about the secrets of magicians-their arcana-Rudy
thought that “arcana” was a wonderful word, so
Arcana became a title. That led to Curiosa, and the invention of a number of other words. In the past, Rudy has used titles from Greek mythology because he thought they gave the pieces a certain distinction, and they were fun to use. In hindsight, he feels embarrassed when someone asks you years later, why a piece is named, you know, “Dionysus,” or whatever. That’s where it gets embarrassing, because you can’t remember why you named it that, and it’s become a part of the pot. It has to be that; you can’t rename it, no. You wish you could sometimes.
Once a vessel has passed Rudy’s inspection, as well as Lela’s, and both have agreed on its name, it can be prepared for shipping. Each piece is individually packed in a crate that Hugh builds to fit it exactly, using a formula developed by Lar. The crate is made large enough to allow room for a Styrofoam lining. When the crate is ready and the piece is in place, Hugh cuts Styrofoam braces to hold the work so that it will not shift and break in transit. After Hugh has screwed on the lid and weighed the crate, Lela labels it with its shipping address, its return address, and the name of the piece, attaches a printout of a digital photograph of the piece, and calls the
shipper. Finally it is sent to its destination-to museum or gallery, or to its new owner.
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an exhibition, to a
More Time for Art
lways ready to experiment, Rudy has no fear of exploring new media, new materials, and new technology. He eagerly embraces every aspect of these that he finds useful, and discards those that he does not. He uses copiers, scanners, and a digital camera to reproduce his work on the computer.
His computer is particularly important to him; he uses it for writing, drawing, "painting" his drawings, and designing new work. Rudy also has his own web site and he even had computerized controls installed on his kiln. These days, Rudy enjoys the luxury of time to experiment with his work, to do his work, to travel, and to enjoy his family-time
that was limited during his teaching career.
In 1982, when Rudy returned from Finland, he was ready to do nothing but make art. Instead, he found himself back in the Art Department, dividing his time among teaching, administration, and
his own work. He loved to teach and he enjoyed his students, but he
did not enjoy the faculty politics. As he had gained seniority at the university, Rudy had had to take greater responsibility for departmental business. For a time, as head of the Salary and Promotion Committee, he had to make decisions about salaries, promotions, and merit awards. He did not enjoy the task because he felt uncomfortable: "You're sitting there with your
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peers and best friends, trying to choose who’s best. That’s no fun. I don’t like to do things like that. My good buddies, my drinking buddies, I couldn’t give raises to because I had to be objective.” He even became chair of the department-”a
couple of times, in order to
keep the school from falling apart”-but
he felt he did not excel at
the task. In fact, he thought he was “the worst damned chairman in the world; if I hadn’t had a good secretary, that school would’ve gone into anarchy.” His secretary, Sue Seymour, ran the department, he says: “She got there at eight o’clock, answered the phone, took care of the students’ registrations, took care of our letters, the filing-she took care of everything. She even did the budget; and, finally she was the last one to go at 4:30 in the afternoon.”
By 1982, Rudy was more than ready to retire. In 1984, he did retire, although he was committed to teach one quarter a year. That first year, he found he’d lost all enthusiasm for teaching; he never saw his students after class, and he began to think that teaching had become pointless: ”1 couldn’t follow up on anything-you
know,
nice kids and all that.” He thought to himself, ”This is the end of teaching for me. I don’t need to do this anymore.” Rudy had been teaching for twenty-eight years. He was only fiftyeight years old, still young and healthy, and his pots were selling at fair prices; but he was exhausted from his teaching and administrative duties. The time had come to end his formal teaching and begin
a new career.
U s i q New Technology Even before he retired, Rudy had been using a computer. He started drawing with a Mac 128 in 1982 or 1983. He even entered a
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contest in a Macintosh magazine, and won second prize. “I was so proud of that,” he recalls. His first Macintosh had a very small screen that seemed to take forever to display images. He used a drawing program called MacDraw: “You could make little dots with it and make black-and-white drawings, and I got enthusiastic with it, but I never went much further with it than that.” When the program called Painter was released, Rudy again became enamored with drawing on the computer. Mostly I had fun with it, made little things like cartoons, played games, and sent things to my friends. Pete Voulkos is one of my victims, so I draw a lot of cartoons about him.
Rudy continues to use the computer in designing. He makes line drawings on
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by 1I-inch paper, slips them into the scanner,
transfers them to a program called Photoshop, and then uses Paint Bucket, or a similar program, to drop color here and there into the line drawings. After he establishes a color scheme, he develops the drawing with another program called Painter, adding textures and airbrush effects-”not
that you can’t do some of that in Photoshop,
but it’s even better in Painter.” He has developed many of his current drawings on the computer, but reminds himself not to overdo it: it’s very easy to get entrapped with a lot of jazzy effects. I have to keep remembering that it’s only a tool, and you have to bring your critical thinking into using that stuff. Otherwise it gets too slick, and I have discarded many, many drawings. It’s not much different from ordinary drawing.
When he’s drawing, Rudy may make a lot of drawings, but he discards most of them and saves only a few. He applies the same principle to his computer art.
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Water Games, 1997. Computer drawing, 36 in. X 24 in.
Dream Garden, 1997. Computer drawing, 36 in. x 24 in.
Rudy also uses an electronic drawing tablet, an input device he used to design several series of catalog covers for a Japanese silk firm. The design for one of these catalog covers, Water Games,
shows his use of this technique. These covers usually are printed as 8 inches by 10 inches, but Rudy has had such prints enlarged and printed on glossy paper by a commercial printing establishment to as much as 30 inches by 50 inches. H e thinks the larger prints
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Garden of the Black Horse, 1997. Computer drawing, X 24 in.
36 in.
Black Horse, 1997. Computer drawing, 36 in. x 24 in.
seem more impressive, but he also points out that at the larger sizes they begin to show the pixels. Rudy does not think of computer art
as an end in itself: "It's like having a very nice tool to work with."
Ceramics In 1998, Rudy received a major commission to make a tile mural for the Nippon Beauty Academy in Tokyo. He used his computer to develop the design because he knew he could "do a lot of things
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Rudy with the unfinished Acanthus mural, 1998.
quickly with it, make judgments about color and textures.” The chief executive officer of the academy, Takuji Amikura, who commissioned the mural, had studied Greek history, and he thought that an appropriate symbol would be the acanthus, a symbol of fertility, good luck, and beauty. Rudy began to look at the spiral form of the acanthus plant, developing the idea based on the tendrils. These tendrils, with their spiral movement, reminded Rudy of whirling figures, so he decided to design the mural around a spiral, with two women, a
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Acanthus, 1998. Ceramic tile relief, 8V2 ft. x 11 ft. Nippon Beauty Academy, Tokyo.
man, and a horse swimming or dancing in a spiraling, whirling motion against a background of tulips, acanthus, and small filigree plant forms. Rudy designed the background motifs with a feature of his software program that enabled him to make subtle corrections, a tool he finds very useful. Finally, he decided to frame the mural with a border. He wanted this border to be a bit elevated from the
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background, and for inspiration he turned to the Japanese hakernono and
rnakirnono paintings that often have elaborate floral borders. He then decided to create a design that would suggest the acanthus plant in another way, as he wanted to give it a freer interpretation in the border ornamentation. After he had designed the image, he made a transparency of it. Rudy put this into an overhead projector and projected the image onto the flat white porcelain tiles on which he would Missoula Fire Station mural, 1995.
paint the mural. It was then quite easy to follow the
design, as it became only a matter of tracing the drawing and painting it. After the tiles were fired, he found that he needed to make a few changes. To do this, he used thin rubber cement to adhere blank tiles over the tiles he didn’t like. Stepping away from the work, Rudy could see what corrections were needed, and he painted the new tiles and glazed, and fired them. The finished work has approximately 250 tiles, and is 240 centimeters high
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and 340 centimeters long, or about 8112 feet by 11 feet. The design work took a relatively short amount of time, but the entire mural project took about a year and a half to complete. The most time-consuming part of the project, Rudy says, “was when I wasn’t quite sure of how I was going to develop the painting with underglazes.” But after he painted a few test tiles and fired them, he gained the confidence to start the mural. Another consideration was strictly technical: Japan’s earthquake codes are very strict, and Rudy
had to design some tiles with holes and retaining wires so that the large tiles, at least, could be very firmly secured to the wall. Rudy could not go to Japan to install the mural. Kazuo Nakamoto, a ceramics artist who teaches art and design at the Nippon Beauty Academy and who had been a resident at the Archie Bray, worked closely with the architect and did the installation. Rudy continues to use his traditional techniques. He still makes five or six pots a year, handbuilding them the way he always has. In addition, he still draws “the old-fashioned way,” with pen or pencil on paper. This is the method he used to design a ceramic tile mural for the Missoula Fire Station. When a regional competition to design, make, and install an art work for the newly constructed Fire Station Building in Missoula was announced in 1995, Rudy entered and won the commission. He designed a vertical panel of ceramic tile painted with brightly colored underglaze. The finished work is eighteen feet tall by seven feet wide, and includes many references to firefighting history. At the top of the panel, a fire bell recalls the founding of the Franklin Fire Society in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin. Two fire engines
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figure prominently, one a Victorian, horse-drawn engine racing to action at the center of the panel, with a contemporary fire truck at the base. Flames are seen shooting up behind both. Between these
is a date block reading MFD 1887, the year the Missoula Fire Department was founded. A time capsule concealed behind this block contains a list of firemen on duty at the time of installation, photos of the artist and his assistants, and an editorial page from the day’s Missoulian, the city’s newspaper.
Printmaking From time to time, Rudy visits his old friend, printmaker John Armstrong, in Phoenix. John often invites artists to work with him in making prints and finds a sponsor to pay for the visiting artist’s trip. In return, the sponsor receives some of the prints made during the session. Rudy has been invited to work with John several times, but does not use John’s technique when he does silk screen. Rudy likes to start with large drawings, generally three feet by five feet. Lela has the drawings photographed at a graphics studio, which reduces them to a manageable size, makes silk-screen stencils and prints them. Rudy says, “Some of my better prints have been done that way. Silk-screen prints have a kind of intenseness about them after they are reduced; reduction makes the line more intensc They have that quality that happens in the reduction process.’’ Rudy also has had fun making woodblock prints. During one vis t to Phoenix in 1996, John Armstrong handed him some blocks to carve. Rudy made a small woodcut called Zamora and John printed a small edition. When he returned to Missoula, Rudy became distracted from ceramics long enough to make a series of woodblock prints in his own studio. He didn’t want to travel to Phoenix to ask John for
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John Armstrong and Karen Stucke watching Rudy make a monoprint in Armstrong's studio, Phoenix, 1998.
help in carving the blocks, so, he says, "I started to carve myself; being as shaky as I am, I made a lot of bad lines, but I made a few woodcuts that I hand-colored, hand-painted. Those were kind of fun."
Workshops Giving workshops, demonstrations, and slide lectures had become an important part of Rudy's working life before he retired from academia, and one he has continued at galleries and museums all over the world. In workshops and demonstrations, a visiting artist demonstrates his working methods. A demonstration is usually not longer than two or three hours, while a workshop takes place over a longer period of time and includes a slide lecture. Traditionally, workshop
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Zarnora, 1996. Woodcut, 8 in. X 6 in.
participants work on their own projects with the visiting artist’s help and suggestions. The audience at a workshop is usually smaller, more knowledgeable, and more intimate, and people can ask questions and talk to the artist both while he is working and during the breaks. Rudy finds it stimulating to meet and talk to new people, saying that he is always interested in the kind of enthusiasm you encounter. People who attend these [workshops] surely have many things to do besides coming to a workshop, and when they come there you
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know you have an audience that is ready to listen or to see what you’re doing. It’s fun to demonstrate, and you always feel that they’re on your side, so it makes it easier to relate to them and to do what you’re doing.”
Rudy also enjoys the exchange that can occur in a workshop between artist and audience. Often the exchange is of technical information, but I think the most important exchange is that the audience gets to know you and how an artist thinks. When they see you work there’s a lot of unwritten stuff, or unspoken stuff that goes through the ether and communicates. I think that’s very valuable to people who are learning, or people who ought to experience what the artist does.
Rudy has led many workshops in the United States and abroad,
either alone, with a helper, or with other demonstrators. Hugh Warford accompanies Rudy on many of these road trips to set up, to make sure Rudy has everything he needs, and to help him build the pieces. On the first day of a workshop, Rudy and Hugh usually work together to construct a cylinder three or four feet tall and between eighteen inches to twenty-four inches in diameter (although sometimes the piece becomes oval). Once the cylinder is put together, the “ears,” which have been made in the meantime, are attached to the sides.
By the following day, the piece has dried enough so that Rudy can paint on it. He starts by blocking out images-figures animals-with
and
white slip on the claybody, which allows him to start
developing the painting. As the piece develops, the audience asks questions, and Rudy will break off to talk about technical points, or aesthetics, or anything else that may come up. Someone will usually
ask, “Who’s the horse?” Rudy says:
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Hugh Warford and Rudy a t a workshop in Ringebu, Norway, 1993.
That always stops me for a minute, because they think there’s some kind of secret symbolism of me and the naked ladies flying around in the atmosphere on the pot. I never know what to say about that. I usually say I’m the horse, and that settles that and everybody has a little laugh and we let it go at that.
In Japan, where Rudy has given several workshops, the audiences are somewhat different from those in the United States. The Ceramics Museum at Aichi invited the general public to a very large
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event that attracted almost a thousand people to one of Rudy’s demonstrations: The room I was demonstrating in had at least five or six hundred people in it, and then there were side rooms in the museum that were filled to capacity with people looking at television. I had to get through this workshop in about two hours, and that’s the fastest I’ve ever worked in my life. I had a whole bunch of assistants who helped me put this together, and amazingly enough, it went quite well, but I didn’t have time to finish the painting or imagery on it.
When Rudy was invited to work in Shigaraki, his workshops were less formal. They were not planned public events, although Rudy says, “The students in another room were allowed to come in and peek at the so-called masters in the big room once in a while.” Rudy showed his slides at a public lecture, where people could talk about them and ask questions. During his visits to Japan, Rudy is always impressed by how much knowledge of ceramics the Japanese people seem to have, possibly because their culture is so tied to ceramics: What we do over there is nothing new. I don’t know why we expected that anything we do over there would shake the earth, because those people are very, very advanced. Their young students are doing everything, from conceptual ceramics, to sculptural ceramics, to throwing, to china painting. They run the whole gamut of everything that we know about.
Rudy loves the interaction with the workshop attendees, but he especially enjoys workshops with other artists: There’ssomething wonderful about that. I love to watch Don Reitz work. He’s great; his energy is infectious. He loves to perform, you can see that. I’m not that way, but I can perform if I have to. I’m
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the quiet man of the demonstration world. Still, everybody has his or her own way of working. Don Reitz is such an energetic and
wonderful teacher, and his dynamic teaching methods during his countless workshops are very popular.
In fact, Rudy recalled an ancient bit of ceramic folklore about Don: ”Before he retired from the University of Wisconsin, it seems that there was a year when Don was away for so many workshops that his students considered passing the hat to have him give a workshop back in Madison.” Rudy has been doing workshops with Peter Voulkos since they were both at the Bray, and he marvels at the way Pete works: When he engages an audience-he course-he
always has an audience, of
starts to work, and people start to help him, and now
he has assistants. Sometimes, he just sits down and has a drink and watches it happen. A t j u n Kaneko’s studio, they labored for three days. John Ballasteri was helping Pete throw. John is a wonderful thrower and had thrown these huge, 400-pound pieces for a big piece that Pete was building, and these things are still soft. Jun Kaneko and his staff and John Ballasteri and everybody were running around trying to figure out how to lift these pieces up and stack them like Pete does. Pete always works in the most difficult way you can imagine. But they finally got these things together and they were fairly true and they trimmed very well, and they were on the mark. Pete was sitting there, having a drink and smoking a cigar and, after all this was done he said, “Okay, give it a push.” So after they had spent three days trying to keep everything straight, somebody gave it a push, and they pushed one side in, and he said, “Knock her out, push her again.” So, this piece that was once straight was bashed in, and now he could work with it. But this is the way Pete works now.
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Peter Voul kos demonstrating a t "Woodstack", University of Montana, 1995.
A workshop i s quite different from a classroom, and because Rudy is not the natural-born showman like some artists on the workshop circuit are, he has had to learn to cope with an audience that may have little or no technical knowledge of ceramics. At first, he was shy about doing it: It was pretty frightening, drawing figures while the public was watching, and I screwed up a lot. That's the greatest fear, screwing up. Finally, the drawings started to get a little better, and I'm
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quite comfortable with that now; and, as a matter of fact, the audience shares the excitement, and I realize that when I’m drawing those figures on the pots and they empathize with me, I’m discovering things that they think about while they watch me do it. So it’s starting to work for me.
The pieces Rudy makes in workshops are usua ly fired there and later shipped to Missoula. Once the bisqued ware arrives, he can
finish it in his own studio, in his own time.
Wood Firing During some recent workshops, Rudy’s pieces have been woodfired. H e likes wood firing but has not done much of it, other than at these workshops. H e has always liked David Shaner’s work with
wood firing, calling it “beautiful stuff.” Rudy admires the blooms Shaner gets by combining Helmar porcelains from Idaho with wood firing. ”Dave’s work has always been very earthy-natural
glazes
with a warm, brownish color characteristic of wood fire. His work had a natural affinity for wood fire; the colors he got from the natural ash and the reduction are extraordinary.” Peter Voulkos has been working with wood firing since Peter Callas, a New Jersey potter and workshop host, suggested it. As Rudy explains, Callas is an expert at knowing how to place the pieces in the kiln and let the flame paint the color on them, how deep the ash buildup on the bottom should be, and where and how you put the wood. Some of my figurative stuff that I did at the Callas studio a few years ago did acquire a patina, especially with the white slip. Just the white slip and the natural firing process of the wood kiln really did some pretty interesting stuff. At the same time, it created a lot of accidental effects, which I appreciated.
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Rudy has had to opacify some of his engobes for wood firing, and he thinks they became better as a result. For example, he says, “The white engobe has a rich ivory-like quality about it in the wood fire in the range of color I usually use.” This can be seen on Nocturne, a large jar Rudy made at a workshop at the Callas studio
in July 2000. Wood firing does other interesting things; a large plate made during the same workshop, StaIlions, took on a nice celadon quality in the firing, and its surface has a more glazed appearance, possibly because the white areas of the piece received more of an ash deposit. One characteristics of Rudy’s approach to his work has been his willingness to fire, reglaze, and refire until a piece meets his satisfaction; but, as for wood fireCould 1 change it? Apply low-fire glazes and refire? Of course. But somehow wood fire is simple and more in tune with letting things happen, so you accept it for all its crust and brown glazes. A lot of people like this surface better than the bright, glossy, colored glaze. I can like both. Each has its own place. In any kind of firing you can move around and refire if you want to-with
some
risk of it changing for the worse.
Philanthropy Even if Rudy had nothing else to fill his time, others would fill it for him. Like so many artists, he is often asked to help support museums with donations of his work. Each year he usually gives something to the Yellowstone Museum in Billings for its annual auction. Other organizations also knock on Rudy’s door to ask if they may have a piece for their auctions, and he i s asked to donate art
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"Pickup on the Arts": The Ford F-10 truck painted by Rudy for the Holter Museum in Helena, Montana, 1996.
works for all kinds of events and all kinds of causes. H e finds it hard to say no, and he often donates one of his silk-screen prints.
Some requests from museums are highly creative in themselves. In 1996, Rudy agreed to paint a pickup truck in response to a request from Peter Held, the director of the Holter Museum in Helena. Someone, possibly a museum trustee, had suggested a benefit called Pickup on the Arts featuring a raffle of a truck painted by an artist. Rudy created a design, which was then sent to a painter in Butte who specialized in decorating sports cars and trucks and who had airbrushes, enlarging equipment, and everything else that was needed to execute the design.
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For a recent auction to benefit the university, Rudy agreed to paint a life-sized fiberglass bear. Unlike the campus “Grizzly,” this
bear, a taxidermist’s form, had arrived ready-made. It was a walking bear, about
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feet tall at the hump, and it took Rudy about a
month to paint the bear with his signature figures of floating women against a background of bright acrylic colors. When he had finished painting it, Rudy decided to add a set of wooden wheels: The bear just had to have wheels. I didn’t want to, but had to do it, otherwise it would have been a mere painted bear. They roll and are made like circus wheels. This bear would go like lightning downhill-a
blur of color flying by.
After he added the wheels, he refused to go into the studio to look at the bear again-”for
fear of wanting to do something else to it.”
Rudy’s Philosophy It was characteristic of Rudy to worry that he might want to keep working on the bear, because of the way he works and because of the way he thinks about art: I have a compulsion to create, a compulsion to work, because you somehow feel that that’s your purpose of being here on this planet. For whatever reason, you have to work. You get very restless if you don?. There is a great deal of satisfaction when you shape something out and it really works well, once you see something come to life, and you see that all the parts are in place; all the things that you worked on have successfully reached some kind of conclusion. There’s a great deal of satisfaction in that. That’s like a j o b well done, and so that’s why you do it. You finish one thing; you inevitably are led to start another.
Perhaps because of this ”compulsion,” Rudy always has something to do-a
project in the studio, a scheduled workshop or
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Bear on Wheels, 2000. Fiberglass, 5
1/2
ft. tall a t the hump.
demonstration to prepare for, something to build or repair around the house. Whatever the project, he sees it through to completion, usually without interference or competition from other tasks. As Lela explains, ”Once he gets going on any job, he can’t quit. It makes me crazy.” Rudy has his reasons. When he finishes one thing, he goes
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on to another, he says, because “I must turn to other projects to keep me out of mischief.” indeed, he has found so many projects that the studio he built in 1965 to be large enough to serve him the rest of his days is now far too small and his work has overflowed into the garage and the shed.
To Rudy, art is wondering, asking questions, and looking for answers to questions that all begin the same way. You say a lot of “what ifs” to yourself. ”What if I took this same theme of horses and ladies, let’s say, and I made a large sculpture seven or eight feet high?” You say “what if?”-so
you go
ahead and you think about that. Sometimes you can’t do it because of circumstances. lots of things might stop you from doing it, but you’re still asking yourself a lot of “what ifs?”: “What if I took this glaze and changed the color? How would that work in relation to some of these other things? These other colors?” You’re constantly posing some questions that you try to answer. The action between the question and the solution is what I think is the creative act. The fumbling around and trying things, and making a line and erasing it, going back and drawing the line, and saying “That’s better.” So you see, you’ve made some kind of progress in answering that question. As you get more and more of those answers, you get closer to the solution. Whether or not you ever reach that is something else. You may reach it at a certain point; you may finish a work of art and say, “That’s done.” You may even send it to a show, but it comes back and you look at it and say “ha!
There’s something I didn’t
solve.” That work is still in transition in a way. That might lead to another question: “What if I should try that same thing, and do it once again?” It tends to lead somewhere else, but you’re building all the time, you’re always looking for those answers. / think that’s essentially what art is. It’s a kind of search toward a solution. When it happens and you’re fairly satisfied with what you’ve got, you feel great about it.
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Rudy still feels the way he once told a reporter (McCormick,
1981: 20) ”I don’t think I’m at the end of my tether yet. That’s the exciting thing about working in art. It doesn’t end. It’s always in movement. Always changing.” And, just as he would not ”always paint the same picture” if he were a painter, Rudy does not always make the same pot.
Rudy working in Jun Kaneko‘s studio, 2000.
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Plate 1 Stoneware Sculpture, 1955 32” H
151
Plate 2
Two Vessels, 1960 152
Stoneware 6" and 10" H
Plate 3 Untitled, 1962
5tonewa re 36" H
Plate 4
Fleshpot, 1962 Stoneware 36" X 32" X 26" Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Art Museum Seto City, Japan
Plate 5 Two Vessels, 1962 Stoneware approximately 14" H
opposite page
Plate 6
Untitled, 1962 154
Stoneware 36" H
155
Plate 7
Coil Top Bottle, 1964 Stoneware approximately 18"
H
Plate 8
Ladypot, 1964 Porce la i n 28" H
157
Plate 9 Untitled, 1976 Stoneware
17%” X 15” X 1 1 ”
Plate 10
Victorville Ladies, 1980 Stoneware
26” x 18” x 13”
Plate 1 1 Untitled, 1982 Porcelai n 24" H Made a t the Arabia Factory, Helsinki, Finland, 1982.
Plate 12 Yellowstone Roundup, 1983 Stoneware 33" X 23" X 16%"
Plate 13
Leena, 1983 Porcelain 18%’’ X 15’’ X 10%”
Plate 14 Copper City Rodeo, 198 1 Stoneware approximately 28 H ’I
161
Plate 1 5
Plate 1 6
Two Ladies Dancing, 1981
Helen Descending, 1982
Porce la i n 32%" X 21 " X 1 1 "
Stoneware 20%" X 1 6 " X 17"
Plate 17
Madame Aminov, 1982 Porcelain 27%" x 18%" x 14"
163
Plate 18
Lady With Lavender Eyes, 1982 Porcelain
25%“ X 19%”X 13%”
Plate 19 Punk Rock Circus, 1983 Porcelain 26" x 15" x 23"
Plate 20
Rolling Horse, 1983 Porcela i n 20” x 24” x 15”
opposite page
Plate 21
Sisters of the Silver Moon, 1984 Stoneware 29%" X 26" X 16%"
Plate 22
Bull from the Sea, 1984 Porcela in 20" X 24" X 12%"
(Photo by Roger Schreiber.)
167
Plate 23
Plate 2 4
Lucy in the Sky, 1 9 8 4
Greek Horses, 1984
Stoneware 20" x 12"
Porcelain 20" X 15" X 14"
x
12%"
Plate 25
Dog on the Beach, 1984 Stoneware 33%” x 22” x 21
169
opposite page
Plate 27
Ruby River, 1985 Stoneware 29%" X 21
Plate 26
Silver City Vesse/, 1985
170
32%" X 26" X 17%" Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, Montana
'I
X
16"
OppoSltP
plqf?
Plate 29 Heart Butte Pony, 1985
Stoneware
36" x 26" x 23"
Plate 28
Morning Star Landscape, 1985 Stoneware
34%''X 25%" X 25"
Plate 30
Bucephalus, 1986 Stoneware 25%” x 2%”
Plate 31 Listening to the East Wind, 1986 Stoneware 40" X 29" X 24" Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
175
Plate 32 North Wind Vessel, 1986 Stoneware 40” X 29%” X 22”
Plate 33
Cranbrook Flyers, 1986 Stoneware 30” x 21” x 21”
177
opposite page
Plate 34
Goodbye to the Girls on Galena Street, 1986 Stoneware
36”
X
26” X 25”
Plate 35
Electric Beach, 1987 Stoneware
37”
X
27“ X 21
”
179
Plate 36
Lady at Kicking Horse Creek, 1987 Stoneware 39" x 30"
Plate 37
Alysheba's Best Day, 1988 Stoneware 31%" X 25" X 19"
x
26"
Plate 38
Orbit, 1991 Stoneware 17” X 4%“
181
Plate 39 Song and Dance, 1987 Stoneware 27" x 26" x 20"
Plate 40
Wonder Woman Returns, 1987 182
Stoneware 32" X 28" X 16"
Plate 42
Luna Lake, 1987
Stoneware 22” x 20” x 1 2 ”
Plate 41
Constellations, 1 987
5tonewa re 24%’’x 22” x 19”
183
Plate 43 Comix, 1988 Stoneware
38" X 28" X 22"
opposite page
Plate 44
Satellite, 1988 Stoneware 31 X 292'' "
X
21 Z''
Plate 45
Electric Horse, 1988 Stoneware
34"
X
27" X 21
"
Plate 46
Remuda, 1989 Stoneware 33" X 30" X 21
"
Plate 47
Sweetgrass, 1989 Stoneware
33"
Plate 48
follies, 1990 188
Stoneware 34%'' X 30" X 24"
X
30"
X
22"
Plate 49
Galaxy, 1990 Stoneware
32“
X
30”
X
12”
Plate 50
Bright Bird, 1990 Stoneware 27%“ x 24” x 19” Groot Foundation, Evanston, Illinois
opposite page
Plate 53
Wind River, 1992 Stoneware 34%’‘x 2 1 ”
190
Plate 51
Plate 52
Nite and Day, 1991
Celestials, 199 1
Stoneware
Stoneware
36”
X
37”
X
24”
37%” x 33“ x 20”
x
21”
Plate 54
Daedalus, 1992 Stoneware
35%“ x 30” x 2 0 ”
Plate 55
/carus, 1992 Stoneware 36" x 28"
x
30"
193
Plate 56
Cheyenne, 1993 8ton ewa re 31/" x 21" .i 28"
Plate 57
Interlude, 1 993
I94
Stotiewa re 31 / " X 20/" k 1 6 / "
Plate 58 Electra, 1993 Stoneware 28" X 3%"
195
Plate 59 Esoterica, 1993
S tonewa re 24%" X 25" X 16"
Plate 60
Eurydice, 1993 Stoneware 26" X 3"
197
opposite page
Plate 62
Illusions, 1993 Stoneware
32"
Plate 61 Iconata, 1993 Stoneware 31" X 3 1 " X 18" M u s e u m of Arts a n d Sciences, Macon, Georgia
X
20" X 16"
Plate 63
Ariel, 1993 200
Stoneware 28%"
Plate 64
Danaides, 1994 Stoneware
31X" X 30"
X
17"
opposite page
Plate 65 Avalon, 1994 Stoneware 34" X 30" X 18"
Plate 66
Gift Horse, 1994 Stoneware 38%" X 30 X 21
I'
203
Plate 67
Timepiece, 1994 204
Stoneware
33"
X
24%'' X 17"
(Photo by Hiromu Narita; Courtesy Kenji Taki Gallery.)
Fanfare, Side 2
(Photo by Hiromu Narita; Courtesy Kenji Taki Gallery.)
(Photo by Hiromu Narita; Courtesy Kenji Taki Gallery.)
Plate 68 Fanfare, 1994
Stoneware 32" X 25" X 18"
205
Plate 69 Marathon, 1995
Stoneware 34" X 31 " X 18"
Plate 70
Tempe 11, 1995
Stoneware
32" X 26" X 19"
207
Plate 71 Astarte, 1995
Stoneware 31" X 28" X 21"
(Photos by Hiromu Narita; Courtesy Kenji Taki Gallery.)
Plate 72
Token, 1995 Stoneware
30"
X
25"
X
20"
209
Plate 7 3
Opening Night, 1996 Stoneware 37" X 32" X 17"
Plate 74
Cobalt Blues, 1997 Stoneware 21" X 23" X 15"
21 1
opposite page
Plate 76
Fly-By-Night, 1997 Stoneware
34"
75
Pldti'
Regalia, 1997 Stotiewair e
34
"
I
34"