Ceramics
I went to Florida to work. This was back in 1999. I had three young sons and a wonderful wife in Westchester and there is no way I should have gone to Florida to work but I did. I few down there at the behest of a man I’d done a couple of projects for through my employer Plaza Construction. The man had asked me to represent him in the construction of his house in Palm Beach County and aside from the nice monetary bonus he offered me it was a chance- I thought- to push myself further in my career. That didn’t happen. In fact it was the beginning of the end for me with Plaza. Folks there were jealous and the boss felt I was disloyal. This feeling came about only when I refused to use my relationship with my client to try to get Plaza some opportunities that would have been unavailable to them otherwise. The client had no desire to get in bed with Plaza or give them a leg-up where he felt they didn’t belong. Long story short, my long slow decline with the company commenced. When the project in Florida ended my days at Plaza were all but over.
In Florida I worked hard. I did a good job but at a cost to me and my family that I didn’t anticipate. I missed my home. They grew for two years without my daily presence. I flew from West Palm Beach every other Thursday morning and stayed up north for three days flying back to West Palm on Monday morning. I went into Plaza’s office every other Monday and reported in but otherwise, I had little contact with them. I went to the job for a couple of hours early on Thursday morning before I flew out and again on Monday afternoons when I would return from New York, so I could be sure that the job site was moving along and there was no hanky-panky going on while I was away. In this way I only missed reporting to the job one Friday every two weeks, much to the chagrin of the General Contractor who I kept tabs on. He would rather I wasn’t there at all. He was not used to having a New York Jew on the job almost all the time and his requisitions (which I approved) had to be accurate. The job site was run like a tight ship and the money was right to the nickle. My daily notes and photos were the last word. The Architect loved me and I could count on his backing. As much as I hate confrontation I do not shy away from it so after a few minor skirmishes over the bills with the GC’s manager at the very beginning of the job
there was no more monkey business.
I had dear friends who lived near the project and I bought a little condo in the same complex where they were. I had a little company and that helped me. I was terribly lonely for my home and family. I was bored in the off hours. I filled my time with TV, cooking and reading endlessly. The library was nearby and it was not long before I was on a first name basis with all the librarians. Still it was boring. The first few months were not bad but my friends were snowbirds and in the Spring they left and headed north. It got very hot and the sense of loneliness set in big time. I was desperate to find activities to fill my days off and the long, hot, sweaty nights.
One day I went to the mailbox on the far side of the condo complex and in my mail was a brochure for the adult education classes at the local high school. There was an open house and sign-up one evening and I went to it. I signed up for a yoga class which was to last six weeks and met once a week on Monday evenings. It was only one night a week but on that night I had something to do. I saw people doing things not related to construction. I stretched and balanced and learned a little bit of Yoga, it was nice. Every other week I would drive from PBI (Palm Beach International Airport) straight to the job site and then to my class. It was a great relief to work the kinks out of my back from the plane trip and the driving and when I got “home” to the condo I found I was sleeping better on Monday night. So, I learned the importance of staying active.
When the Yoga classes stopped I thought I might try something else for a change so I went to the next “open house” and tried to sign up for (of all the craziest things!) a quilting class. The women who took and ran the class were in one of the high school rooms working away at their quilts and when I walked in all activity stopped dead. They were polite. When they heard I was going to sign up for the class they tried as diplomatically as possible to discourage me. There was not a woman below the age of sixty five and no men at all in the class so I was definitely and “invader”. After ten minutes I could see the handwriting on the wall and retreated as graciously as possible back out into the hallway and back to the registration area. Maybe there would be something else I could try.
As I wandered in the halls I felt just like I used to in my high school back in 1964. Square vinyl lined floors. Celotex 2x4 ceiling tiles in a white metal grid. The same nondescript light green walls with vinyl cove base. Periodic glass display cases with trophies and awards and photos of smiling, teenaged athletes and cheerleaders. Along this memory lane one of the classroom doors was open and I looked in as I passed by. It was a shop class and I stopped to investigate. Even with my totally uneducated eye it was easy to see that it was a ceramics shop, with kilns and lines of unfinished shelving packed with unglazed, raw vessels of all shapes and sizes drying in perpetration for firing. On the work benches there were tools I could not identify and plastic wrapped blocks of clay and other stuff that was foreign to me. There was one shelf with finished pots and sculptures decorated in a rainbow of colored glazes. I’d never considered trying ceramics until that moment. A woman about forty years old with an apron on and hands covered with damp,cracking clay came up to me and asked me if she could help me. I told her I’d like to learn about this stuff and she smiled and directed me to the registration area with instructions to sign up for the beginner’s class. I did.
The next week I attended the first class. We got basic instruction on “throwing on the wheel” and as part of our instructional fee we each got a twenty five pound block of gray clay. We also got basic tools. I tried to get into it. I really did. But throwing pots just didn’t get it for me. I made a pretty nice pot that night and it set on the shelf with all the other pots so that it would dry. We would bisque fire it next week. I asked the instructor if I might bring some of the clay and few tools home to “play with”. She looked at me kind of funny but agreed it was alright. Someone asked someone else if they wanted to grab some supper at Chili’s and before I knew what was happening I was going out into the Florida night air with my ceramics supplies and getting into the car to go meet my classmates for a meal. I had a new hobby and a new bunch of friends.
During that week, after work, I sat at my dining room table experimenting with my tools and my clay. The basic rules for “hand building” sculptures out of clay were pretty easy to learn. I got a book from the library and looked up stuff on my super slow Toshiba laptop computer. The book was much more friendly and helpful. I learned how thick to make the slabs of clay so they would fire properly, how to “weld” the pieces together using a slurry of clay and water, how to burnish the surface of the clay to make it smooth and how to use cloth and a comb and other materials to make surface textures. I experimented for several nights. I rolled out the clay using a rolling pin I bought in the second hand store. I cut it into shapes and welded the shapes into there dimensional figures and then squashed them and re-rolled them over and over again. Clay excited me. It was so forgiving and unforgiving at the same time. Before the next class I had fashioned my first sculpture. There was no way it would be dry before the class met but it became “leather hard” and I carefully packed it up in a box and brought it with me to the classroom. It was a full sized telephone with a dial and a handset that nested on the cradle of the phone. I was excited with it but was not so sure what the teacher would think of it. She might not like that I was trying stuff so far afield of what the class was doing. I could only hope she would be OK with my experimentation.
I brought the box and my sack of tools and set them on the desk and sat down. The teacher had prepared a lesson for the class and I listened patiently as she explained how everyone was going to throw another pot that night. This one would have a lid and she showed how to use the tools to cut the neck of the pot to receive the lid and how one made the handle for the lid and welded the parts together. Much of this I’d already tackled from my library books but I sat patiently and listened to the lesson. When she was done she split the group up and got each person set up at a wheel or the slab rollers. I held back and when she came to me almost everyone else had started on the project. I asked her if I might not do that project but, rather, do something else? She came over to my desk while I opened the box that held my “telephone”. I’d rather work on some other things if it would be OK?
I carefully lifted my “phone” out of the box. I watched for her reaction but she just looked at it as it sat on my desk. At first, she said, I thought it was a solid piece of clay. She lifted it gently and looked at the “welds”. Where did you learn how to join the pieces? She asked. From a library book. When she set it back on the desk she smiled politely and said, You can do anything you want to do in this class. If you need any help or want to know anything I will try to help you.
I never threw another pot. I worked on my own. There was nothing I was afraid to try. No problem that I could not overcome with the help of my teacher. I was so happy. After class I went with my new friends and ate dinner at Chili’s.
I mentioned before that I spent a fair amount of time in the library. I used to go in once a week at a minimum. Sometimes twice. I would spend five or ten minutes depending on how long the line was at the check out desk. Never much more. I don’t sit in the comfortable chairs and read the local paper or skim book jackets or ask the librarian for recommendations. I just get some books and get out. Maybe some people spend time reading literary reviews and keeping lists of books that they glean from conversations with their friends or reviews from “Fresh Air” on NPR or book reviews from the New York Times but not me. I have no list.of Books suggested by my friends, in fact when someone tells me about a terrific book that they just finished it pretty much flits in one ear and out the other. I don’t know why but I’ve always been like that. I might come on the book on my own years later and read it and be amazed that it was sooo good! But I might hate it too. Never know. Not worth worrying about. Instead I just parked in the library parking lot, breezed in and picked out four or five books and checked out. Back out to the car and home I’d go. I looked over my booty when I got done with dinner and if I was lucky I’d have a good one. If not, who cares? They are free and I can go back when ever I want and do it all again. No biggie.
The selection process is not a big secret either. There is none. One day I might pick out five red books. Or four blue ones. Or maybe four oversized books stored on the bottom shelf of the stacks because there is no room to stand them up on the other shelves. Once I picked out four books by people named Cohen. Four different people. When I unload them at home I usually find one book that is worth the effort. That will take me a few days to read at least. The rest go back unread. I figure at a minimum I am helping to contribute to the librarian’s job security. Someone has to put the books back on the shelves.
One day in the Tequesta Branch library in Tequesta, Florida I was checking out my books when the sweet young librarian stopped in mid-check out and said to me (in hushed tones so’s not to include the other patrons in the conversation) You know Mr. Gartman, you are the most prolific reader at our branch. I hadn’t the heart to tell her that I read one out of twenty of the books I checked out. I thanked her for the compliment and stared for a guilty beat too long at her youthful bust and pouty librarian mouth and went home with my armload of guilty literary booty. Anyway…
When I did take the time to research a book or a book topic I leaned heavily on books about forgery and about art theft. I love them. I have read many, many books about art forgers and document forgers. They have a particular “tang” for me. The ballsiness of the endeavors and the risk and the skill employed gives me a special thrill. If I had to fill time in a period of a dark mood or kill some hours on a couple of long plane trips I would abandon my usual shotgun approach to finding literature and look for a book about forgery. I remember fondly “The Salamander Papers” a book about Mormon document forgery and theft and the bloody cover-up that followed. Modern art theft and brazen forgery has fueled the engines of so many factual accounts as well as fictional novels galore. The theft of thirteen valuable works off the walls of the Gardener museum is one such story. The untold forgeries discovered in the halls of venerable auction houses such as Christies and private collections throughout the world… In my imagination I picture myself as the forger in one of those stories and wish I had the skill to pull off crimes like that. Really! I would love to be that good at painting or sculpting and I might have spent my life cocooned in an artistic lie.
Why mention this now? Because as I sat at my dining room table during that lonely period of my stay in Florida and created a copy of a bellows camera or a surveyor’s transit in clay I felt a little bit like I was stealing. Copying the original but putting my own cartoonish spin on the shape and the hardware details of the original. I rarely looked for an actual model to copy but would sometimes look for photos of lanterns or cameras to mimic. Mostly, I would form my creations from the images in my mind. I would do the fasteners, screws, rivets and joints as I pictured the original in my daydreaming mind but alter them to suit my comical sense of them. The result was usually immediately recognizable as “of reality” but somehow not quite right-a fantasy. My telephone only had eight holes in the dial while the original had ten. The lenses for my lanterns were truck light lenses and I always invented a fake “manufacture’s name” incised in the clay similar to an original manufacturer’s font but one letter off. The glazes I used were metallic and applied only in spots on the piece. After the “raku” second firing the pieces were plunged white hot into a can of flaming wood chips or paper so the finish was reduced and looked deeply blackened with highlights of metal-copper or iron-peeking through. It made the item look like item had been dug up after being buried for a century. Aged with a glazed patina. When someone looked at these creations for the first time they were not recognizable as ceramic, but, rather looked like old metal. When someone would say to me What is that made of? and they would not believe that it was a clay sculpture it would make my day. I had succeeded. I had fooled someone with my little creation.
I continued in my “class” at the high school adult education program for a year. It was more for the dinner at Chili’s than for the classroom work, I did much more work at my apartment on the dining room table than I did in the shop class. One other thing I looked for in that class was the final raku firing we had each month at the instructor’s home. She lived on five acres in a place called Jupiter Farms. She had the whole class come to her house to do the second, glazed firing which was the final step in the creation of our works. She served wine and cheese and it was more like a party than a class. I loved seeing the final works displayed on a large picnic table near the kiln. It was the payoff. Did you do it right? Or not?
The raku final firing is a terribly imprecise operation. The kiln is lighted and heated up to over a thousand degrees F and the bisque fired pieces are stacked into the kiln while it is blazing hot. The lid is closed. It takes a very experienced eye to recognize when the glazes have liquefied and the pieces are just right (a very difficult state to determine!). Carefully the individual pieces of work are taken from the kiln with the aid of long tongs and elbow length, heavy leather gloves, a protective apron and goggles. They are carried to a metal vessel (in our case a garbage can) filled with combustible material. The works are gently lowered into the burning vessel full of paper or wood shavings which ignites almost explosively when it comes in contact with the super heated ceramics and the vessel is then tightly covered. All the oxygen inside is consumed by the combustion and the pieces turn black from the carbon and turn all the colors of the metallic rainbow as a result of the reduction of the glazes. When the pieces are retrieved from the can, still very hot, they are put into a water bath to be cooled and cleaned and then, and only then, the result of the firing becomes evident. And it is always a surprise. No piece ever comes out exactly as one expects.
Our instructor cautioned us about these expectations on the very first day of class. It is a little discouraging on the first day of instruction to learn that we might not like the results of our labors, that colors will not be as we envisioned, that our work might be muddy looking and ugly, that they might shatter at any stage of the process. I don’t think this concept went over well but nobody dropped out of class after hearing about it. It was only after the first “firing party (?)” at the instructor’s home that the early warnings she had given us on the first day of class became clear to us. Pitchers and pots and sculptures-including mine-came out of the water and scrubbed to reveal some fairly ugly results. Many of the other students got a little bit discouraged at that point. I on the other hand, saw great potential in the blackened surfaces and the glimpses of flashing copper and iron and oxides on my pieces. I saw what could be. I tried to really understand what I had done whether by accident of intention, and how to achieve the same effects but in places where I wanted it. I began to look forward to those firing parties more and more.
My apartment became my studio. I ate at the kitchen counter so I would not have to move my work-in-progress. Some nights I would work late on a project I couldn’t stop working on and I forgot about TV and most of my reading. Sometimes I would wake up very early, I would fester thinking about some detail of the project that lay on the table downstairs, I would get up in the dark and go down to tweek a little fake fastener or experiment with a texture I wanted to try to impart on the clay. The sun would come up and I would grudgingly give up and get ready to drive to work. I picked up a coffee on the way and worked all day thinking about what I would be doing on my sculpture when I got home. I became consumed by the effort.
During the months that I had in my class I had produced a small collection of my work that included a strange and varied assortment of tools, mechanical devices, and items that just interested me. I contemplated doing a typewriter but decided it was just too complex, but I did a couple of staplers. I did a surveyor’s transit and a Milwaukee Hole Shooter drill. The drill was fired with a hole in the handle so I could attach an electric cord to complete the effect. My telephones also had cords-I had my original table top phone and a “candlestick” phone from the 1920’s. These were fired with a wash of copper glaze that turned silvery blue in areas and charcoal black in other areas. I did a series of “lanterns” with handles of copper like I imagined a coal miner might be swinging along with his lunch bucket as he descended down into the shaft of the mine. I used glass truck lenses with them and if you lifted the lid you could put a candle inot the body and in a dark room it would cast an eerie glow. One lantern looked like something from twenty thousand leagues under the sea. It was silver and had a faint resemblence to an undersea creature like a giant clam or a diving helmet. But my favorite creations were my cameras.
I had in my home in New York a couple of old cameras I’d acquired someplace-I can’t remember where. They had bellows and viewfinders and one was called “Kodak Autograph”. The name even inspired me. I had nothing but the memory of them and the picture of them in my mind to work with. I produced a series of four of them, each slightly different as my mind wandered and my technique developed. Each was constructed and fired separately having its own personality but each pleased me greatly. It was the last firing of the last camera that brought me to this story…
Our instructor was a patient woman. Kind and immensely helpful. She had nothing but encouraging words for me the entire time I was in her tutelage. There was one thing, though, that would set her off and that was related to that warning the first day of class-disappointment was part of the deal. Nothing could ever be perfect and if one expected perfection in their work they were in the wrong place in her studio. That day at her house when I fired my last camera one of the parts fell off (or broke off more accurately) from my sculpture. It was a knob on the body of the camera, the one which one would use to roll the film back into the camera or advance the film, whatever-if the camera had been real. The part had snapped off when we were loading or unloading the trashcan full of burning paper and ashes. I didn’t notice it was missing until I was cleaning the piece with water and I was upset. People were still using the can for the reduction of their pieces but I grabbed a pair of tongs and began rooting around in the ashes trying to find the lost camera knob. The whole production process for the firing was backing up behind me while I looked and the instructor came over to see what was holding up the class.
I held up my camera for her to see and she took the tongs from me and issued a stern warning. I’d never heard her so upset and there was no mistaking that it was aimed at me. Forget it! She said. But!!! No buts. Forget it. If we find it later fine, if not too bad! Everybody, let’s go now and don’t let stuff like this slow down the process. She looked at me-or through me- and walked away with the tongs dangling at her side. I felt as low as a worm and skulked away to swallow a stiff glass of wine. I sat dejectedly waiting for the class to end so I could look at leisure in the burning can to find the knob so my camera could be complete. She watched me as she cleaned up the site of the party, never saying another word about it to me. I never found it. The camera sits now on my shelf in my bedroom a stern lesson on compromise and satisfaction and process and compulsion. I have never forgotten that night.
I finished my job in Florida. I came back up north to my wife and home and three sons. I went back to work slogging into New York City each day and back at night. My job never normalized and after one more year with the company I’d served thirteen years with I got the ax. I got the phone call from the president of the company on the day after the Christmas party. I went into his office and he fired me without explanation. I didn’t need one. I knew he thought I was disloyal by going to Florida and that was that. I moved on. I worked another ten years for other companies but I never felt the same about work again. It became nothing more to me than a paycheck. There was no sense of belonging to anything bigger or more important than myself and my family.
I did, however, cleave tightly to my sense of art. I continued for a while with my ceramics and I still loved working with wood and metal and paint. Slowly I built a display of my work that filled my home. Carved plaques. Ceramic sculptures. Furniture. Drawings. A few paintings and, the last few years, glass and mirror mosaics. Writing also filled my life and I keep a journal and a blog full of my thoughts and memories (like this one). When I say filled my house I mean it literally. In every corner and on every shelf there are samples of my attempts at art. One piece in particular encompasses all the elements of this story. My candlestick telephone.
Created in Florida, I brought it home and I displayed it on a shelf on the wall of the kitchen. There has not been a day in twenty years that I have not sipped my coffee and looked at that piece. It was about thirteen or fourteen inches high, which is what I imagine a real telephone from the period would have measured. It was constructed in two pieces, the ear-piece and the candlestick/base and they were interconnected with a wavy piece of black insulated wire. The earpiece hung from the cradle of the base unit and resembled a real phone only in so far as my imagination could create a cartoon-like facsimile.
Sitting in my morning chair sipping coffee a few days ago I realized it was not up on the shelf where I usually kept it. In its place was a stark white statue of ceramic chickens…not mine thank god! Thinking I might have moved the phone to keep it safe last year when Lizzy and I went away for the Winter I searched the house. All the while I also searched my brain trying to remember when I’d last actually seen it? Getting old leaves one occasionally doubting oneself, ones memory and this was one of those times. Had I seen it this week? This month? I could not remember. I looked and looked and it never materialized. I came to the conclusion that there are two possible explanations for the disappearance.
The first possibility is that it was broken by someone and discarded to be rid of the evidence. We were in Florida most of the Winter and there were sons, families of sons and friends of sons in and out of the house during that time. An accident is always possible. I find this a possible but unsatisfying explanation. I secretly hope this is not what happened but leave open the door.
The second possibility appeals to me. That is, that someone visiting took a shine to the piece and boosted it. Stole it, and it is sitting in someone’s house where it is safe and appreciated. That would make it not trash, but rather in the company of the great art thefts I love to read about. Perhaps not so grand a theft as the Gardener heist but somewhere on the same continuum. I never dream that my endeavors will become desirable on a monetary level, that would be presumptuous. I would love to believe that perhaps someone loves something I have created enough to steal it though.
