• Clay Mother
• Apprenticeship in Santa Fe
• Roxanne Swentzell and her "little people"
• Lucho Soler, Master Potter from Peru

This webpage will evolve.

In the first part, I will want to talk about my pottery and present some of my "masters" and talk about some of the things that I learned from them.

In addition, there are lessons learned from my own journey in life that have contributed to how I live my life, my experiences in life and living, and how I express that in my art. When I speak of art, I speak of "art" in its larger context -- creative expression, whether in ceremony, storytelling, dance, song, music poetry, as well as the visual arts -- I also consider the raising of children, cooking, and growing of gardens as art forms -- creative expressions -- giving life.

Clay Mother:

In the beginning...I won't go there!, but all storytelling begins that way.

I married a Santa Clara Pueblo woman in the early 1980's and switched from a life of bureacracy (working for the Indian Health Service as a hospital adminstrator) to going back to school to work on my PhD at the University of New Mexico. I wanted to study Psychology, but ended up in Sociology. I really did not know how to do any art form and I found the academic world frustrating -- It seemed far removed from life itself.

My Gia (Tewa word for mother), Rose Naranjo, became a mentor for me in the arts as well as in life. She was the matriarch of the family and mother to nine children. Each were well-educated and artists -- all were hardworking people. I really had not considered learning how to work with clay, but tried to help Gia when she went to dig clay, or gathered firewood or manure for the firing process.

Gia told me that the clay was Clay Mother, "she would provide for us". I was told to leave an offering and pray before we began to dig and to give thanks. When she would be making her pottery, she would sing songs in Tewa -- "You must think happy thoughts in order to create beautiful pots". It was difficult to learn technique from her as she was like the "old cook" and would throw things together and somehow everything would turn out beautiful and graceful.

I was helping her at her booth at the Santa Fe Indian Market one year and someone had scratched one of her pots. She handed it to me and said, "Carve me a design on it". I had no idea what to do! I carved a simple Mimbres pottery design of a mountain sheep and put the pot back out for sale. It sold right away and she handed me another. So began my life as a potter.

photo by Marcia Keegan

I began sitting there to sell my pottery in the mid-1980s. In the beginning, the only thing that i could make was little "bear fetishes" with carved "heart-lines" (signifying life) on the sides. I remember the thrill of making my first sale -- I had sat there for seven straight saturdays without selling anything! On one Saturday, I was the only one sitting there -- It was snowing and 28 degrees out.

I remember that over the four years that I sat there, I came to value the friendships made. We laughed, we fought, and shared pinon nuts in the fall. Children were born to many who sat there and in time, they came to sit there themselves. When someone died in their families, we all mourned.

Our assigned space was about four-feet wide and six-feet deep -- that was our "gallery". Some filled every single inch of space and others took the time to arrange their pieces in as attractive manner as possible -- in some ways, it reflected "who you were". Most of us were not able to sell through the galleries, and/or, did not want to. The galleries were frequently not very nice to you, unless you were a "known" artist or came from a famous family. For many of us, it was the only way to pay our bills and became a way of life.

I did learn to read people, as we all did. Tourists, townspeople and collectors would come to browse or pick up the less-expensive items for self, or for gifts. We all enjoyed visiting with them. One of the real gifts about selling one on one is to be able to talk with people and "tell your story" and share about the meanings of the designs -- It is more personal. I still prefer going to markets where I am able to visit with the people.

Many in the community didn't know what to do with him. Like me, he was "not from there". They knew he was a potter, but did not realize his mastery. Helen had a stroke shortly after and lost the ability to polish/burnish her pots. Lucho showed her another method that allowed her to keep

Lucho and I became friends and used to run offroad and through the arroyos in the Abiquiu Valley of northern New Mexico. We were always on the lookout for clay and talking about pottery traditions. He told me that in Peru, there were "pueblos" all along the rivers that ran from the high Andes to the ocean -- their pottery was made using tradtional materials and techniques, "just like the Pueblos of New Mexico"

A consummate potter, truly a master of all techniques. He has been making pottery since his childhood. Lucho is able to make traditional Incan pottery, "throw" on a wheel, do production pottery with molds, and thinks like a chemist. When I have a "problema", mi amigo is there for me.