Influences and Approach

All of my work strives to find a balance between the glories of nature and my particular aesthetic sensibilities, as highly-inflected as they are by the baroque, my training as a zen buddhist monastic out in the world, a lifetime of collecting, and a probably entirely anachronistic pursuit of imperfect beauty.

Me. Photograph by D. La Bu.

Also, let’s start off with this painful and uncomfortable fact: Decades ago, as an early medieval historian and archaeologist, I wrote an entire dissertation on inhumation accessory vessels. Yes, pots with dead people. Let me know if you’d like to be the fourth person in the whole world to read it. So, pots and I go way, way back.

But–aside from the contents and circumstances of late Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Carolingian burials–I’ve been particularly influenced by the neolithic and its incomprehensible productions; the calligraphy and painting from the Muromachi through the Edo periods in Japan; the poetry of the Tang dynasty in China, that later of Bashō, Ryōkan, and Ikkyu in Japan, and even later that of Jim Harrison and Ada Limón in the US; the pre-cruciform churches of Anglo-Saxon England; the interior excesses of the late Renaissance and immediately afterwards; the shadows of Junichirō Tanizaki and Caravaggio; the transcendence of Bach, Mozart, Satie, and Chopin (and more than a little Wagner); the polychromic wordshards of Borges, and an ever-expanding ecology of extraordinarily creative and inspired ceramicists, musicians, architects, sculptors, painters, poets, and writers that make the contemporary such an interesting and exciting place within which to live.

I work largely from some alchemic stew of memory, intuition, wild-eyed experimentation, and the knowledge that whatever happens, it will all be all right.

After years elsewhere, I now live in very rural France, where I also garden, cook, and occasionally write.

As a former member of a number of corporate boards, professional societies, various cliques, and mysterious brotherhoods, I now only affiliate as a membre, Collège 3, Institut pour les Savoir-Faire Français (anciennement L’Institut National des Métiers d’Art), which seems after all, absolutely sufficient.

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