In 1969 I began my pottery career in an old chicken coop behind my house in the small Western Massachusetts town of Colrain. I started by throwing for a year without firing and then returned to Guerneville, CA., to take a second of 3 summer study sessions with master potter Marguerite Wildenhain. At home I looked west across a branch of the Deerfield River, known in Colrain as the North River, which inspired my business name: North River Pottery. By 1973 I was starting again in Brooklyn and the name stuck with me.
From childhood till the present day I have loved architecture. My career plans in architecture were transformed during my college years once I discovered the values championed in the “small is beautiful” movement and became involved in the lives of potters John and Esther Sills in Woodside, California.
I realized making pottery and designing buildings required many of the same skills and interests, demanding integration of beauty and function. My university years at Stanford did not lead me to alternative career paths. Loving the Sills’ lifestyle and pottery inspired me to let my artistic impulse determine my career choice. Pottery offered me a chance to seek beauty in a practical art which sidestepped what for me was an incomprehensible art era focused on abstract expressionism. The Sills' advice led me to three intensive summer study sessions with Bauhaus potter Marguerite Wildenhain at her Pond Farm Pottery in Guerneville, California. Thus I built a foundation for my work based in the Western European pottery tradition. Though I imitated the Sills’ rural setting as I began my potting in rural New England, I soon moved to the urban inner city in Brooklyn where I continue making pots to this day.
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