Notebook 2
If I Were Not a Painter, I’d Be a Potter
In my mind’s eye I can picture the pots I’d make—simple forms, tactile, gentle natural glazes. They’d rest comfortably in hand. If you’d notice, you’d admire them because of their quiet presence, and they’d feel right, look right. You would not question them. They’d be elegant because they would not shout, they’d possess a quiet confidence in being exactly what and who they are. You would use them. They’d become part of your daily experience.
But I am not a potter, though my affection for pots finds its way on the canvas. I often paint pictures of pots or other subjects alone, isolated as part of the canvas’s landscape: a clay vessel, a bowl, or a tree, an egg, an apple. I sometimes paint groups of like kinds: twin trees, three eggs, a group of the same jar. I want to define why a single form, or multiple representations of the same form, interests me, but I understand that it is not the aloneness of the subject that speaks through me—it is something more elusive. Alone, an object can emit a powerful presence, symbolic of something we innately feel but may not rationally understand. Repeated, they become a reiteration—lest we forget them as individuals—like writing the same word over and over again as a way to remember it.
Are the still lifes landscapes? Yes, I think. The results of my work have everything to do with how they are made.
My studio work moves along two paths that look, at first, like opposite temperaments—one deliberate, one chance-driven—but come from the same discipline and return to the same place.
The still lifes are planned. Vessels, alone or in small gatherings, rendered in near-monochrome and inspired by the restraint of ancient Asian ink drawing. Positive and negative space are weighed as carefully as the form itself—often the space around the vessel matters as much as the vessel does. These paintings are quiet on purpose: not glossy, not colorful, not performing. A single vessel, alone in a field of nothing, is not lonely. It is free—complete in itself, asking nothing of what surrounds it. Open vessels, closed vessels, rustic or elegant, worn or spare: each is a study in stillness held just this side of emptiness.
The landscapes and animal paintings work the opposite way. Paint is applied, then partly taken away—dissolved with solvent, worked back with sandpaper and rag, lifted with absorbent paper, torn loose with tape—until what’s left is what the process decided to keep. I plan the entry and I plan the exit; the middle belongs to chance. A managed loss of control. The image is found rather than composed.
What holds the two together isn’t subject matter. It’s an old ceramic instinct—the same one behind the plain, undecorated pottery I admire and collect, where a maker shapes the form and the fire finishes the surface, unsupervised. My still lifes are that potter’s half: a restrained hand building a deliberate stillness. My landscapes and animals are the kiln’s half: a surface given over to a process I set in motion but don’t steer to the end. Two different temperaments, one shared respect—for something willing to be left alone.
August 2026, Woodstock, Vermont