Those American production potters threw in much the same way as did their Chinese antecedents five thousand years before, as do potters today. The exception is the electric wheel, which didn't change the method, just the power source: from the potter's right foot, or the arm of an apprentice, to falling water from a far off stream.
The basis of the craft of shaping clay on the wheel was and remains "centering" a ball of clay that rotates symmetrically about the center of the potter's wheel. From the centered clay ball, all shapes come.
Wheel shaping is not like sculpting. A push "here" does not create an indentation "here," but an indentation all around the rotating shape. Similarly, a squeeze doesn't necessarily create a thin spot. The squeeze is translated all around the spinning clay and can result in the mass growing taller. Throwing on the wheel is a unique method of shaping. Using mathematical terminology one can say that wheel thrown forms are "generated" not "specified;" that is, a "push" transformed by rotation becomes more than a "push."
"Yes, yes," I've been impatiently told, when I give my lecture on wheel-throwing to visitors to our pottery studio in the western foothills of Washington's Cascade Mountains.
"We understand all of that. But tell us now, just how do you throw an oval bonsai container on the round wheel? Surely you don't have an oval wheel?" they say, half believing that I do.
I don't.
There are a variety of methods for altering the shape of a wheel thrown container from round to oval. The simplest method is one briefly described, appropriately enough, in Bernard Leach's A Potter's Book, (Eleventh Printing, Transatlantic Arts Inc. Hollywood-by-the-Sea, Florida). I say appropriately, because Leach spent a good deal of his life in Japan; he was born there, and returned again at the age of twenty-one to study stoneware pottery techniques. He brought these techniques back to England, along with Shoji Hamada, the Japanese National Treasure-to-be. Before returning to Japan, Mr. Hamada worked alongside Leach to establish Leach's stoneware pottery at St. Ives, Cornwall.
Leach's method, the one that I use routinely for six and eight inch long containers, depends on cutting a narrow piece of clay the shape of a willow leaf out of the middle of each thrown dish. The sides are then pressed together altering the circle to an oval or ellipse shape in the process. Leach's interest was meat serving platters, not bonsai containers. The method for creating one applies equally well, nevertheless, to the other.
The steps of throwing, altering and finishing a bonsai container, in this case Pine Garden Pottery's number 308 are described in the accompanying photos and captions.
A subsequent visit to Japan influenced Max's perspective as a potter "in a powerful and permanent manner." He was particularly struck by the beauty and simplicity of the common items of everyday Japanese life, articles "perfectly designed for their function" and "devoid of ostentation or self-conscious artiness."
After five years in Taos and ten in rural New Jersey --during which he met Chase Rosade and rekindled a long-held interest in bonsai--Max and his wife Kate Bowditch, who is an artist in her own right, moved once more. They now reside in a quiet mountain valley north of Seattle, Washington where Max's potting art is focused solely on the production of bonsai containers.
Return to Info Plaza
Return to Pine Garden Bonsai home page