Voulkos is dead. He died today. I read it in an email, the fact that Voulkos died. Perhaps it was yesterday. I saw him work. I saw him work when I felt burned out and when I was about to leave clay school, when the limitations of institutional life, the scrutiny, the responsibility, the compulsion to produce something, were strangling me. I saw him work in the school studio where I didn’t like to work myself anymore, choosing instead to sneak some clay in the garage of the shack I rented, to push out the walls of a lumpy pot on a skittish wheel prone to tip over, to flop a bowl on the floor and leave it there for a week. I saw him work and it made me glad I had fired pots tumble stacked without cones four hundred degrees too hot even though I and my housemate had no bisqueware to take to a wood firing and even though my housemate did try to glaze and fire one of the pots and even though it blew up all over the kiln. I saw him work and I have never before or since seen such focus, such consideration, such enjoyment. That that school with its flourescent lights picture windows welded blue wheeled racks daily weekly quarterly cleanings could accomodate such a filthy joy bouyed me.

So shut the door. Close the book. The pots were never getting any younger. The clay is all there. Maybe there is more bisquware to fire, but the life is done. Voulkos is dead.