6 minute read
Guy Wolff Pottery
by Toni Leland / Images Courtesy of Guy Wolff/Visko Hatfield Photography
Iconic Connecticut potter, Guy Wolff has followed his passion for perfect pottery since his high school years at High Mowing in New Hampshire.
“My mom was a hobby potter,” says Wolff, “and I played on the wheel when I was four or five years old. But at High Mowing, there was this very well-developed pottery department which set the stage for all these people to talk about nature and beauty and where creativity comes from.” He smiles.“Right away, I became interested in antique pottery.”
Wolff’s creativity came naturally. His father was an Abstract Expressionist--a Bauhaus person--which meant there were always designers in Wolff’s early years. “Marcel Breuer was the designer of the original Whitney Museum in New York,” says Wolff. “Breuer also invented the tubular chair known as the Wassily Chair and the Cesca Chair. Another artist who was always around was Alexander Calder, a modernist sculptor who invented the mobile.”
Wolff spent his summers in the New York countryside amid a group of extremely exciting people. “They were all obligated to find their own interesting path,” he says. “I grew up in this very chemically frothed creative environment where the only rule was that you should follow your passion, and that finding your path was a really big deal.”
Wolff became enthralled with New England historic crockery and old jugs. “Breuer had a beautiful 1820 bottle from Boston, and the form was so amazing because of the vigor of the hand that made it,” says Wolff.
He points out that when you look at things like a Han Dynasty bowl or a Ming Dynasty vase, or a 19th Century salt glaze from Korea,or Connecticut redware from the 18th Century, they all have that vigor, and the forms knew where they were going. Wolff says, “They weren’t muddy--they had a line that went from one place to another, on purpose.”
In the 60s, Wolff’s goal was to find anyone left that did that trade. “Everyone else was at Woodstock,” he says. “I was in North Carolina at a pottery called Jugtown.”
He learned that the Owens family had come from Wales in the late 1700s and had been making pottery in the Piedmont ever since. A few still exist in the South, but New England had none. So Wolff spent the summer between junior and senior years working at that pottery, and he says it completely woke him up. “After seeing a master in one trade, you start recognizing masters in others,” he says.
Wolff is fond of quoting his father’s philosophy: Tradition is not a form to be imitated, but the discipline that gives integrity to the new.
“You can be a Modernist, or someone who is interested in old-time pots,” says Wolff. “People ask if I replicate them, but what I’m interested in is why those old pots are so good and what physicality made that happen.”
The material is key. “You can’t make it do what you want,” he says. “You have to work with the attributes that it has and utterly respect that. Then have a conversation with it. Respond to the materials. Every form of art has symmetry; there can be tension, but there has to be balance.”
Wolff’s pottery graces the homes and gardens of famous and not-so-famous people and has been featured in many well-known magazines, but is still easily available for anyone in Wolff’s Bantam studio shop.
“I’ve been extremely lucky,” he says. “I was a junior in high school when my work was on the cover of Ladies Home Journal because they were doing something on how to make your kitchen beautiful. Another story was for Victoria magazine; the buyer for a high-end shop saw the story at her dentist’s office.”
After a cover for Horticulture magazine, Wolff received three phone calls in a row that morning. “The first call was the head garden curator for historic plants at Monticello,” says Wolff. “I no sooner got off the phone than a call came in from Boston from someone who needed pots for her 2,000-acre estate.Then the phone rings again, and there is silence on the other end. Finally, a man asked where the nearest airport was and said he wanted to fly his gardener out to my shop. He wanted me to design his garden.”
Wolff laughs. “Instead of asking who it was, I asked him what he did for a living that he could afford to do that. Pretty impolite of me. But he finally told me that he owned two computer companies. It was Steve Jobs.”
“It took me 15 years to become an overnight success, to quote Emerson,” Wolff says. All that success came with hard work. Wolff loves making flower pots out of red clay because that’s what taught him how to throw. “I’m70 years old, and I still throw 50,000 pounds of pottery a year,” he says. “But the old-time good potters threw half a ton a day!”
The studio is a fascinating place with an interesting aroma of clay and heat. The kilns used for firing the flower pots are school electric kilns and they fire every day. Wolff loads a kiln, taking care to space and stack and nest in a way that allows him to get the largest number of pots into a kiln. He explains that the more pots that can be fired at once, the more inventory can come out of a day’s work.
Shelves everywhere are filled with pottery in various stages, and the shop is full of finished wares, as well as examples of the different types of clay and glazes. Wolff works in the pottery every day. “At70, I sleep until I wake up.” He grins. “Sometimes I get up at the crack of 10,then have breakfast and wander over to the pottery to do a little bit ofstuff.” He starts throwing mid-afternoon until around 6:30, then has dinner and closes up the shop. Kilns are on and working, so he checks again around midnight.
Clay is not Wolff’s only talent. He is an accomplished musician on the banjo and guitar and worked summers playing rock and roll drums in North Carolina with Ralph Rinzler, co-founder of the
“Following your dream has costs,” says Wolff. “People say that artists have to feel pain. That’s not true, because you’re so in love with what you do that you don’t mind.”
