essential arts
charlie olson BY KYLE JACOBSON
Working off unsettled beats and experimental muses, Charlie Olson takes to pottery like jazz. The product might look straightforward, every curve and coloration seeming the result of a clear plan, but there was a 54year learning curve to manufacturing that cohesion. As jarring notes ring fittingly dissonant, Charlie’s pieces sometimes capture an allure with regard to intention—his practiced hand turning what might’ve been a blemish into a feature. His deftness can be credited in no small part to knowing his art in a way few potters do. Charlie understands his glazes and clays at a chemical level because he formulates his own. “You make up a formula,” says Charlie, showing me his notebooks. “If you have any chemistry background, you can see there’s a listing of all the various elements that comprise this glaze. These are represented by raw materials, some of which contain a number of these oxides. ... Most every glaze mineral is in an oxide form.” 30 | m a d i s o n e s s e n t i a l s
Charlie’s dive into becoming a glazeaholic started when he was in undergrad at Minnesota State University, Mankato. “Most potters don’t work with 26 glazes; that’s kind of insanity for most people.” His high school art teacher had already sparked his interested in ceramics, but “it was at Mankato that I had such an awesome teacher. He was a black man, which was really rare back then. We’re talking 1969, and I’m in a southern Minnesota rural area.” That man was the late William E. Artis. He’d been featured as a sculptor in the 1930s film A Study of Negro Artists, a silent film meant to highlight black artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance. “He really inspired me as to the chemistry of glazes and the technical aspect of ceramics. I don’t think that many people realize you can pursue this interest in many different ways. On one end of the spectrum, you can buy your clay commercially; you can buy your glazes commercially. In fact, you can get your work fired by an outside source.
GLAZING POETIC The way I learned is totally on the other end of the spectrum. “So my true inspiration was in undergrad. Then I went to grad school in Boulder, Colorado, and that’s when I shifted away from pots and started doing more abstract sculptural forms.” Not to
