Now nearly 62 years old, Paul Soldner has been involved in the modern American clay sculptural movement since its inception three decades ago. Soldner and other artists working at Los Angeles' Otis Art Institute began making monumental clay sculpture in the 1950s.

Addressing the technical difficulties of producing large-scale forms in clay, Soldner exhibited an entrepreneurial flare by developing new equipment to fit the needs of ceramists working outside traditional techniques. Since 1955 Soldner Pottery Equipment has been a thriving business that helps him spend half of each year working at his mountain studio in Aspen, Colorado.

During the other six months of the year Soldner directs the ceramics department at Scripps College in Claremont, California. His pioneering work with raku techniques provided the base for the extremely popular contemporary American version of oriental raku firing.

While in Atlanta for an exhibit at the Great American Gallery and a workshop at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, Soldner was interviewed by Atlanta potter Rick Berman.

Rick Berman: In an aesthetic sense, you've reached the point at which you make a "Soldner" pot. I can make a "Soldner" pot, anybody can make a "Soldner" pot. Right? But that's beside the point. Anybody can do a George Segal sculpture, too, for example. Segal has a series that can go to infinity. He can take anything, anytime, anywhere, and make it into his art. Do you feel that there was a point when all of a sudden you were making "Soldner" pots? A demarcation beyond which everything you make turns out?

Paul Soldner: I'm not sure that I've ever been totally satisfied by what I'm doing. I am satisfied with the work at the moment, but looking back a few months later, in comparison to my new work I'm not satisfied. That's a recognition that I've changed, that I've grown, but it wasn't a growth or change I felt I had to make. It just happened, almost without my knowing it. I woudl reach a point where it's not so much a fear that I have to change as a boredom with what I've been doing, or a feeling that I've exploited a certain series. I could still do those pieces, and I know I could seel them really quickly, but I have very little interest in them today.

Sometimes it's a technical shift. I first started getting into my current work with low fired salt. I knew I wanted to change but I didn't know what to change or how. I rejected my earliest experiences with the salt firings, calling them mistakes, but as it turns out that's what I'm currently investigating.

My intuition is to seek out things beautiful, I guess. I get guilt feelings about it sometimes, but I don't think I'm quite as uncomfortable these days with making objects that are poetic, oe that speak in a softer sense. I've become pretty happy with that position. Sometimes people think I'm outrageous, but that's only because I kid around a lot and joke in our Ceramics Monthly ads promoting my line of pottery equipment. But underneath it, you know, I have a sweet self I have to worry about sometimes.

RB: Have you ever had a desire to spend time with people like Motherwell, Kline, Christo, Henry Moore, just to see what they're like? Do you think people working in all different media, architects, sculptors, poets, musicians, are thinking about and trying to accomplish the same kinds of things?

PS: I haven't had much desire in that respect, but I have had a few opportunities to mix with such people. The International Design Conference brings outstanding artists to its annual meetings in Aspen, Colorado where I live half the year, and for a few years the Institute for Humanistic Studies was providing studio space for an artist-in-residence program for six artists of stature every summer. So I've been one-on-one with Claes Oldenberg, for example, and Roy Lichtenstein and Carl Andre, but only because I've had the opportunity. I'm shy, and I won't go seek it out myself. It's kind of the same thing with making any first moves...I'd rather be seduced than seduce.

RB: But you sought out Peter Voulkos in 1954. I would really like to hear about what happened when he first came to Otis that year.

PS: I went there to study with him initially because I was interested in becoming a good production potter. Until that time he had not been teaching but had been working in Helena, Montana, as a production potter for the Archie Bray Foundation. Everything he cranked out was turned over to the Foundation, to be sold in their gallery.

When Pete was asked to come and teach at Los Angeles County Art Institute, sometimes called Otis, there was no equipment there, and it took two or three months to get the studio set up and get started. He was quite organized as a production potter. He'd sit down at the wheel and once he got started working he'd make twenty or twenty-five of a kind. The next day they were properly trimmed in a sequential way, quite unlike the way he came

to work later. He would make bottles and decorate them with Picasso-like drawings very often, or a kind of calligraphic symbol of bamboo growing. Everything was high-fired and glazed. That worked, and I was very happy. That's why I went there - to learn how to do that.

Then, sometime after Christmas that year, a major change took place in his work. It was quite sudden. A big division happened. One day a particularly beautiful girl from an adjoining school came over with a girlfriend to visit our school. They kinda rolled their eyes, flirted around a little bit, and teased Pete and asked him if he'd throw them a big pot. He said "O.K. - sure." He thre them a tall, straight-sided bottle with a neck on it - I guess what we've come to think of as a Voulkos neck - tall, elegant, yet real strong.

I noticed later, while we were talking with the girls and having soem coffee, his eye kept going back to that piece. After they left, he did something quite dramatic and shocking. He went over to the soft clay, turned the wheel back on, and very definitely grooved it with his finger, dividing it into three separate sections. It wasn't a sophisticated groove; it was a direct finger mark, a scratched kind of groove. It definitely broke that original, single bottle form up into three. Then he started throwing little necks similar to the one on top, which he later added on. There were about five necks all of a sudden going up on a single pot. I'd never seen anybody do that.

That seemed to be a turning point because within a very short period of time, within weeks, he was experimenting with a lot of other types of pot manipulation. He was adding on, cutting off, paddling his pot-things that people just hadn't been doing. Mostly he was breaking into the rigidity of the wheel-thrown object, turning it into a more fluid thing.

The question is why didn't that happen before, why did it happen at that particular time? It is my belief that it had to do with changes in his circumstances. In Helena, he was pretty much alone.

Though there were visitors from the outside, there was not a stronghold of other artists. It was quite different when he was thrown into an art faculty. Suddenly he was given a job. He was paid money, which he wasn't expected to repay with pots or with anything tangible - he was just expected to teach, just be there. That allowed him the freedom to make work that didn't have to be sold. Being thrown into an art school with painters and sculptors as peers, he must also have felt some competitiveness to make his work more arty, more artful, more involved with aesthetics.

Then also, most of his students were pretty mature. A lot of us had been off to the war and had made some pretty heavy decisions about life. We weren't just kids. I was about three years older than Pete and had been out of school for a while. There was also the proximity of other art schools, art galleries, museums - we would even go down to the Japanese town and check out the pottery.

He changed quickly - he'd go through styles. Art school does that. I got into my own figurative work by going back to teaching in an art department. I felt stimulated by the rest of the faculty and pushed my own work into another direction.

RB: After teaching for twenty-five years, what do you feel is the difference between the student of the 50s and the 80s?

PS: When we were students most of us never though that one day our work would be collectable as an investment. We envied those painters and sculptors that we knew would get to that point, but I think we were pretty much prepared to accept the idea that we would be making lamp bases or, at best, samovars or some other large functional object.

Also, we were very close, willing to work together, to share ideas, to party together. This is what I call the pre-Beatle period. In the post-Beatle period a dramatic change took place. Students didn't work in a cooperative sense anymore - they didn't really play together. They tended to go off and "do their own thing." They wanted their own private space.

I sensed a period there, after the Beatles, of almost selfishness, almost a sickness with the self. As a teacher I hated the period, because the students became more clique-ish. They divided off, us against them, meaning some of us were better artists than the rest. Particularly if you were making functional pots, you were "them". If you were making more sculptural, painterly things, you were considered better quality. It wasn't a pleasant time.

Now we are in another period where I find my students are happier again with each other. They are more willing to share. However, they would still never accept that idea of sharing one big room and all the wheels and tables, as we once did. They are more oriented to what they would consider a professional career. Most of them don't expect to get a teaching position because they know there are so few. They think if they can just find the gimmick that will call their work to the attention of some art critic or gallery they can get picked up.

It's hard for them to make a traditional vessel. They might say they want to, but peer pressure says that isn't good enough. So they look desperately at the magazines every month to find out what's hot, what's popular in the galleries, and they try to translate that into clay.

We never thought about quick acceptance or reputation. I think we all expected it to be a long involvement and we welcomed that. Our idols at that time were more like Japanese potters. It wasn't until we realized that Shoji Hamada and Bernard Leach were world famous, travelling around the world, that we were drawn out of our own little studios into a larger world.

Another difference between those times and now is there were far fewer people to compete against then. That was actually one of my reasons for getting into clay. I remember telling my wife that the field of painting was crowded and I didn't sense that there were going to be as many people in clay.

There were three major shows when I started exhibiting my work. Although there were national contests, only about four or five hundred people would enter them. You could send your things clear across the country for maybe twenty bucks at the most, and you had a very good chance of having something accepted, or even getting national recognition by winning a major prize. There's no forum today to get quick recognition on a national scale. Today you have to be able to take good, slick photographs of your work to impress a jury. In those days you simply sent the work.

RB: Do you share the feelings of others that a visual artist's career hinges on the photograph and the printed word? I know that you've said that you are a photographer.

PS: I do it simply because it is part of what's expected, what's demanded, not because I think that it's the only way to make the work acceptable, to call attentions to it. I haven't played the game of glamour as much as a lot of people. I tend to make it just a straightforward documentation instead of a nice photograph. Only very rarely will I use brightly colored backgrounds or exotic shadows, lights, airbrush, and so forth. Of course, there's some advertising that has to be connected with it. The gallery people and the collectors make something else out of it. You can count on the piece that's on the poster to be the first thing to sell, simply because it has been documented. That's new to our field, and they're controlling it. All I'm doing is supplying them with a photograph. The dealers and collectors create their own market values.

One think Voulkos told me years ago that I've always kept in the back of my mind. He said, "Whenever you have an offer to exhibit, take it, regardless of where it is." I don't think we believe that today, but he'd say, "If it's at the country fair with the pigs, it's an invitation, so go ahead and do it." He also said, "Send your best work. Never hold your best work back because the place isn't good enough - you should be making better work by the next exhibit anyhow." I think I spring more from that philosophy of common sense than I do from playing the games.

RB: Have you considered just dropping out? I mean, you dropped out in the 50s when you started making pots, but now you are the establishment.

PS: I have no reason to drop out. It's a nice, warm place to be and it certainly feels good. I get to move around a lot. I'm able to make a living. But on the other hand, if the gallery scene dried up, would I still have the compulsion to do something with my hands? I think so, because that's what drove me into it in the first place.

For example, my wife and I had gone out camping in the Rockies once - it was before I had discovered clay, but I was involved with teaching art in a general sense - and this pressure had been building for a long time that summer. I remember staying with her in an aspen grove and kind of confessing, saying "I don't know what I want to do, but I want to do something with my hands. I don't want to just paint, I don't want to just teach - I want to make things. Maybe I'll become a salad bowl carver. We could move up here in the woods and I could use the wood from these aspen trees to make salad bowls and forks and spoons to sell to the tourists."

The very next summer I got my hands in clay and suddenly found that not only could you make things in clay but you could even get a college degree in clay. It could be a professionally acceptible form, which being a salad bowl carver never would have been.

RB: What's the philosophical difference between Warren MacKenzie and Bob Arneson?

PS: In MacKenzie's case, I think it has a lot to do with love. In Arenson's it's more with seeing. MacKenzie is still very caught up in the Leach tradition, the idea of making beautiful objects available to the masses, of beauty in an anonymous sense connected with functional pottery for daily use. It isn't even important to know that Warren MacKenzie made the piece. What's important is that you use it and appreciate it and that you do not put it on a pedestal. Whereas to Arneson, the aesthetic qualities, the ideas underlying them, social

comments and political statements - and even the galleries with their pedestals - those are the important issues. The cost and the availability to the masses are of no concern. I was caught up in MacKenzie's philosophy early on, that sense of anonymity as an ideal, not to cater to my ego but simply to fulfill myself by making other people happy. That's still nice, but it sometimes interfered with my own development. For years, people said to me, "Soldner, you're really undercharging people for your work. You should charge a lot more." I had difficulty handling that, coming from this humanitarian background preached by Leach and Yanagi. I still like to read their ideas, there's definitely a value in them, but I don't think it can be done at the same time your work is becoming collectable.

RB: But, forget the money, within the art community don't Arenson and MacKenzie end up in the same place?

PS: I think there are many roots, many paths to the same direction that one can take. So you're probably right - in their own way they arrive at a similar place.

RB: Do you feel you've spent past lives as a Japanese peasant potter?

PS: Where did you get that? Where did that question come from? The reason I ask is I have said that, but not very publicly. The first time I went to Japan I was absolutely dumbfounded at how familiar everything felt. I don't understand a bit of Japanese. I don't even know how to say "thank you." And yet I didn't feel like I was in a foreign place. There was just something about being in touch, being in tune with what I saw about me - the land, the architecture, the simplicity of the country life.

I was influenced by Hamada's calligraphy and only recently realized that it was like a fingerprint, very identifiable. In fact, he really had only one kind of gesture, which he repeated over and over and over. I'm finding in my own work I have about three variations of a certain gesture, within which there are several thousand subtle variations.

The fingerprints of glaze that I've left on my pots for years look almost like fruit-grapes or something - though they really weren't meant to. In the beginning I usually did it to cover up a blob or some drips of glaze. I would quickly cover them with my hand, leaving fingerprints. Then that became part of my calligraphy, and I could see it really did relate to nature... maybe vines or plum branches. In fact, in Japan that's exactly what they told me - "You know, you do beautiful plum trees."

RB: What historical work do you respond to the most?

PS: The Oribe ware I've always felt very close to, and Bizen - not so much the form as the pattern, the random flashing from the fire. I get turned on just as much, though, by the work of the Mimbres, a little known American Indian tribe that vanished. Also Pre-Columbian and South American pots.

Historical pieces offer a well-known standard to which you can compare your work, but I've ended up trying to make Soldner pots that I can't find in any history books. One time I was working on some really tall floor pots, from what I thought was going to be a really individual point of view, but I was surprised to find some African drums that, though wooden, were very similar, elongated forms. It's hard to be all that original.

RB: Is there ever a fear that your creativity can dry out?

PS: I think that is a latent fear, almost like losing your sexuality or something. If you've had a certain strength all your life, to see it wane is to make that fear actually physical - like growing older. When I suddenly realize I don't have the strength in my arms that I used to have, and that it's something I can't do anything about. I wonder whether I'm going to dry up that way in my creative work too.

But usually I counter that uncertainty by looking at others who have continued to grow and expand. At eighty-nine years old, Georgia O'Keefe came to the school saying, "Look, I can't see too well but I'd like to become a potter, and maybe you could help me."

And just last week I saw a show of the black folk artists movement, primarily from here in the South. Almost to the person they were in their seventies before they started to make art. That reduces becoming an artist to its really gut level. I would like to believe that I'm always going to feel that necessity to make art.

Rick Berman founded the highly successful pottery program at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center in 1973. He currently owns and operates Claywork studio and gallery in Atlanta.