Stealthily Like The Inhuman Raptors They Were

The raku story starts in 1960. Every fall Scripps College had a Fine Arts Festival, basically just moving the classrooms out into the public and showing how each professor and their class conducted their work. Most years of the festival, we simply took our potter's wheel outside and demonstrated throwing. It was always popular. That year I decided on something different. "Lets try making raku," I said to the students. You must understand, I had never seen a raku pot, let alone done one, but I had read all about it in Bernard Leach's A Potter's Book. He wrote that he had become interested in raku while attending a party in Japan at which the guests decorated biscuit pots and fired them in a small charcoal kiln. Leach described Japanese raku from its technical as well as aesthetic and philosophical perspectives. He wrote that one must have 30% sand or grog in the clay and use lowfire lead-based glazes.
     In retrospect, I realize that Leach's information may have been somewhat misleading. It was, nevertheless, a stimulus for our prospective entertainment at the festival. I said: "Let's make raku!"
    I built a little 9x9-inch chambered kiln outside the classroom. We didn't mix up a special clay body with a high sand content, as Leach advised, but just used some biscuited stoneware cups lying around the studio. We mixed some of his lead glazes and fored up the kiln. At the appropriate moment one of us reached into the kiln with tongs, pulled out a cup, and ran like a rabbit through the crowds to a fish pond to dunk it sizzling into the water. Leach hadn't mentioned fast cooling in water, but he did indicate cooling quickly. The crowd loved it.
     I didn't. Our stoneware cups broke from the shock of being plunged into water. Even more unpleasant to me were the results of the firing: the copper glazes were green, the cobalt glazes were blue, and the body looked a bilious yellow. I didn't see any of the subtleties that Leach admired in raku.
     We were working under a pepper tree that afternoon, and quite a few leaves had gathered in a gutter. I had a serendipitous hunch that if the pots were being oxidized by dipping into water, then rolling them around in the leaves might modify their raw color with some local reduction.
     Boom! Eureka! All of a sudden they were beautiful! The copper glazes began to luster and the clay body became smoky. There was a remarkable difference through the change in technique. I became so exicted that I went back to the lab that night and redesigned the clay body with 30% sand and 20% talc and the rest fireclay. The next day that body held together in the firing process, and we continued throughout the weekend to make and fire pots.
     Within the year, I was invited to demonstrate this technique for three weeks at the Los Angeles County fairgrounds. It was a wonderful opportunity to learn more about a technique that has really started out as an accident. Of course, every accident is useless unless you can learn something of value from it. I spent those weeks getting away from lead poisoning and working on new glazes. I developed a glaze I called 80/20, consisting of 80 percent Gerstley borate and 20 percent nepheline syenite, a glaze that is still being used as one of taku's basic glazes.
     After this experience I began to make raku pots, and sent one off to the Everson Museum in Syracuse, where it received an award. I felt vindicated by it after the uproar generated over my other award in Florida. One doesn't need a highfire kiln to win first prize in a big show.
     Those initial experiments with raku were a breakthrough; they freed me from high temperature firing and allowed me to work in low technology, one of my favorite ways of working. Coincidental with this new sense of freedom was a surprise visit to Scripps College by Kirasawa Kanishiga, the great Japanese Bizen potter and Living National Treasure. I didn't even know who the man was! I offered him some clay to use, and he sat down at the wheel and threw some pots and saki bottles. It seemed to me he didn't have much control of the clay, especially when he trimmed a pot. He just rubbed the foot with a stick from an orange tree. That shocked me, even after working with Voulkos.