The Despecialization Imperative

(Note: "Despecialization" is not in Webster's Dictionary, nor is it in Microsoft Word. However, its antonym, "progress" is in both dictionaries. For more on the subject I highly recommend "A Short History of Progress" by Ronald Wright.)

Cicely and I have always believed in investing in our potential and we have never considered the stock market to make a return for us on any of our extra money or time. To invest in the market would be to trust a corporation to be inventive in our stead, to trade powerfully where we can’t, and wouldn’t. I would have to be willing to be fattened upon expendable, interchangeable workers, for doing nothing.

Seven years ago we invested as much in a modular fireplace system I created and patented as we had put into the home we built over eight years: a 1915 abandoned Catholic Church situated in the center of eastern Washington's Waterville Plateau. After two years in our Winthrop home I have almost no time for manufacturing my fireplaces. The custom work I am asked to do is more interesting to me and I have struggled at times to keep up with that because I don’t want employees to work in my name. To misquote quote Kurt Cobain, I never wanted to be a manufacturer. An inventor and prototyper, yes, but by the time I did all that I had to make money back. The many good people I have met across Washington State bcause of my fireplaces have been a nice and unexpected surprise.

Through the months of good weather I am almost exclusively a stonemason, though I have a job building a little Japanese-style shed coming up. Wherever possible I defer concrete countertop and shower jobs for the winter. An undesirable combination of oral genetics has forced our two children into orthodontic necessity, though perfectly boring commercial teeth is not the objective. With the volunteered help of my parents and a good year for me, as a team we got this paid for up front by August with the rest of the season to consider winter savings.

I am looking at the first opportunity since I became a husband and a family man to build an art studio again, with the only consideration being savings or risking it to make stuff from clay. That Cicely has herself become a ceramist makes the prospect a soul necessity for both of us instead of calculating our potential comfort about bill-paying. Besides soil, clay might be the most human element outside of us that is able to teach us what we are and what we hope to be. In a climate like ours, when the dirt is under five feet of snow the soul screams for dirt that can become permanent, maybe lasting hundreds or thousands of years. Clay is communal, like a garden’s produce, but fashioned into vases, cups, bowls, and figures, ceramics are emblematic as they are useful to the humanity that we have always been.

After thinking it over for years and procrastinating the apparent impracticality of making art for its own sake when there are other more utilitarian things to do, my old favorite medium is calling me back. I would like to sculpt in a way that is more readily accessible and humble than bronze, and less corporate and common than art ironically borrowed from the Pre-Raphaelites, stamped out for sale on the super-cheap. Fired clay holds the place in my heart it has held for thousands of years of human experience since food was first served ceremonially: something precious to see and ponder for its individuality, or immediately durable and functional for the pouring of wine and water in every house in the community.

Though once I made a mold to reproduce a single mammoth pot, I like the idea of doing only one-of-a-kinds like my career as a mason has forced me to do with results that have been good for me as well as my clients. The people I work for appreciate that what I have done for them is exclusive to them and their specific idea of what they hope to live with in their home.

As a sculptor I will make what I want to see. It could be that I end up with a warehouse worth of unique pieces that only I enjoy, but that is something I am prepared to deal with, even if it means that my space is so crowded that I have to turn the fruit of my mind and hands into clean broken-up clay landfill to save space. I have figures, vases, and combinations of both in mind, but I will not be matching what I sculpt to our town’s tourist aesthetic: an old west town with wooden boardwalks. From me there will be no cowboy art. I almost never like it and I don’t want to give any energy to making it. I don’t care if I am being unreceptive to a ready market established by excellent craftspeople in their own right.

Winthrop’s style against mountain peaks and a fertile valley brings tourists in, but local master artists are creating things of greater purpose and humanistic appeal than items made in a Chinese factory and sold on Winthrop’s Main Street, only a few feet from rarified excellence by local masters. In a storefront in town Don Ashford is making gorgeous ceramic bells, masks, and huge, beautifully colorful thrown plates. Up and down the Main Street and the entire Methow Valley, world class artists are sculpting in every medium from the heart, whatever comes to mind and hand. I am a fan of every item done by a variety of sculptors found at the Peligro metal works studio in Twisp. It seems for them as it is for me, a personal imperative to create mere art in addition to their work in homebuilding, teaching, gardening, farming, theatre, political activism, and food serving. I’ll be sculpting textures and emotions of my experiences up to now hardened in a personal crucible at 2,200 degrees, in between pounding nails, writing, and setting stone, and dinner at the huge dining room table Cicely plans to build this winter out of second-sawn reclaimed timbers, immovable on her wide-plank face-nailed floor the four of us installed with more audacity than expertise.

Cicely gets our vegetables from local growers at the farmers’ market until she can supplement this with her own produce from what she likes to think of as her own piece of ground, the only spot on our lot that gets enough sun, currently occupied by a very large and very curved pine tree that any day now might fall on our house. We get milk from the Methow Creamery that makes the usual manufactured milk taste like a used bath towel in comparison. Bread flour comes from Bluebird Grain Farms to make rolls with a lovely texture and flavor. The Old Schoolhouse Brewery in Winthrop brews a very nice "Hop Along" unfiltered amber beer. Meat and goat cheese comes from local herds and butchers. After testing the validated claims of sustainable local agriculture, I intend to buy only what is worth buying, while I try to sell only what is my best effort at a worthy trade.

I used to think, “What I’d give for a sense of authenticated community, where people want the best they can get, and they give it back.” For fifteen years, beginning with my final refusal of the Mormon culture I grew away from, I have been giving my eyes, my lungs, my back, and my ankles for a short term participation in an experiment that preceded all of the pyramids, capitol buildings, churches, and office buildings, and the violence done to the soul by the construction of huge gods: a human scheme called local trade with love. So far the trade has been good and might get better.