New DVD offers opportunity to study with Peter Voulkos
Published: April 2, 2008
With a cigarette dangling from his lips, Peter Voulkos slams balls of clay into a lump, then wedges the 30-pound mass, muscles straining as he rocks and rolls it into a spiral form. Student vassals carry it to the wheel.
His clothes are smeared with mud; his fingers, oozing slip, shape and pull, shape and pull; the wheel spins. It's wet, dripping water while Voulkos uses a paddle and then a knife, mumbling comments to students, making jokes.
More mud splashes when he digs in with his fingers, grabbing a stick to undercut the foot. Finally the form fits. He steps back and does a little flamenco dance of joy, surrounded by laughing students.
In "Our Founding Mudder Who Art in Heaven: A Workshop with Peter Voulkos," filmmaker Martin Holt provides a unique view of this complex man who changed the course of ceramics by introducing it to abstract impressionism. His approach to teaching a workshop shows he was an artist to the core and a teacher at heart.
The artist's workshops were chaotic, full of music and conversations and activity. His teaching went the extra mile; he showed tricks and techniques without holding back.
For him there was no proprietary information. Voulkos valued the fact that students asked questions that he might not ask himself, and he concluded, "I got more from my students than I ever gave back."
"Our Founding Mudder" documents Voulkos (1924-2002) teaching a workshop organized by Torbjørn Kvasbø as part of the 1994 Winter Olympic Games in Norway. It is Voulkos at his best, confident and direct.
Much of the audio comes from interviews and previous filming sessions where he talked about the kinds of things that were important to him as he grew in his understanding of art, and of himself as an artist.
Voulkos was an iconoclast, never inhibited by tradition. "I never have had an idea of what I would make before I started," he said. He followed his hunches, working freely until the piece looked done or he ran out of ideas. "The hardest thing is to get it to look like art," he admitted. "If I can get it to look like art then it'll be alright."
About the filmmaker:
Martin Holt is a moviemaker whose favorite subject is "the music of what's happening." His video, "Rudy Autio Makes Night Music," was released in 1994.
"Sovietski/Amerikanski" (1991) shows a group of artists in clay from the USA interacting with Soviet ceramic artists at the Soviet Artist's Union House near Riga, Latvia, as the old Soviet Union was crumbling toward a market economy; "Summer of Mudders" (1989) focuses on emerging artists at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Helena; and "Akio" (1987) documents the last work produced by Akio Takemori at the Archie Bray.
"Our Founding Mudder who Art in Heaven: A Workshop with Peter Voulkos" is available directly from MontanaArtWorks.biz as well as at various retail sales outlets that routinely carry this type of media.
