Guy Wolff: Master Potter in the Garden

5. Setting Up Shop: Guy Wolff Pottery

Back home in Connecticut, Wolff looked around for a place to set up shop. There was a barn on the other side of Route 202, opposite his parents’ house in Woodville, that he remembered being vacant his whole life. A local summer camp owned it and agreed to rent it to him. He says there was a circular roller skating rink on his parent’s property from the days of the Garland Estate, which had been there before the new road sliced through what became his family’s backyard. Guy Wolff Pottery Chapter five Staubach_GW_Finalpgs.indd 57 4/26/13 10:55 AM 58 Guy Wolff The story he tells is that“Miss Mary Pickford [1892–1979] rented the local guest house on the Garland Estate up the hill which had been a teahouse in the Victorian era. So she rented this teahouse and I guess Mr. Fairbanks came to visit. At that point it wasn’t a marriage. It was sort of a love nest—her biographer stopped by and I asked her about the place in Woodville and her response was ‘Shh.’ . . . Miss Pickford . . . needed a barn to keep her donkey and her cart,” while she lived in the guesthouse, so a barn was built for her, and that is the barn that became Wolff ’s shop.“Locally,” he chuckles,“they always said it was built to keep Mary Pickford’s ass.” It’s a pretty barn, the wood of the vertical siding deep golden brown with age. There are two chambers on the first floor, and a loft that in later years he sometimes used as living quarters.The barn is built on a wooded hill that slopes down to the Shepaug River. It is close to the road, near a bend, and, in time, became a landmark. Wolff believes that one’s environment must be beautiful in order to do the best work.“Making your environment truthful,”he says,“so the stuff that comes out of it is real ...I have a sign up here [his current workshop] that says,‘No cell phones. No texting.’ People come in and say,‘Oh do you have that up because you don’t want people coming in and taking pictures and copying your ware?’ No,the world is so bad at being present,yet if you don’t leave some empty space for something to happen, or some silence, none of the magic will come out of the air. You have to leave space for the magic to happen. That’s why Hamada had a beautiful Japanese house. It wasn’t because he wanted a museum, it was the need to have really nice ground for the sparks to happen.” Wolff made the front of the barn his showroom,which he heated with a box stove, and the back his workshop.Aesthetically it was perfect, charming, but it was cold in the winter and hot in the summer.“If I dropped a piece of clay on the floor in the winter, it would be frozen within three minutes.” Wolff built his first kiln, a sprung arch kiln of soft insulating bricks, in the fall of 1971. He would, over the years, build five. Gerry Williams (b.1926) who the following year founded Studio Potter, the influential journal for working potters,came by several times on his way from New Hampshire,where he kept a studio, to the Brookfield Craft Center in Fairfield County, Connecticut. He would offer comments and advice on Wolff ’s kiln building. His first firing was Thanksgiving weekend in 1971. If one uses the old terms, he says he would consider himself a journeyman at that time and that he was on a journey to learn more. Because the old-time potters were not allowed to use Staubach_GW_Finalpgs.indd 58 4/26/13 10:55 AM 59 Setting Up Shop another source of power for their wheels until they had completed their seven and a half years as a journeyman, and he had not yet completed that time, he used a kick wheel when he started his shop. In his mind, he had not yet earned the right to use a powered wheel. One of the first things he made and fired that year was a chess set for his uncle, Marcel Breuer. Breuer sent him a light-hearted thank-you note, written in bright red ink. Dear Guy, As man to man, uncle...