Guy Wolff: Master Potter in the Garden

7. The Guy Wolff Guilds

Chapter seven After the life-changing results of that year, Guy Wolff recalled, “With Martha and with Horticulture, that’s when the relationship with Peter Jackson had to happen. Wholesalewise I could probably make $125,000 worth [of pottery] a year. So with a company like Smith and Hawken, that’s times three. So when they started ordering about a million dollars worth of stuff, that’s impossible.” Staubach_GW_Finalpgs.indd 95 4/26/13 10:55 AM 96 Guy Wolff Historically,potters have not always worked in solitude.Asolitary potter who performs all tasks,throwing,decorating,firing,selling,packing and shipping,is a constructof thestudiopottermovement.EarlyAmericanpottersoftenworkedin small groups,two or three brothers,or a father and son,or sadly,in the South,a slaveownermighthaveslavessuchasDavethePotterthrowpotsforthem.Sometimes whole families worked in the pottery. In the heyday of the era in which the English flowerpots Wolff loveswerebeingmade,therewereworkshops andguildsstaffedbynumerouspotters:apprentices andjourneymen.BothLeachandCardewproduced production ware with apprentices and skilled potters . There is a deep historic precedent for potters working in groups. Those traditional potters who had worked alone in their later years, such as Button , were forced to by circumstances. Wolff felt very strongly that though there was more demand than he could meet,he did not want to enter into a relationship with a factory where pots were never touched by a human’s hand. He wanted his pots to be individually handmade to the designs that he had researched and developed. He had to find a way to get help making his handthrown flowerpots. “ I could try to start a shop in Connecticut,” he says, but he knew he did not have the personality to be a boss.“I can’t. I can’t,” he says.“I am not a good taskmaster. I am not a good babysitter. You know people have messy lives and when you take on people they are getting married; they are getting divorced; they are getting sick—you know all the things that happen in life. I am not a good Boy Scout leader. I’m too emotionally involved in everything I do. I can’t be neutral about stuff.” “Guy and I met about ’86 or ’87,” Peter Wakefield Jackson says.“We had a mutual friend at the Chicago Gift Show, a guy named Brooks Titcomb whose family owned Woodbury Pewter. Guy had been friends with Brooks and his brother Gordon from playing music together and I got to know Brooks from doing trade shows near his booth.He told me about his potter friend GuyWolff. Maybe another couple of years later—I had met Brooks in ’84 or ’85—Guy had gotten involved with a company based in Kansas called Diamond Brand Regency decorated pot, white clay, 4 pounds, 2012. Staubach_GW_Finalpgs.indd 96 4/26/13 10:55 AM 97 The Guy Wolff Guilds Stoneware and they were looking to do a line of reproduction early American style pottery and had come across Guy and thought he might be a good person to design it and head it up.”Wolff did do some consulting for them and helped them with some designs but the relationship was brief.“So anyway they had come out onto the market with some of their initial pieces and Guy was out at the Chicago Gift show, must have been the summer of ’86 or ’87, so we got to talking. We are kindred spirits with our love for the old pottery, so we became friends after that. “I’ve got another potter friend in his neck of the woods,Todd Piker of Cornwall Bridge and so I’d been there to visit Todd,my friend there,and also visited Guy and so it was just a collegial friendship up until ’96, I believe it was, when Guy called me and said he was in a real bind with Smith and Hawken because they were flooding him with orders and he couldn’t keep up.” Jackson began making pots in seventh grade at the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma (now the Philbrook Museum of Art). He built a wheel in his basement with his dad and bought an electric kiln with his paper route earnings before going on to Knox College where he earned a degree in Studio Arts. After that he apprenticed in Minnesota with Wayne Branum and then worked as a production potter for two years at Rowe Pottery. Then he started his own business. “My...