Guy Wolff: Master Potter in the Garden

Introduction

If you mention Guy Wolff to a serious gardener, that gardener will tell you either that he or she owns a Guy Wolff flowerpot or how much he or she covets one. His pots, from small windowsillsized vessels to massive outdoor receptacles, are widely considered the epitome of gardenware. The outward sweep from the foot to the rim, classically proportioned, the simple decoration, the pure color of the clay, terracotta or white, the marks of his hands, make plants look their best. Introduction Staubach_GW_Finalpgs.indd 1 4/26/13 10:55 AM 2 Guy Wolff His pots possess an honesty and liveliness that machine-made flowerpots lack. They are beautiful and eminently functional, with generous drainage holes, a porous composition,and a shape that guarantees that a root ball can be slipped out for repotting when the time comes. Wolff is probably the best-known potter working in the U.S. today. In gardening circles, he is highly revered, a horticultural icon. Gardeners flock to his lectures and demonstrations.Visit the personal gardens of landscape designers, and you will see Guy Wolff pots. Step inside the gates of estate gardens, and you will see Guy Wolff pots. Ironically, his pots have been on the cover of Horticulture Magazine, but not on the cover of Ceramics Monthly (the potters’ magazine of record). Yet he is a potter’s potter.He’s a big ware thrower,a skill few have today.He thinks deeply about what he calls the architecture of pots and the importance of handmade objects in our lives. He learned from some of the best traditional potters in Wales and England, disciplining himself to be able to throw a half-ton of clay a day, as the old-time throwers did. He has steeped himself in the history of ceramics, especially the ceramics of Italy, France, England, Wales, and early America.He supports himself,sometimes tenuously,with what he makes.And he has succeeded in reaching an interesting accommodation with the realities of the modern marketplace and has established guilds of potters. The day I first met with him for this book,he was carrying an 80-pound pot from his drying boards to one of his kilns for ten hours of candling at 200°F.This lengthy period of low heat would ensure that all the water would be removed from the large garden vessel (taller than my youngest granddaughter) so that it could be safely fired. Entering his seventh decade, a red bandanna tied tightly on his head, with thick arms, a slight belly in the way of a man who has lived a certain number of years, average height, an air of seriousness and purpose, he measures his days in making time. He says he has been very lucky. More than once, he says, things have all just come together and happened for him. But he has had his share of challenges too, and worked to face and overcome them. Wolff first set up shop in Woodville, a small hamlet in the postcard-pretty northwestern hills of Connecticut in 1971. Today his shop is in a small eighteenth -century two-room house that he expanded.The front,the original house, is his showroom, lined with shelves displaying his flowerpots and other pieces. Across the back of the house, in an addition, is his workspace, crowded with three wheels,three kilns,a pugmill and ware boards.His treasured coggles,the Staubach_GW_Finalpgs.indd 2 4/26/13 10:55 AM 3 Introduction carved caster-like wheels he uses for decorating,hang along the wall,objets d’art themselves. There is a loft over the showroom. Here he keeps his wonderful collection of the pots that he admires and takes inspiration from, and, close to the floor, under the eaves, shelves of gardening and ceramics books. Up the hill from the shop and behind it are his wife Erica’s abundant gardens punctuated with Wolff ’s pots, which she has planted, and the handmade house they share. North of the workshop is an outbuilding with special racks for his father’s paintings. Except for these wrapped and racked abstract expressionist paintings by his famous father, Robert Jay Wolff, the bucolic setting is exactly what you would imagine for a country potter working either today or one hundred years ago. It is also the home and workshop of the cosmopolitan artist-potter, businessman-potter that he is; one...