First in a series
All artists, at some point, face the same daunting question: How can I make a living doing this?
“I heard of this artist one time, a gentleman bought every piece she ever made,” reflects St. Petersburg potter Charlie Parker. “So she didn’t have any pressure. And I’m thinking well, that’s kind of a weird way to go — you can make whatever you want, because he’s gonna buy it all.”
That pressure, a need and desire to keep changing and improving your work, is what keeps art alive. And the 65-year-old Parker, recipient of MUSE’s Visual Arts Award for 2018, has never been content to rest on his laurels. He can make whatever he wants, because he’s earned it.
Approximately 20 member-students attend his classes at Charlie Parker Pottery; other area potters lease time on his pro-grade wheels and kilns. And while Parker and his wife, Nancy, may not exactly be living on Easy Street, he’s got this art thing down to a science.
“I make a living by teaching,” he says. “Right now, they pay my mortgage, my electric bill … anything that I need to do to survive is paid by them.
“And then whatever I sell, I go to Hawaii. That’s the little icing on the cake. If I sell something, it stays in my pocket for about five minutes and then I buy something.”
Parker’s first job, at age 14, was unloading 50-pound bags of raw clay-making material from a Minneapolis railroad boxcar. From there he graduated to the clay production line. He emptied the bags into a dome mixer.
“I was athletic, and had good hand-to-eye,” Parker says. “Things that I did, I was always pretty good at. So after a few years of being on the production line, I kept moving up. At 17, I became the clay production manager, so I did all the ordering and producing the clay for the University of Minnesota, and the local potters. Making quite a bit of money.”
Inevitably, he took an interest in the final product, and signed on as an apprentice to studio potter Warren Westerberg. He was a natural, and had his first gallery show before his 18th birthday.
“My teacher said ‘Hey listen, you make good pots … you want to make great pots?’” Parker recalls. “I went ‘I’m already selling pottery … but yeah, OK.’ And he told me to lose a few of ‘em. He said ‘You never lose them, so you’re not taking them far enough. You’re an average potter.’
“To be a good potter, he said, I had to take it to the max — take it until it falls down. Then you know how extreme you should go. Instead of doing this, do that.”
From his mentor, he learned about creating texture, about color, form and character, about advance glazing and firing techniques, and about never being completely satisfied.
The Minnesota winters finally got to him, so in 1978 Parker packed everything up and moved to St. Petersburg. For many years, he divided his time between Derby Lane, where he worked as a mutual clerk, and a ceramics instructor at the St. Pete Arts Center.
In 1996, he and two partners rented an old warehouse, hung a shingle as “St. Petersburg Clay Company,” and rented out studio space.
For our arts community, this was a game-changer.
“We were the mavericks,” Parker says. “We came in and started the ceramic scene in St. Petersburg.”
St. Pete Clay introduced the first gas reduction kilns to the private sector (previously, they’d only been available for use in university art departments). Standard, air-burning electric kilns, Parker explains, are “like toasters.” To bring out the real magic in clay and glaze requires the deep, penetrating heat of burning gas. Super-heated to 2300 degrees. Bowels of hell stuff.
Best of all, everything was handmade. St. Pete Clay wasn’t the ceramics department at Sears.
“We came up with the idea of making ceramics available to people who wanted to enjoy it. There was nothing here. If you wanted a vessel, there was a real good chance that you weren’t going to find one.
“In Minnesota, I think you could actually fire at the 7-Eleven, there were so many potters.”
Charlie Parker Pottery, a combination studio and gallery, opened for business seven years ago. Every day, a steady stream of students, teachers, and buyers comes through the door.
And Mr. Potter continues to learn new things about his art. Not so long ago, a local bonsai society contracted him to create a series of specialty pots for their miniature Asian trees. Parker, who’d never made one before, thoroughly researched both the plant and the pot. His design was a resounding success, and the first run was a complete sellout.
He’s a friendly, gregarious guy, and he likes his students every bit as much as they like him, his irreverence and sense of humor, and the way he coaxes beautiful things out of cold, inanimate blobs of clay.
He’s reasonably sure the next Charlie Parker might be among them.
“I still see a lot of people come in here and take to this really quickly,” he says. “Because they understand that the hand-to-eye is the real meaning of this is, with the thought of ‘where am I going with it?’”
This article appears in Dec 14-21, 2017.
