I began making pots in the summer of 1960, after I had been accepted into the MFA program at Minnesota, in sculpture.  I learned informally from students of Warren MacKenzie (but never took a class from him).  The pots were wheel thrown “School of MacKenzie”: cups, mugs, casseroles, bowls, pitchers, plates and vases.  They were all glazed on the outside.  Attempts at decoration always felt wrong for me.  I hated to cover the outside of the pot with glaze.  I had figured out in my undergraduate efforts in sculpture that the surface needed to happen directly from the shaping, from the process of getting the shape right.  There was simply no way of adding a surface to a shape as a final step.  The surface is the shape.  Adding a layer of glaze to the already made shape just didn’t work for me.  So the early pots are all wheel thrown, unglazed (outside) and undecorated.

Wheel-thrown casserole circa 1980

Two tumblers 1976