It was in 2007 that I lost my friend and mentor, a long time ago as you acknowledged. What I didn’t get to tell you was his name was Reed. He was a well studied, skillful potter who was coming into his own. You knew he had died long ago, but you probably didn’t know he died in his sleep of sudden heart trouble. The blow cut a Reed shaped hole in my life. He had a distinct build to both his body and his life so the hole was, and I think you could see it still is, uniquely carved. For his memorial, another potter friend and mentor of ours cleared his gallery of his own work and filled it with Reed’s to display. I met and talked with Reed’s other friends and family and was told to take a piece of Reed’s home. I came home with a cup that I knew was not made by Reed but was in his collection. It was clearly made by one of his famous teachers and mentors. I cherish that cup. I have so many pieces made by Reed and still use them daily, the way he would have wanted. At his memorial I met his best friend Chris, and we talked for quite awhile. He invited me to go to Reed’s place and dismantle his kiln’s burners for my own use. Please let me tell you a potter’s kiln is a potter’s heart, and I never went back to Reed’s place until the day you and I met.

You were put off guard to have caught me returning to my friend’s place so many years after his passing, no longer withheld. You were angry. I spoiled the place with the scent of my trespassing just a few days before the hunt. “Let me explain,” I said as I walked down Reed’s overgrown drive. You see, I had walked down that driveway many times with Reed to fetch his big open flag after the end of a day of making his living keeping gallery hours. As I walked towards you down the drive, I carried a brick from the shaped arch of Reed’s rotting kiln. The wind was crisp as it split off Lake Michigan behind you, but the November sun was surprisingly warm as it edged toward the vastness of the crystal blue water.

You were angry, but you knew why I had come. I spoiled your hunt, but mine was the better need. You had just lost your son on May 15th, so you knew well why I’d come, and with conflict in your heart, you got into your truck to drive away.  You stopped though and told me through your passenger’s window that you were glad I came. I then realized why my soul had sought Reed’s place on that day and not years earlier. “Sunday is my birthday,” I said. “Oh, happy birthday.” “Thanks,” I said, “opening day. I will be 48. My friend died when he was 47.” “What a shame,” you said. “I know.”

Driving away these words came into my mind: Only where love and need are one,/And the work is play for mortal stakes,/Is the deed ever really done/For Heaven and the future’s sakes.  Those are the words of Robert Frost from his 1934 poem Two Tramps in Mud Time. I include the poem here in my letter to you. All the best my dear huntsman. I will yield to you your right to this opening day. Happy November 15th.

Two Tramps in Mud Time

or, A Full-Time Interest

Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily “Hit them hard!”
I knew pretty well why he had dropped behind
And let the other go on a way.
I knew pretty well what he had in mind:
He wanted to take my job for pay.

Good blocks of oak it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good,
That day, giving a loose my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom.
It is snowing a flake; and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum.
Except in color he isn’t blue,
But he wouldn’t advise a thing to blossom.

The water for which we may have to look
In summertime with a witching wand,
In every wheelrut’s now a brook,
In every print of a hoof a pond.
Be glad of water, but don’t forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth.

The time when most I loved my task
These two must make me love it more
By coming with what they came to ask.
You’d think I never had felt before
The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip of earth on outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

Out of the wood two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps).
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
They judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax
They had no way of knowing a fool.

Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay

And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man’s work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right–agreed.

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

Late last summer a tall, lean and bedraggled man walked slowly up our driveway one morning and caught my daughter on the deck. Stopping a good distance from our house he stood and in a tone meant purposely not to be threatening yelled, “Can I use your phone? I’m lost.”  My daughter replied “yes, ” and got the phone for him. He made several calls looking for someone to help him. From what he spoke into the phone we pieced together that his girlfriend, and then his friends, had left him in the woods sometime in the night.  Sustaining many cuts and minor lashes from briars and brambles, he had walked all night through the woods and, moments before, stumbled down the hill onto our road opposite our house. Finally after calling his father and pleading with him he brought the phone back to us on the deck.  Apparently rejected, he asked for directions to the nearest gas station and my daughter sent him walking north.

One afternoon, about a year before, my daughter and I were in the yard rubbing oil into the legs and feet of our chickens who had a bad leg mite infestation when a young, tall man came walking up our drive in need of water. Covered in oil and chicken feathers, with my vinyl gloved hands I motioned to our well faucet up the driveway from which he could draw water. Bottle filled, he thanked us and walked back down our drive and out onto the road headed north.

Now on the morning after the red sweatshirted man in the black car came to our house asking for water I see all three men as the same man.  Our house a way station to a stranger headed north.

Cherries of the night are riper
Than the cherries pluckt at noon 
Gather to your fairy piper 
When he pipes his magic tune: 
        Merry, merry, 
        Take a cherry; 
        Mine are sounder, 
        Mine are rounder, 
        Mine are sweeter 
        For the eater
        Under the moon. 
And you’ll be fairies soon.

In the cherry pluckt at night, 
With the dew of summer swelling, 
There’s a juice of pure delight, 
Cool, dark, sweet, divinely smelling. 
        Merry, merry, 
        Take a cherry; 
        Mine are sounder, 
        Mine are rounder, 
        Mine are sweeter 
        For the eater 
        In the moonlight. 
And you’ll be fairies quite.

When I sound the fairy call, 
Gather here in silent meeting, 
Chin to knee on the orchard wall, 
Cooled with dew and cherries eating. 
        Merry, merry, 
        Take a cherry; 
        Mine are sounder, 
        Mine are rounder, 
        Mine are sweeter. 
        For the eater 
        When the dews fall.
And you’ll be fairies all.

“Unimaginative Alvaro,” commented Master, smiling.  “There was a roach?”

“Yes, Master.”

Oh, how foolish, I thought.  He should have frightened it off, not painted it.

Cristobal was sulky. 

“I would like to ask, most respectfully,” he said, in a disrespectful tone, “why my painting was destroyed?”

“To teach you not to beautify.  It is a great temptation.”

Cristobal struggled not to say more, but he could not help himself.  He looked at Master with rebellion in his bright eyes.

“I thought Art should be Beauty,” he muttered.

“No Cristobal.  Art should be Truth; and Truth unadorned, unsentimentalized, is Beauty.  You must learn this, Cristobal.” 

Taken from I, Juan de Pareja written by Elizabeth Borton de Trevino.

I, Juan de Pareja is told through the voice of the slave of the great Spanish master painter Diego Velazquez.  It is the 1966 winner of the Newberry Medal for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.

Diego Velazquez lived from 1599-1660.  That was a long time ago.  You might wonder if his life, his work, and his feelings and beliefs about art could be relevant to young art students today.  (Don’t worry, I would never be as severe and harsh to my students as Diego Velazquez was to his.)  I read this passage from I, Juan de Pareja to my drawing students because I want them to understand that art is not always pretty and I want them to start to think about the many ways art can be truth.

My November Guest

My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

-Robert Frost

from a Boy’s Will published in 1913

I love this poem for so many reasons.  It is moody like November.  It so fits my mood in November.

If you look around on the internet you can hear a recording of Frost reading the poem himself.

I like to have my drawing students read this poem because so much of being a visual artist is about expressing feeling and mood.  To be able to do that they need to feel things.  They can’t just perfect their hand-eye coordination and other technical skills and be done with it.  If they want their work to really speak to people it has to be more than nicely rendered drawings of quaint scenes.   Also, some people write November off as an ugly month but I want to encourage my students to get outside and feel November like Frost does in his poem.   No one always feels “beach party in July.”  Sometimes we are “pity party in November.”  Sorrow is just as important in human life as joy.  Lastly I want my drawing students to read this poem because other forms of art are employed all of the time to convey feeling and mood.  As visual artists we can learn so much from exploring how other artists, such as poets and songwriters, delve into feelings and mood.

All Images by Christyl Burnett.  Copyright 2018

All Images by Christyl Burnett.  Copyright 2018

Returning to five, six, seven of age
When all self-consciousness is forboded
O, yes, this is the something special stage-
Realism’s failed grip is duly noted.

A child’s advice to me freely given
All that’s before me but a pared down sight
Oh that all of my life were so sieven’d
For length of my life what then of great height?

For water is loose, as clay is to fire
Trust that letting go is ever higher.

Christyl Burnett Copyright 2018

Next we looked at how Islamic design employs symmetry found in nature and since we would be working in three dimensions we looked at examples of radial symmetry in flowers and snowflakes.  I brought small square boards for each student with radial lines and concentric circle drawn on them for the students to use as a guide for measuring out the designs they would brush onto their pots.

The students now understood that I was going to be taking the pots home to my studio for firing and would be coming back with them during a follow-up visit.  The delayed reality of ownership with clay is always something one has to reckon with, but they all put their trust in me, that I would return with their newly acquired pots.  Before the class was dismissed I gave the students a small homework assignment.  I asked them to consider what wishes they might ask to be granted if a genie were to grant them three wishes.  I asked this with the stipulation that one wish must be for the benefit of the world, one wish would be for the benefit of their community, and one wish could be all for their own benefit.  They were to think about this until I returned for my second visit at which time they would get there pots back all fired and water tight.

Upon my return the students were glad to see I made good on my promise to bring their precious pots back to them and we all shared our impressively altruistic wishes.

Impact:  I have been a freelance teacher of clay and drawing for many years.   One thing I know is that students respond very positively to the opportunity to create art using high quality art materials.  That being said they can’t just simply be given access to the materials for the opportunity to be worth the investment.  They must have something to create art about and must be shown how to use the materials in an inspiring way.  Creating art as a reaction to an experience –in this case the experience of a tale from Arabian and Islamic culture- equals educating.  It is just as valuable as writing a report about it or giving a presentation on it.  Students have so few opportunities to demonstrate their understanding in this way.  And, further, without it they often have less understanding.  The two go hand in hand: experience + expression = learning.  This is especially true for those who struggle with written and oral forms of expression.  Programs such as this are the very thing that some students will use as the lifeline with which to pull themselves through their educational career.  I know, I was one of them.

Thank you so much to The Franke Center for the Arts for the opportunity to work with these kids in this meaningful way.