By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, December 15, 1934.
“The trouble is,” said Jim, “that you make up your mind to be sensible about Christmas and then, along about the last week, a sort of gush takes hold of you.”
“I know the thing,” I admitted.
“A sort of emotion or something,” went on Jimmie. “And even although you have got your children’s presents hid up in the closet shelf you go up and look at them and think they are not enough.”
That’s it,” I rued.
“So you rush out, three days before Christmas,” said Jim, “and buy them a lot more stuff.”
“It’s part of the institution of Christmas,” I said.
“Look here, Jimmie,” I suddenly said. “You’re an artist. Why don’t you sit down in the evenings and paint a dozen or so landscapes? There isn’t a friend or relation of yours, near enough to require a Christmas gift, that wouldn’t give his eye teeth for an original painting by you. To be framed. It’s a swell idea. If I had talent like you that’s how I’d solve my Christmas problem.”
“You should talk,” said Jim. “Why don’t you compose some beautiful little moral sentiment, something characteristic, like:
“‘The man who can smile
is the man that’s worth while.’
“You know. the sort of thing,” cried Jim eagerly. “And then have it hand-lettered on art paper and send it around to all your relations and friends. They could frame it. How proud they’d be to have a motto like that, all from you, on their wall!”
“Don’t be silly, Jim,” I said.
“All right; don’t you be silly, suggesting I paint a lot of landscapes,” said he. “Artists aren’t like that. They can’t work wholesale. They’ve got to suffer over their work.”
“It seems a great pity,” I said, “that two ingenious fellows like us can’t make something that would do for Christmas presents. Women are lucky. They can knit things and crochet things. They could easily give jars of preserves or pickles to their friends for Christmas. You know. Done up in pretty bottles, with scarlet ribbon around the neck?”
“A jar of ginger marmalade,” said Jim, “would be just as nice a Christmas present as a necktie.”
“But what can we do?” I begged. “What can a man make that would pass for a Christmas present?”
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” mused Jimmie. “Not a thing. Men are pretty helpless.”
“I used to be good at manual training,” I suggested. “I once carved a kind of box. I guess I could turn out some nice carved book-ends made of mahogany. That isn’t a bad idea.”
“Or hammered brass and copper,” cried Jim. “Remember that fellow with the whiskers we saw at the Exhibition, hammering out bracelets and ash trays and all sorts of little things? He worked like lightning. There wouldn’t be a bad idea. Let’s get some metal and some hammers. We’ve got a few days left. I bet we could turn out a couple of dozen objects of art before Christmas.”
A High Resolve
“I’m not much on hammering,” I said, “I hammer typewriter keys all day long. I wouldn’t want to hammer brass all night.”
“That’s my feeling about wood carving,” agreed Jim. “After scratching away with a pen all day I wouldn’t want to go scratching away with a chisel.”
“We ought to think up something we could both work at,” I said. “We could turn out a lot more stuff if we worked together on it, like manufacturing. How about batik1, you know -staining silk with pictures?”
“Too messy and too arty,” said Jim. “How about – er – how about…” I suggested.
“I’ve got it,” shouted Jimmie. “Pottery. Pottery, of course!”
“That’s it!”
“You remember that old fellow at the Exhibition?” went on Jim ecstatically. “A wheel whirring around? A gob of mud? And he holds a kitchen knife and some curly bits of tin against the mud whizzing around? And lo, a pot!”
“Jim, you’ve hit it,” I applauded him. “We’ve seen vases and jugs with gorgeous rich reds and maroons and blues. With just big simple patterns of leaves on them. Gorgeous things.”
“I don’t think I’d have any trouble painting on the patterns,” said Jim. “Where could we get quickly some dope on how to prepare the clay and the glaze?”
“Encyclopaedia,” I stated. “It will give the whole business.”
So we dashed down to The Star library and not only did we find all about pottery in the encyclopaedia but there were books of clippings on pottery and a couple of little volumes on the art of pottery and its history. In fifteen minutes of judicious reading Jimmie and I had mastered the fundamentals of the art and craft of pottery.
“It’s amazing,” Jim declared. “Those ancient Greeks, living three thousand years ago! Making pottery as lovely as that. Why, it’s more artistic than the stuff we can buy to-day! You’d think the Greeks, three thousand years ago, were more artistic than the people of Ontario to-day!”
“That’s what they say,” I informed him.
“But it’s ridiculous,” cried Jim. “Look at these lovely colored plates.”
And we studied the old Greek, Etruscan, Roman vases, bottles, bowls and jugs portrayed in the encyclopaedia.
“Why,” rasped Jim, “in three thousand years we should have advanced a million miles ahead of this instead of falling behind it!”
“Maybe,” I ventured, “you and I will start a revival; and with our pottery, lightly conceived as a Christmas gift to our small circle of friends, revolutionize the art world. Let us start where the Greeks left off!”
“If the Greeks could do this stuff so can we,” announced Jim.
We read how they took clay and kneaded it, and then spun the ball of clay on the wheel, and shaped the pot and painted a design on it, and baked it in an oven.
“It’s a cinch,” said Jim. “We can turn out fifty pots in three weeks. Littie pots for our casual acquaintances. Big pots for our dear friends and relations.”
“And all,” I added, “bearing the unmistakable character of the artists who created them.”
From the Humber riverbank north of Weston we got two bushel baskets of reddish clay. From a store on Richmond street we got a kind of powder to dust on over the colors that Jim was to paint on the pots. That would melt into a glaze. From an old tricycle that one of my boys had worn out we fashioned a potters’ wheel. We made a round disc of wood from the top of an apple barrel and fastened it with wire to the tricycle wheel. By reaching under and turning the pedal the wheel revolved beautifully, fast or slow, just as we required it.
We set up a bench in Jimmie’s cellar and went to work. It was absurdly simple. All you do is moisten the clay and make a ball of it, which you flatten out and curl up the edges as the wheel revolves.
The first two pots we had the clay too thin. Jim was doing the pioneer work, moulding the pot, and I was turning the pedal. But I got a little fast and suddenly the clay flew out in several directions, splattering Jim and me with mud.
“Not so fast!” commanded Jim.
“Make the dough a little thicker,” I retorted.
Which he did. And we got the pot nicely. moulded up into a sort of fruit bowl when suddenly it left the wheel with a jerk, flew up in the air and crashed into the fruit shelf, upsetting two jars, one of peaches and one of pickled onions, which broke on the floor.
“Not so fast,” repeated Jim.
So we slowly fashioned a nice little fruit bowl. It was our firstborn.
“Boy,” I said, as I turned the wheel, and it was a little tiresome, “there’s the first Frise Etruscan masterpiece.”
“I think,” said Jim, “we’ll paint a simple design in low color, a kind of landscape, with a blue lake and green islands.”
“Why not put a Birdseye Center scene on it?” I asked. “Old Archie chasing Pigskin Peters, in his red and white striped sweater, around the bowl.”
“That’s not art,” warned Jim, sternly.
“It’s art to me,” I said wistfully. “I wish I had a bowl like that.”
“No, sir, a Canadian, scene, like a Group of Seven picture,” said Jim, “gray limbs and cream-colored rocks and a yellow sky. That’s art.”
“You’re the artist,” I said. “I’m just the wheel turner.
“In regular manufacturing,” said Jim, “we should turn out a whole raft of pots first. Then paint them all. Then powder them. Then bake them.”
“All right,” I said, although I had a little sciatica in the arm.
So we turned out we eleven pots, some large, some small, some high, some low, some fancy shaped, and the last one Jim worked the two little handles on the side. As I turned the wheel Jim’s nimble fingers moulded the gob of clay by depressing here, filling out there.
When it came to painting them Jim did a beautiful thing on the first one. and he liked it so much he decided to go ahead and powder it and bake it in the oven, just to celebrate the first work of art.
The scene was lovely. The rocks were a kind of sour cream color, the trees had scabby limbs of a color like an elephant’s skin, the few dying leaves were like old cigar butts strung on wires, and the sky was like Roquefort cheese. It was a masterpiece of Canadian art.
“It’s a knockout,” I cried.
Jim had the kitchen oven heating all the time and it was piping hot. The encyclopaedia said the heat had to be intense.
Placing the pot on a cake tin, Jim slid it into the oven.
“Now it has to bake several hours, the encyclopaedia said,” announced Jim. We got our coats on and went for a walk. In an hour we came back. We proceeded down cellar to our humble studio which some day great critics and art lovers might buy for the nation as a shrine.
“Ach!” cried Jimmie.
The ten other pots had all sagged down until they were just ten reddish looking pancakes on the table. Some of them leaned sideways, others had just sat right down their bases.
“Aw,” said I.
“Let’s see how the first one is coming anyway,” said Jim, leading upstairs again to the kitchen. The gas oven was fairly pushing heat. There was a smell of burning paint, a bright, interesting smell of something baking.
Jim took a dish-towel and opened the oven door.
We both stooped down and stared in astonishment.
The pot was gone.
“Has anybody taken it?” I demanded.
Jim twitched the cake tin out.
“No,” said he hollowly.
In the pan was a pile of dry red sand.
We went down cellar in silence. Jim wandered about, patting the remaining jars of peaches and pickled onions. Then he gathered up the shapeless pancakes of clay and dropped them heavily back into the bushel basket.
“The reason the Greeks,” said Jim, “made such beautiful pots was that there were no stores where they could buy them.”
“Art flourishes,” I added, “where there are no modern conveniences.”
“What are you going to give your wife for Christmas?” asked Jim.
“Oh, I guess another couple of suits of lingerie.”
“Same here,” said Jim.
Editor’s Notes:
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