Neil Tetkowski is not easily categorized. He is a potter who makes sculpture. His artworks are rugged and down to earth, but his living space is filled with classic examples of Bauhaus design. His ceramic platters are not designed to serve food; they are meant to be explored visually. These expressionistic works conjure up thoughts of Japan, but the scale is too big, the color too bold, the approach too brash.
During his grade-school years, Tetkowshi shuttled between Siena, Italy, with its rich Renaissance heritage, and the gritty industrial city of Buffalo, New York. As a teenager he envisioned a life as a self-sufficient potter in the country: "do-it-yourself, hippie, laid back, bake bread, go to the mountains, and make pots." In college he practiced the piano for four hours a day until his art professors gave him an ultimatum: art or music.
Tetkowski is soft-spoken, reticent to discuss his personal life, but eager to share his thoughts on art and the art world. In short, the man is a study in contrasts.
Artistic Origins
The only son of two art teachers, Tetkowski grew up in Buffalo. His father was chairman of the design department of SUNY College in Buffalo, and initiated a year abroad program based in Siena, so that family spent alternate years in Buffalo and Siena. Tetkowski recalls that as a child growing up, he encountered difficulties because of these regular disruptions. He really never became a part of the grade-school society in Buffalo, because when most boys were learning to play baseball, he was in Italy visiting churches and museums with his parents. He turned to music and art to sustain himself.
As a teenager he become interested in clay. His father's best friend was a ceramist, and he recalls, visiting him and reverently handling his collection. When Tetkowski's high school acquired a potter's wheel, he helped uncrate it, and since the teacher did not know how to throw pots, Tetkowski experimented until he could. He loved the medium and enrolled at Alfred University, well known for its ceramics school, with some of America's preeminent clay artists on the faculty: Wayne Higby, Val Cushing, and Robert Tuner. He and others in his freshman class thought they were there to immerse themselves in the medium, but quickly found out that the school required a strong foundation in art before they were allowed into the clay studio. He remembers, "There were kids form allover the country who thought they were going to make pots and instead we woke up in art school. … I became a victim to the program." Like many other students in the seventies, he became "disillusioned" and tool some time off to consider what he really wanted to do. He want to Europe entreated alone. "I remember asking these big philosophical questions like What is art?," says Tetkowski laughing, "I was eighteen at the time."
During his travels he met Michael Cardew, the well-known English potter who had studied with Bernard Leach. Leach is considered the one most instrumental in bringing the Japanese ceramic aesthetic to the West. Through Cardew he met Leach, who was in his eighties and blind. They spend an entire day together. "I got a real taste of what St. Ives [the pottery founded by Leach with the Japanese potter Shoji Hamada in 1920] was all about, and the Zen philosophy and getting turned on to the author of The
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