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CREATIVITY

Why I create pottery What will I do with myself while my 12-
year-old son takes his first pottery class?
By Dudley Harris, MD Well, dang! I’ll just take the class with him!
That was more than 30 years ago. I’m still
Above: Pottery bowls are readied for an open house sale, with proceeds making pottery. Who knew?
benefiting local charities. Photos courtesy Dr. Dudley Harris
Below: A mixing bowl with a Shino glaze was created by Dr. Harris. There’s work time, and there’s free time.
What do we do with our free time? We seek
18 San Antonio Medicine • February 2015 entertainment -- travel, movies, television,
etc. Making stuff is entertainment. It just
so happened that it was making pottery that
chose to entertain me.

Pottery is a beautiful thing for an intro-
vert with a touch of the obsessive. Hours
of solitude working on the potter’s wheel
making the same thing over and over and
striving only for just a bit more refine-
ment … a bit more beauty … with each
thousand pots.

KINSHIP, CONNECTION
There is nostalgia surrounding pottery.

It’s a feeling of being connected ... to early
man around his campfire working clay, to
the Japanese tea master and to all the un-
known craftsmen through the centuries.
This is not something I think about all the
time, but when I sit down at my wheel and
slap down a ball of clay on the wheel head,
I do feel a kinship with all the potters who
have made exactly that same maneuver and
stared at exactly that same potential.

Making pottery on the potter’s wheel is
not easy. It requires a single-mindedness
that might seem excruciatingly boring. But
that spinning wheel with its lump of clay
has an allure that drives me today and has
driven me for decades. I don’t even bother
asking why.

Turning a ball of clay into a mixing bowl