Byron Temple: The Gift To Be Simple   1      2      3      4      -      PRINTER VERSION

>> During Temple's brief stay in New York City before he went to England, his hangout had been the Museum of Modern Art, where he met friends every Sunday to look at and talk about modern painting. He remembers being deeply moved by exhibitions of Mondrian and De Kooning. He did not believe that painting and pottery were mutually exclusive; in his mind, each had its own history and way of speaking. By the time he left St. Ives in 1962, he was certain that others besides himself were equally moved by pottery. He did not think that for pottery to be modern it had to discard its history, as Slivka seemed to suggest.

Temple looks back on the two years at the Leach pottery as his graduate school. Leach, who ordinarily traveled a lot, was in St. Ives during Temple's sojourn and was a constant presence. The discipline and routine he learned there proved invaluable, but more important was the intellectual encouragement. Leach urged him to read about and look at as much pottery as he could. There were ongoing discussions about the relative merits of different styles, as well as arguments over things like handle placement, decoration and the balance of both in relation to particular forms. It was a place where he could explore his intense interest in pottery, a place where it was taken seriously and where the aim was to expand and build on pottery's particular history, not abrogate it.

At St. Ives, Temple's sensibility began to jell and surprisingly, or perhaps not, it was sometimes incompatible with Leach's. The student was more attracted than his mentor to Scandinavian design—with its minimal, angular quality that emphasized material and process. Leach was, not to put too fine a point on it, unimpressed with that aesthetic. Nevertheless, he encouraged his apprentice to make work that reflected his own interests. Temple remembers that his biggest concern during the period at St. Ives was how he was going to fit into American culture when he returned home. How was he going to make pottery, for example, that was relevant to contemporary life here in the United States? He knew he didn't want to make English country ware. The only thing he was sure of was that it must be work people would use in their homes.

After his return Temple realized that there might be only a small number of people who would want his pots and that his survival as a full-time potter would depend on his ability to reach them. At first he went to craft fairs, but he found himself unwilling to compromise his vision in order to meet the demands of a fickle and visually unsophisticated audience that prized novelty and any kind of cobalt decoration over his straightforward, unadorned forms. By the time he moved to Lambertville, New Jersey, in the mid-1960s, he knew he had to cultivate a market of his own, one that understood and wanted what he wanted.

Temple found that his work didn't fit into either of the two major camps that characterized mainstream contemporary crafts. His preference for the austere, for example, was unpopular with the crafts-buying public, while his unswerving commitment to utilitarian pottery put him out of step with those who were beginning to claim—by the conscious denial of function in their work—fine art status. He realized he had to develop a strategy whereby he could reach beyond these two groups to get his work seen. He decided to create a catalog in the form of a black-and-white poster from which individuals and shops
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