While I wait for myself to make the larger postings about Hawai’i, I will celebrate a deep friendship renewed there when we visited Willi & Kate Jacobson the 24th of December. They live near where we were visiting on the Kona coast… yes, these are friends of mine going back into the ’70s. Several days later in our trip we will visit some friends of Stephen’s with similar vintage…
He made this shot of Willi & me bridging deliciously dissonant color schemes:
Elliot — whose parents made our last visit together in my first Seattle apartment, the Cabinet, on their first night away from him as a baby — declared himself resultantly independent & went to his computer, leaving two adult couples to discover commonalities in our new & old.
Now, we are mostly comfortable in our middle aged versions of history, even as we recall what might have been more lively than we can now afford to remember… or not. We don’t do life so badly now…
I remember Willi first in 1975 for some really big black gutsy pots I met early in my Sedona arrival. Later his production studio became a local institution nurturing piecework jobs for numerous folk who verged into my curass during that period. Somewhere in there I commissioned from him the tea set which we regularly love to use now on Vashon Island.
I have the first prototype cup he made for me, an archetypal form referencing the essentials of wheel thrown clay. Strength & ease… but a bit larger & more open than the final versions.
I’ve long loved the word Astragal which describes such horizontal ribbing. Willi explored this in the numerous manifestations as each cup took its own variation of shape & proportion. Even longer have I loved taking tea from the soulful richness of this set, particularly from those favorite cups which tuck more closely into astragalic puckering rims…
Check out Kate & Willi’s collaborations in current work at: