Designs for Pottery, 1970

Designs for Pottery consists of nine, 4 x 7-inch, technical-pen and India ink drawings on 7 x 10-inch paper. I produced this little series of little drawings in August, 1970, in New York City from research and sketches at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

1970 was an interesting year for me. From late April to mid-June I lived in a resort, Deer Lodge, at Lake Louise, Alberta. I had a job there cleaning tables in the restaurant, but I spent most of my time sketching in the mountains around Lake Louise. Sometime in June I hitch-hiked back to Toronto where, beginning July 1st, I taught in the 20-day Summer Course in the Art Department of Central Technical School (CTS), the first of eight years of teaching at CTS. When this ended, about July 20, I rode the bus to New York City, when I stayed with my American girlfriend in her Greenwich Village apartment. I stayed until the end of September, when I returned to Toronto to take up teaching again. My friend moved to Toronto a few months later.

In the 1960s, as an art student at CTS, one of my favourite courses was Museum Studies (taught by Kathleen Kennedy). We students were more or less free to draw what we wanted to, so my several weeks at the MET was much the same. This time though, I drew nine fictional ceramic objects that only vaguely resembled real ones that interested me. Then I continued wandering through the museum until I found appropriate decoration for each object. I drew everything in light pencil, and turned that into pen and ink when I returned to Village apartment.