For Mary Mallman, the petite potter who runs the Manhattan Beach ceramic studio in Live Oak Park, it’s a typical Thursday morning. A dozen adults are watching her hands with all the intensity of L.A. Phil musicians following maestro Gustavo Dudamel’s baton. Using a strip of wood caning, her fingers deftly work a kind of visual melody as they fashion a handle for a blue-green ceramic teapot. Never mind the chatter and tennis-ball thwacks on the courts outside — Mallman and her students are locked in a creative moment.
Suddenly, she glances at her watch, softly excuses herself, and hurries off to check on the firing temperatures of the kilns behind the studio.
“Thursday is my long day, lots to do,” says the 39-year-old mother of a toddler son. “It’s head spinning, but it’s a good head spinning.”
While she is gone her students return to their own projects. On one side of the studio’s main room, four women and two men continue “throwing” (or shaping) clay bowls and cylinders on spinning, knee-high wheels; on the other side, standing by metal tables, two men and three women resume “hand-building” (sculpting) objects out of red and white clay, and next door in the glazing room another woman, wielding what looks like a giant electric egg beater, finishes mixing a bucket of soupy green celadon.
They and other students who arrive early for the next three-hour class are an eclectic group. Excluding the children — who arrive at other times–they range in age from 18 to 85, live throughout the South Bay, and represent a wide variety of occupations, from archeologist to psychotherapist. Some have made ceramics for many years, others for mere months. Some enjoy making and trimming more than decorating and glazing their pieces, others just the opposite. Some veer toward large works, others toward miniatures.
Despite their differences, all report that making ceramics at the studio relaxes them. “When I’m at the wheel throwing, everything is forgotten,” says Ruth Taira, who started making ceramics decades ago in college. “It’s like Tai Chi. The world is left behind. I’m in my own world.”
Risa Hyman, the ebullient, busy wife of Rabbi Mark Hyman of Temple Tikvat Jacob in Manhattan Beach, says, “I’ve been coming here for six years and it’s always enjoyable. It’s my therapy, my outlet.”
Studio regular Carmen Jordan, an avid, 64-year-old tennis player at the Live Oak courts, reports that manipulating clay helps her arthritis. “Besides relaxing me,” she notes with a chuckle, “it almost makes me a bona fide artist.” Echoing her is Barbara Van Dusen, 60, a real estate broker who began ceramics several years ago as therapy after undergoing radical cancer surgery around her sternum. “A first I couldn’t work a small ball of clay. Now I have upper body strength and can make all kinds of things. I’m lucky to be alive and the city is lucky to have such a precious place.”
As many tell me, it’s not only the activity itself that delivers the mellowing, restorative vibe, it’s also the easy fellowship with others who love creating in clay. “I like how friendly and respectful everybody here is,” says longtime surfer Bob Simcik, 59, who retired from a 32-year career as a health inspector after a whiplash injury. “The social part is so satisfying.”
Sara Kollios, a retired airline administrator who grew up in Manhattan Beach, says, “We’re like a family here. Everybody gets along and there’s no snob factor. They inspire me. Then there’s the personal satisfaction in making my own bowl or mug. And since I give a lot of my pieces away, it means more than something I just click and send.”
Susan Goldstein, 53, makes the point that most people put their creative side on hold while they go to school, work careers, and raise kids. “My two sons are in college, so now that I’m an empty nester this is my clubhouse,” she says, smoothing the edges of a flat, decorative mask she made. Adds automotive engineer Sara Schafer, 28, who lives in Hermosa Beach, “When I first moved here I didn’t know people, but I started ceramics and right away made friends.”
When Mallman returns from kiln duties, she fields a few more questions about the teapot handle, then roams the studio — now pulsating with Simon and Garfunkel songs — to offer suggestions on works in progress. Now and then, she stops and patiently discusses or demonstrates a certain technique or tool at the wheel, often punctuated by laughter at someone’s joke or lame tip for raising teenagers. “I learn a lot about child-rearing, cooking, you name it,” she tells me during the break between her morning and afternoon classes.
A Highland Park resident, Mallman says her Thursdays start about 6 a.m. when her son Calvin starts crying for his bottle of milk. Two hours later, she’s kissed him and her husband Brian goodbye and is headed down the 110 to the studio and her first check of the kiln that she loaded the day before. “I’ve loved clay since I can remember,” explains the holder of an MFA degree, specializing in ceramics. “I have a vivid memory of when I was four or five playing with clay in my grandfather’s backyard. He babysat me, always encouraged me to be creative. I really like watching my students go through the process — what sparks it, how morphs, emerges, goes around again, and is reinterpreted at some point down the line. When people create art they’re defining their personality, their likes, dislikes. What better way to get to know them than by spending time with them in a creative space?”
Lowell Nichols, a San Pedro potter and art teacher at several schools, reminds me that when the studio began in the early 1970s, the space was much smaller. In fact, says the program’s first instructor, the original wood-and-stucco structure was so small that it first served only as changing rooms for the tennis courts. “The potter’s wheels are now where the shower stalls used to be,” he recalls.
Carol Erilane, an accomplished Manhattan Beach potter who’s sold works at L.A.’s Craft and Folk Art Museum and other venues, was a Nichols student before the city built the present facility in the early 1980s. “It was a funky little place — the kids’ classes crowded like crazy,” says the mother of three grown children who also did ceramics at Live Oak. “Now it’s one of the best city studios around.”
The city offers five ceramics sessions a year, each running eight or nine weeks and including eight adult classes and four for children and teenagers. Along with Mallman, three other teachers — Nan Wollman, Rita Anacker, and Tom Trulove — conduct a variety of classes for a total of 62 beginning, intermediate, experimental and raku-firing students. (See www.citymb.info for specific details.)
For a city once known for its Metlox pottery factory, in a small way the studio’s potters and clay-makers faintly echo a production line that began in 1927 and ended in 1989.
“Manhattan Beach still has its fingers in clay,” Mallman says. “The city’s made improvements in the studio, with more ahead. So all’s good.” It’s almost 10 p.m. and she’s finished her evening class and the last check of the kiln. She can now drive home with time to think and solve problems, she notes, time enough to halt the head-spinning. ER
