Most of us know intuitively that there can be a connection between pain and creativity. Whether the pain is mental or physical, its presence in the artist's life forces a confrontation that often leads to great beauty. Such was the case with Shane Blitch.
Back Pain Flares in the Middle of Nowhere
Shane Blitch and his 7-year-old son, Harrison, were enjoying an outing on the Owyhee River in Eastern Oregon when back pain struck--hard, agonizing, relentless.
Somehow, Blitch got himself, his son and his herniated disk back home to Portland, Ore., where doctors ran a CAT scan. The news was not good: Surgery was out. Too many operations in the same area had left so much scar tissue that there was nothing they surgeons could do.
Blitch, an artist and potter, was essentially on his own. “I got through it ,” he says, “but in that time I spent four months in the most excruciating pain.”
He assembled a team -- a chiropractor, a physical therapist, an acupuncturist and a naturopath. But most of the work was up to him.
Lying on His Back, Blitch Discovers the Crows
He used a cane to move painfully about the house. He spent some time on the sloping driveway outside his house in Portland’s Sellwood neighborhood, lying head down in a sort of “reverse traction,” to the bemusement of his neighbors.
But mostly he spent hours flat on his back on a yoga mat on the hardwood floor in his living room, where sun streamed in through south-facing windows. Outside the window were sunflowers. And birds, big black birds. Crows, most likely.
“I started watching the birds come and eat the sunflowers.,” he says. “They just gave me hope. They were fun, and I missed being creative, I missed playing my guitar.
Day after day, he watched the birds fly from flower to flower. “How effortless it seemed! I was just like, man, I used to walk like that.”
The next thing he knew, he was sketching them.
Black Birds Migrate From Sunflowers to Pots
Eventually, Blitch’s back healed. The pain subsided, and he began to work with pottery again and to teach at Oregon School of Art and Craft. Soon, the birds he had seen in his garden were ending up on pots, mugs and other pieces.
He throws the forms as cups and other containers in his basement studio, then lets them dry to leather hard. At that time, he pulls the handles off the cup from the existing clay or from a dab that he has applied. Some handles are just small peglike appendages, something to rest a finger against.
As he adds the handles, he also pushes indentations into the sides of the mugs, forming a natural place for fingers to grip later. And he makes no effort to make the rims perfectly round and smooth. “I want to remind the user that this was a soft material at one point.”
Once the handles are also leather hard, he glazes the pots, using a salt and soda method. When the kiln has heated to about 2,300 degrees F, he dumps in salt on a piece of angle iron. As the sodium vaporizes, it glazes all the silica (clay) it touches. The background colors, golden yellow and light blue, bring to mind sunflowers and clear summer skies.
When the pieces are cool, Blitch uses a black slip to hand-paint a bird on each. He keeps the bird images generic for a reason. “They’re just ‘bird,’” he explains. “You know, I’m painting them freehand; I’m not predrawing them. I’m moving pretty quick. ... I don’t want them to be a species. I just want them to be a representation of a bird.”
So they are, just birds, but each has its own personality. Most look perky, insouciant, ready to fly off the pottery to new adventures.
Customers Flock to Pottery With Black Birds
“They’ve been incredibly popular,” Blitch says of his creatures. “People really like the little black birds.”
You can find Shane Blitch’s work at the Hoffman Gallery at the Oregon School of Art and Craft or at the Mary Lou Zeek Gallery in Salem, Ore.
Fran Gardner - Fran Gardner is a writer and editor who lives in Portland, Oregon. She retired in 2008 from The Oregonian, a big newspaper in town. She ...
Join the Conversation