Finding One's Way as a Truthful Craftsman

The architecture of the piece is my passion and is why I can look at 18th and 19th century English flowerpots and centuries old Asian vases with the same eye and ask the same question: What makes this antique pot so wonderful? The answer always comes back to the architectural integrity of the pot and the potter's reverance and knowledge of the materials he is using. The potter knew where he was going in the making of that particular pot. This is where traditional craftsmanship is born: The knowledge of a particular material and its attributes after years of working with it and respecting the true potential of that material.

My father, Robert Jay Wolff, was an Abstract Expressionist and wrote in 1949 a thought that has stayed with me many years. "Tradition is not a form to be imitated but the discipline that gives integrity to the new." The search for that integrity has been my life's work.

Why a Web Site

With this web site I will try and communicate clearly what I am up to, and will share the fact I am a potter involved in the rather tenuous process of listening to the materials first and offering what is made to you, the public interested in these efforts after the fact. The resulting site may be of less a commercial nature than usually seen on the internet, but will hopefully communicate more truthfully who is at the other end of these pictures and words.

WELCOME

Yours in clay,