John Chalke (47-58) - So Many Faces

So Many Faces

At a tender and most unworldly seven years old I was instructed to board a country bus filled with unknown people of different heights and smells, and head for the big city. I began to be very uncertain about all this and for the first three days I kicked, struggled and refused to go. Spoiled? No, surely a joke. This was my first encounter with a bus, let alone with mongrel hordes who packed and lurched all around me, examining my new school clothes. I was now wearing a tie! The feeling got worse as I entered a vast College Hall for the first time. Not a mere 30 or 40 strange faces. This time 350 white blobs, all feeling to be looking in my direction. I hadn't thought up to this point of how many people there could be in the world but surely this could easily have been most of them. As I got older, I developed a strong immersion country accent that, to an outsider, clashed oddly with the more refined accents of others. However, "refined" isn't the word I want to use. The posh ones couldn't help their accents either, nor, I presume, some of their attitudes. As I got older yet, and began to learn about matters that rarely concerned my beloved countryside, I gave way in places under authoritative pressure and followed the learning herd. But, with much alas, when things didn't interest me something cut off and my mind went out of the window. An Attention Deficit, they handsomely call it now. I was passingly fair at English, Latin and Art. But I could never see the point of head-to-head collision on the rugger field and did my best to avoid it. Nobody convincingly explained that these contact sports were to give me coordination, that spurious word "leadership," and development of athletic ability, should one require some. Hic, haec, hoc. Or the much hated punitive runs to places far away. This was supposed to do me some good? So I learned to cheat to avoid. There is no guilt here in admitting this, no regretful confessional base. Whenever situations appeared, accompanied by petty ruling—ergo, unnecessary—the result was to make me develop a lower form of cunning. In hindsight, a reasonable defence. It occurs in the natural world frequently. Schools like King's in those days would have bred fine material for group captains, leaders of industry, and a sprinkling of long-distance runners and socialist-minded writers. They would also have bred fine criminal minds, spies and political dissidents. And did.

In my final year I saw myself in a school group photograph. Pasty, vacuous features. (Sure, maybe it was the light.) No constant cunning in this face. Only cunning to order. But I did, in my need to be noticed and loved, develop the beginnings of, if I may be allowed to call it so, a sense of humour, a life-form which I've reinforced over the years and have been known, just now and then, to be briefly popular in small groups. Even once for a whole hour—on my own radio show.

After King's I went to art school. Bath Academy of Art. Immediately I felt to be much more among my own kind. My cunning was no longer needed and dropped off like a snakeskin. They gave some excellent classes and I, just like everyone else there, resolved to become a famous artist. Well, it was all going to be rather difficult, I found out. So, just like everyone else, I became a teacher of some of the things I could do best. The age-old craft of ceramics passed before my eyes one day and I took to it with slow gusto, as seems to be my wont. And that's what I've done for the last 50 years, give or take a week or two. Ceramics, pottery, Fine Craft. It isn't just that I love it; it's simply what I do. In contrast, my days in secondary school education were mostly dreadful times. Once again, the sign went up—this isn't what I should be doing. An authoritative voice or two would explain, oh so wisely: you can't have it all your way; there are some lesser things you're going to have to put up with in order to get through this life. I would say, that may be true, but let's keep the unnecessary stuff all to a minimum. What's so wrong with that?

So here I am, an ex-pupil of a somewhat revered school. Taught to act as a singular person but the system not thinking it through. Too much herd in those immediate post-war days, not enough personal attention. There were a few great teachers, patient, caring and open. Others were seemingly indifferent. There were one or two sadists and a very few who really shouldn't have been kept on. A kindly, fair-minded headmaster, however, an Edgar Tower (worth some ten points alone) and one's own cathedral on a ley-line with much coveted musket ball marks. I think all in all I was mostly a bad student, a sort of wastrel. And yet not two days go by when I don't think of the place. To slightly balance this image I have of myself, one year I did win the Henry Wood Essay Prize, a few art prizes and became House Captain of shooting. Memorable stuff, wouldn't you say? But King's made me resentful of present and future authority, unfortunately. Officials of most kinds. I got into trouble as much outside school as I did within. Most days I received at least a minor punishment of some kind. "May this be a lesson to you, boy." I wished that it could have been so. Not when you're partly stupid, as I must have been, to continue. Or was I it deliberate defiance? Easy to say but still probably a mix of the two. The machinery of school had to happen. It was inevitable, like having to be called up for National Service. It broke my idyll of younger years into many inflexible do's, don'ts. I just happened to be in its relentless way. But, as I said, not two days go by … Eleven years is a long time to have to stay anywhere. I'll carry that dull click of the old College Hall door latch for the rest of time.

My career consists of ups and downs. That's reasonable. That's how it goes. As an artist there won't be something called retirement. I'll just keep working, grateful for each day. Each kiln opening is full of new directions. Fifty years of over 350 exhibitions in several countries (I guess this is where the wastrel gets to crow a bit), appearances in 34 or 35 books, recipient of several Canada Council Grants for both travel and research, and a lucky (I swear) award winner of the inaugural Fine Craft Endowment presented by the Governor General of Canada in 2000. I've given many workshops up and down North America and elsewhere, been a solo judge of two large international ceramics competitions, and various other jurying. Taught at good art schools in the south of England, and at three different universities in Canada, which is where I've lived for the last 40 years or so. Sure, all that was crowing, and a little uncomfortable, but it's all B.S. really. It always was, and I admit I was impressed by it once as well. Good people get some of these awards, and not so good people get them also. It's always been that way. It's within the system we've allowed.

I'm in the studio most days and work away. I'm married to a wonderful woman, Barb, an American who's a potter/artist also. Twenty-five years of close and cherished moments. My first marriage was very mediocre, a sort of apprenticeship to marriage, if you will. The first one usually is. Marriage is a medieval institution, I still declare, and I married the second time for practical reasons (to make it easier to travel back and forth between the U.S. and Canada at the time). Also, hardly secondarily, that a very strong devotion could remain more comfortably in place.

Alberta is one of the western provinces of Canada. It has oil, wheat, beef and cowboys. I live in a heritage 1912 (oldish for here) wooden, clapboard house with a classic front porch, on a quiet street in Calgary. On the weekends I throw on a denim jacket and cowboy hat, get in my truck and drive to the mountain foothills an hour and a half away where we have a log cabin on the edge of a forest, and a herd of cows. I built a three-chambered Japanese-style wood kiln out there, and it has given me some great results. (I see I'm crowing again.) People tell me I'm most fortunate and have a great lifestyle. I'm too close to it to tell the truth in that and don't really wish to examine the idea that closely. Only if I get to sense moral misdirection in what I'm doing. I'm by no means holy but haven't sensed much misdirection yet. People haven't pointed it out. Am I blind, deaf or lucky? They would probably prefer to point out how many books there are, how many exhibitions. Whatever. We can't rely on any old feedback to get at who we really are and if we're actually contributing to any greater good. We owe it to ourselves to stay alert some days. A developed value system, no matter what it is, should also be in place.

I write this overlooking the Rockies, purple and blue in the summer, which lie across many folds of foothills and valleys a hundred kilometres away. The air can be so clear they sometimes look a lot closer. There are occasional cougars here, last year a trio of wolves, and sometimes grizzly and brown bears will wander through the forest behind me, trailing cubs. It's beautiful, though. I'm lucky but, as you've no doubt heard, luck can come about as a result of something you've worked at. I've never worked that hard, nor did I set out a step-by-step plan before I started. An odious idea. Risky, though, without at least some construct in place. It could so easily have gone downhill, and at times, sure enough, life wasn't easy. I guess you have to learn to balance. But I do believe some days I've been looked after by other powers. Smile away, but I've been privy to unusual events out here in the wilds that would indicate at least some kind of parallel universe. As a result I think I've become a more spiritual person too—at least an interest in thing unsubstantial. Nothing to do with formal religion but an acceptor of other entities that have shown intelligence and ability. It's not that ability I want part of but I'm glad that those other essences are around. I am at the very least a pantheist.

Two years ago Barb and I went back to King's. We wrote ahead of time and were treated with great courtesy and charm. I'm glad I went. It was a good visit. As a ceramic artist I grew amused that the Worcester Royal Porcelain Works' old canteen is now part of the new art department. Difficult as it has been to extract, something happened at King's that has remained continuous over the course of my life, a sort of twitching, oddly reappearing at unexpected moments, like the Loch Ness inhabitant. I admit some of the difficult stuff I hated at the time was eventually good for me; no doubt of that. And I'm certainly glad, if I had to go somewhere at all for an organized education, that I went to King's rather than a place of clearly lesser quality and verve.

(2011)