A Potter's Life
by Ellen Barone
©ML Pearson/mlphoto.zenfolio.comMy 11-year-old Audi rattles down the dusty dirt track road, across the cattle guard, through the rusted open gate and past the listless cattle that turn an indifferent eye to my arrival. Four miles ago, I’d rolled through the nearest town, White Oaks, a once booming, now bust, ghost town, boasting, at last count, population twenty-three. Preceding that was an hour-long drive across empty two-lane county roads through desert scrubland, a sleepy motel and gas station crossroad, past the vacant plots of a fledgling real estate development, and over the same transcontinental railroad tracks that had once carried East Coast pioneers to the Frontier West.
With the eager anticipation of a great journey to an exotic land, my husband, Hank, and I make this pilgrimage to our friend Ivy Heymann’s pottery studio, and home, at least three or four times a year. In the tradition of rural hospitality, we go to visit over a cup of coffee, to see a valued friend, to add a new piece to our growing collection of Ivy’s pottery, and, if we’re lucky, to learn a thing or two—about art and living.
A waif of a woman with a vivacious spirit and sturdy practicality, Ivy is legendary in these parts. The Georgia O’Keefe of Lincoln County, New Mexico. What she makes is fine porcelain pottery, hand-crafted with the patience and simple elegance of a perfectionist. Who she is, I think, is extraordinary; although, I suspect she’d cringe at this depiction.
Like the colorful mismatched mosaic tile floor in her studio office, the story behind the artist is vivid with the uneven shards of an uncommon life.
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