Meticulous clay plates designed by artist and sculptor Rick Yoshimoto are on exhibit at the Bolinas Museum. But which side of the plate is on display?
If you look closely, some pieces are marked with Mr. Yoshimoto’s initials and a date. That is because you are looking at the back of the plates.
“I always glaze both sides,” Mr. Yoshimoto said. “I want them to be handled. These aren’t things you just put on the wall and leave. I want them to be useful, so the backside is just as important.”
It’s an example of Mr. Yoshimoto’s fastidious approach to his pieces. The works at the museum—the ceramic plates and cups, the redwood and black acacia stools, the crayon rubbings of redwood, eucalyptus and madrone—can appear simple at first, and Mr. Yoshimoto says he often works spontaneously as he forms a plate or shapes a stool. He never wants to overpower the natural beauty of the medium. But the tension and balance between spontaneity and care is always present.
“There is a simplicity to the way he works,” said Charles DeLisle, the guest curator for the exhibit and an artist and designer for whom Mr. Yoshimoto has fabricated pieces. “The clay is not over-processed… but it’s all very manmade. The final project is definitely controlled.”
Born in 1948, Mr. Yoshimoto was raised in Honolulu. He traveled to Europe one summer in his early 20s to surf; on his return, he stopped in California. He decided to stay to continue his studies, and enrolled at California State University, Long Beach.
He first studied physical therapy, he said. Then he decided to take a few art classes to improve his anatomy drawings, a decision that prompted him to switch majors; he ended up with a bachelor’s degree in ceramics, and went on to earn a master’s in ceramics at the University of California, Irvine. He worked his way through school by making pottery on the wheel—an experience he does not recall fondly.
“It was sort of mid-hippie era, early ‘70s. What was really popular were crafts, handmade crafts,” he said. He was paid by the piece, making thousands of identical things. “So I have a bit of an aversion to the wheel,” he explained.
That he ended up building a life in Inverness was a happy accident. He was tiring of Los Angeles, frustrated by art-world politics. In 1977, he decided to abscond to Canada for a break, but a friend told him to say hello to a potter along the way. He happened to work in the Creamery Building, in Point Reyes Station.
The potter told him he had a huge project and needed help; knowing Mr. Yoshimoto was a ceramicist, he promised a short-term job and housing if he would stay for a month. “And I never left,” Mr. Yoshimoto said.
He hand-builds all of his ceramics, from red and white clays. “Even if I make symmetrical round cups, I hand build them. It takes longer, but for me, the creative process is much more intense and amplified. You have to be conscious about the shape,” he said.
The touch of his hands is made permanent in all his pieces, but the designs are also geometric. One plate in his current show, for instance, is almost sliced in two: the right side features red clay, while the other, glazed shiny black, bears a bright red-glazed square.
The red glaze, he noted, is new in his work. “It was always a color that was just too much,” he said. But he thought it might work with the red clay. The red glaze accentuates the circles, rectangles and triangles, yet it doesn’t overwhelm the pieces; instead, it works like an anchor from which to explore the more subtle aspects of the plate.
The pieces are thoughtfully crafted—not just aesthetically, but in their functional design. The plates, he stressed, should be used. (What for? “I’d serve fruit on it. I’d serve crackers on it,” he said. “Things you can pick up with your hands.”)
The cups also bear this out. Most of the exteriors, for instance, are left unglazed, a rough clay surface easy to hold. The insides are glazed smooth, as is about an inch of rim, beckoning a pair of lips to sip from the vessels. (A sign in the exhibit asks people not to touch anything.)
The distinction between art and function is, in Mr. Yoshimoto’s work, immaterial, wrote his goddaughter Mariah Nielson. Like those who have influenced him, including J.B. Blunk, who is also Ms. Nielson’s father, Mr. Yoshimoto “creates ceramics, furniture, paintings, and sculpture that…can be appreciated as either sculptural forms, painterly artworks or functional objects,” she wrote for an exhibit flyer.
Mr. Yoshimoto, who has built houses over the years to supplement his income, began working with wood after he moved to Inverness, in ’78. That year, he became an assistant to J.B. Blunk, the esteemed sculptor and woodworker. He worked for the artist until he passed away, in 2002.
Mr. Yoshimoto now uses an array of woods—redwood, black acacia, sugar pine and more—for his short stools, which he started making a couple years ago. “I just love the fact that, one, it’s sculptural, and it’s also utilitarian,” he said.
He or friends of his locally harvest or find most of the wood, whose character—both beautiful and flawed—helps determine the final form of the piece. “The rot influences what the final shape is going to be, and I have to work with that. It’s very spontaneous,” he said. “There are these ‘Oh shit’ moments. ‘Oh, there’s a pocket of rot in it. Now what am I going to do? Okay, let’s cut it away and see what is left and continue on.’”
Last week, a few days before the opening of his exhibit, the buzz of his chainsaw ripped through the sun-soaked morning as he worked on new pieces. At his Inverness studio, at a home owned by Ms. Nielson and her mother and Mr. Blunk’s widow, Christine Nielsen, he has stockpiled pieces of wood to tackle in his sculpting. One stool, made of silver birch from Inverness Park, sported a hole in its middle where he removed inner rot. On one side, the hole appeared a perfect rectangle slicing through the base, but the interior planes of the hole slope down into a trapezoid shape that appears on the opposite side.
When Mr. Yoshimoto describes his process and artistic aesthetic, two distinct ideas emerge. One is the desire to explore tension and contrast, usually by juxtaposing bold geometric designs with an innate organic feature in his material. In the stools, for example, perfectly flat planes abut a segment of gnarled tree trunk left untouched. One of the four stools on exhibit, made of redwood, has a smooth front: narrow in the middle and wide on the top and bottom, like a geometric hourglass. Yet those who peer behind the stool will see raw bark cascading down the back, like the mane of a wild animal.
In his ceramics, too, the idiosyncratic hand-crafted quality or the natural roughness of the unglazed clay stand in stark contrast to geometric patterns and glassy glazes.
But another desire is also apparent: a desire to situate himself in the piece, connecting himself to the medium in a delicate balance. He credits his upbringing with developing his respect for the natural world; his grandmother was a Shinto Buddhist, and would bring him to the Shinto temple in Honolulu. “In Shinto Buddhism, it’s a belief in many gods: god of wind, god of water, god of lightning. Everything has a being,” he said.
The first thing that draws him to a piece of wood is the power he feels in the material itself. “Then I go, ‘What am I going to do with this?’ I want to keep that sense, but I also want to put a sense of who I am [in it], but not to overpower it.”
Mr. Yoshimoto mentioned an art theory book he is reading, about a series of sculptures—by the 20th century artist Constantin Brancusi—called The Kiss. Each piece is a stone into which two figures are just barely carved in. Perhaps the idea of a kiss is an apt analogy for Mr. Yoshimoto’s works: meeting at a single point, yet remaining distinct. In tension, but creating a whole.