Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project For Craft and Decorative Arts in America
Interview with William P. Daley
Conducted by Helen W. Drutt English
At the Artist's home in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania
August 7 and December 2, 2004
Preface
The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with William P. Daley on August 7 and December 2, 2004. The interview took place in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, and was conducted by Helen W. Drutt English for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America.
William Daley and Helen Drutt English have reviewed the transcript and have made corrections and emendations. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.
Interview
HELEN W. DRUTT ENGLISH: This is Helen Drutt English interviewing William P. Daley at 307 Ashbourne Road, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. We are sitting in his studio, and it is the 7th of August 2004, and I am interviewing him for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and this is disc number one in this part of the Laitman Project.
William Daley, when and where were you born?
WILLIAM DALEY: I was born in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York on March 7 in 1925. I was born in the section of the town called Uniontown. I was born at home – it was on a third floor walkup in this village.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I know that you have always had a strong passion for your legacy and your heritage. Could you speak to me about your parents?
DALEY: Well, my mother and father are from Irish descent. Both their families have been in the country a good long while; they were not immigrants. My mother lived in Yonkers, New York in a town below Hastings-on-Hudson, and my father was born in Hastings-on-Hudson. So I really felt in some sense that I really belong to the town, or I lived in the town. It was a great feeling.
And my father worked in the mill. He had become an apprentice to a house painter as a boy and became a house painter and went in the Navy, and when he came out he started a house-painting business. And my mother worked in the Moquette, which is an Armstrong rug company. She was a bobbin girl. My dad left school at ninth grade and my mother left school at fourth grade to work. My grandmother on my father’s side, or my grandfather, died of consumption, and my father had to go to work.
I still have a letter from the principal of my father’s school – the Frasier Free School in Hastings – that he was a magnificent student, and the principal was begging my grandmother to let him stay in school. And my father was a twin, and they had already taken his brother Edward out of school two years before. And my mother went – she then became a nanny and took care of wealthy people and children in Yonkers, New York. And she was married to her first husband, then he died of consumption, and then married my father. So I have a half brother whose name is O’Mara and I have a sister, Alice, and that constitutes the clan – the immediate clan.
My father had a really bardic memory and also loved poetry and he loved to talk. And he knew all of [Robert] Frost and all of Carl Sandburg and he would just go on and on and on. I used to sort of be willing to go out on the back porch in the rain to just escape hearing him. His favorite poet was [A. E.] Housman, and he would say to me, “Now hear this, Billy,” and he would recite.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: The commitment that you have to house painting seems to be something that is very central and very much part of your heritage.
DALEY: Well, I taught Tom how to be a house painter, and I painted with my father. Back then, the town – he would moonlight all the time in the factory, paint people’s houses to earn extra money, and when he would do that – when we would be walking to church, my father would take a diversion and show me what he was painting because he really liked it so much. So I worked with him as a house painter and then when I went out to Iowa to teach. And I only taught nine months and didn’t get any pay in the summer, so I signed on as a union house painter. So you are right. Painting houses – I still paint one side of my house every year. On my 80th birthday, my wife, Catherine, gave me a 40-foot ladder.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: On your 80th birthday?
DALEY: No, no, what am I saying? I haven’t had – my 70th birthday because I have not yet had my 80th birthday. But, anyway, I put the ladder up on the side of the house and climbed up to the top and had a fantastic conversation with my father. And I literally almost – when I would paint and I was teaching Tom how to paint on the back of our house – when I was 13, my father put me out on the ladder on the plank with him and I would be in the middle of a yellow pine plank that was 20 feet long between the ladder brackets and it swayed up and down – it was very scary. And he used to say to me, “Billy, think into the wall, don’t think back of yourself and you will be just fine.” And my mother would call – called out and said, “Now Bill, what are you doing, having that child out on that side of that house painting? He will do that soon enough.” And – [laughs] – my father said, “Ally, he has to learn how to do it sometime.” So that is how I started painting.
And I got so I loved climbing trees and being up high in the air. I still love going up. So it was a real treat to go up on that present I got, that 40-foot ladder.
When I was teaching Tom, which is where I began, I really could hear my father around the side of the house, telling me what I should be telling Tom. And of course I told him the same things that my father told me.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: So it’s pretty special.
DALEY: Yes.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Also, language has been such an important part of your life, and the use of language and the way you invent words and use words and extol your thoughts through language.
DALEY: Well, I think he really loved it himself. He would tell me that the greatest word in the English language, the most euphonious word, was cellar door.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Oh, yes. [Laughs.] Right.
DALEY: Have you heard that at all?
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Yes, from Cinderella. She says, cellar door.
DALEY: Oh, okay.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Yes. [Laughs.]
DALEY: Well, anyway, he had all these kinds of things about – he would repeat the Shrops – things from A Shropshire Lad [A. E. Housman, London: K. Paul, Tranch, Treubner, 1896], and he would say, “See how marvelous it sounds, Billy.”
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Do you think that is a part of your Irish heritage –
DALEY: Maybe, maybe.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – where language is such an important part of expression?
DALEY: I never thought of it – but it – I’m sure it comes from his celebration of it, although he liked – he thought artists were magnificent. He was in the Navy with a man who was an illustrator during World War I. And of course he never got on any ships because since he was a painter, they had him painting admirals’ houses and things like that at Newport and then up in Rhode Island – I can’t remember the naval base there [Naval Station Newport]. But he had, as one of his fellow painters, a man who was an illustrator, and my father would talk about the pictures that he painted and describe them to Alice and I – my sister – and she ended up going to art school and being an artist, also. But he really – and he talked about [Jasper Francis] Cropsey, the Hudson River painter who lived in Hastings in the preceding generation, and also that he was Irish and that he was a great painter. And my father’s favorite painting was Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair [1853-55] in the Metropolitan [Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York], and I don’t know if you have ever seen it, but it is a huge painting. It must be 20 feet by 8 feet high of people at a horse fair, and he would go on and on about what a fantastic painting it was.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: So there was this great interest –
DALEY: That’s right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – in art in the house –
DALEY: That’s right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – and in language and in poetry, and –
DALEY: Yes, through him.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Yes, through your father, and do you think that it was these sensibilities that motivated you toward wanting to be an artist?
DALEY: Well, in the neighborhood that I grew up in, there wasn’t much of a precedent for being interested in culture in that way and I think it really was that he thought it was a very special calling, and he was always buying us art supplies and in fact, I got a set of oil paints when I was maybe – a small box of oil paints for Christmas – maybe I was 10 or 11. And when I got them, I had a very difficult time getting to paint with them because every time I would start a painting, my father would want to finish it, and he would want to paint on it. And then once he would begin painting on it, he wouldn’t let me paint on it anymore. And then my mother would intervene and say, “Bill, now the child is trying to make a painting and you should let him finish it.” And he would say, “Ally, I’m just helping him.” [Laughs.] So he did. He had an enormous appetite for doing things.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I’m just trying to remember – did we talk about the specific date that you were born?
DALEY: In 1925, March 7th.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And were there other things in your early childhood that you feel, in some way, acted as a catalyst for the way in which you developed as an adult, and affected your career choices?
DALEY: Well, I think it turned out early on that the thing I had liked most and was good at and was encouraged in was drawing and making pictures. And somehow, I became – my brother, when we went to parochial school, my older brother, Joe O’Mara, could draw beautifully, and he would draw all the things on the blackboard in parochial school. At Thanksgiving, he would draw big turkeys and at Christmas, he would – in colored chalk on the blackboard. And I kind of inherited it. I mean, when my turn came, I became the drawer of holidays on the blackboard until I left parochial school.
So I think I had some kind of propensity right from the get-go and I also was encouraged in it from the beginning. So I think that was it – of being good at it, or that was the special thing that I was able to do that other kids didn’t.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: At what point in your life did you become interested in ceramics and become what you would call a mudman?
DALEY: Well, I think I did do it in high school. I made something on the wheel and – but I didn’t think of it as being special in any way. But when I went to Mass Art [Massachusetts College of Art, Boston], and I was an art education major as a junior, and you sort of had to do everything, and I took ceramics with Charles Abbott. And the first thing he did was throw a casserole on the potter’s wheel and told us that he paid the gynecologist or the pediatrician or whatever it was – was at the birth of his first child – paid them with dishes. And we were totally smitten by him in terms of his abilities to make things that were extraordinarily useful. And Cate and I were courting each other at that time, but I just knew that I liked it. I was terrible at it, and in fact, they called me Swill Daley because – instead of Bill Daley – because when I threw, I threw so wet that everything that I would make would fall down just about the time I had it finished because I used too much water. And the inside of the potter’s wheel sort of looked like a pond.
So I really didn’t show much ability at it. I just knew that I really liked it, and that is sort of the point at which I decided I wasn’t going to be a painter and I wasn’t going to be an illustrator because drawing really had always been the center of my art life – of doing drawing, and I used to – in art school, I was doing a lot of painting. I got a painting in the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston on Newbury Street, and I thought that was just the greatest – that as a student I submitted something and they accepted it. So I really thought I was going to be a painter, and I was being encouraged in that direction as well.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Aside from the drawing, painting, and emerging interest in ceramics, were there other media that you were attracted to and began to explore – use in your work?
DALEY: Well, it was interesting, I went to the Massachusetts School of Art, and it still is a magnificent school, but it was a strange thing of being with all veterans who had been shot at and so on. And we all thought that we could do everything, you know, which was a really – when I think about it, it was a very arrogant attitude to have, but we were all intensely interested in whatever it was that we had a chance to do. So every aspect of the visual arts – if we had a modeling class or a sculpture class or whatever, we really felt that we could do that, or we would offer ourselves to it in some way. So it was very competitive, it was also very exciting to be part of it.
I did my thesis with two other artists – Joseph Carreiro, whom you know, is one of them [Charles Quillen was the other]. I was editor of the yearbook one year with John Cataldo and Charlie, we – so I was very interested in graphic design. But we [Joseph Carreiro, Charles Quillen, and I] did our thesis on exhibition design and we made a flexible display system that ended up being published in Interior magazine way back in 1949. So we were pretty all eclectic in the scope of our interests, whatever it was. Looking back on it, art making included drawing, painting, graphics, industrial design, and ceramics. Design, craft, and painting were all aspects of art form giving.
Joe Carreiro, was also my friend, whom you know, and became an industrial designer, but he was interested in furniture, but he was also a marvelous painter. So we all thought we were, I don’t know, soldiers that were becoming Renaissance men somehow.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right. But you know, that was a very special time in history, and now – I suddenly realize that you were part of a community of individuals who were able to come to have the advantage of higher education because of the GI bill.
DALEY: That’s right. Absolutely.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And could you speak about that? I mean, where were you during the war?
DALEY: Well, during the war, I –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: The Second World War.
DALEY: – left high school to join the cadets and I was going to become a flyer. And I really joined because I was – I wanted to get out of high school without taking my final exams, and if you enlisted, you would get your diploma because I thought I might not make it. So I went down – we had the day off if we went down to enlist, so I went down and enlisted and got into the cadets and began to – almost immediately to wash out and end up being a gunner in a plane and flew one mission and got shot down and went to prison camp.
And I must say, though, in terms of having someone having an influence on me, there was a man named Lloyd Long, whom I met in a flight pool in Florida before you were selected to go to your training. I met this man and he was really different. He was quite a bit older than I, and he was very interested in philosophy, his brother was a philosophy student at Berkeley, and he was from Fence Lake, New Mexico. And he started talking to me about – and he gave me Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy [1927] to read, and, you know, I would ask these questions and he would kind of – well, he was really being a teacher. And lo and behold, when I got to prison camp, who was in the camp in this room that I was assigned to in the barracks in the Lager in Stalag Luft 3A but Lloyd C. Long.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Where was the prison camp?
DALEY: This was up near Stettin, up near – it was north and east of Swinemunde where the rockets were tested. So I really had someone everyday to walk around the compound with, getting my head ventilated, and, you know, we would talk about religion, and my father was very religious and I guess, in some sense, so was I. But he would ask me questions – well, if there is God, then there must be something behind God, who do you think is behind God? And all these kinds of mind-bending questions.
And we also had – managed to get a couple of books through the Red Cross, and the one book that I got hold of was the Oxford Guide to Classical Literature. So I had this guy Lloyd Long talking to me about all the constellations, which we could see out the window – we couldn’t get out at night of course, being in the camp – but it was interesting because I had this – I started making a chart from Zeus outward. And I made all the chart of all the people of whom begot whom and all the rest of it, and then we would talk about it. So it had a kind of – later on, when I became – started reading into myths and so on in school, I really kind of knew all about them anyway from having had Lloyd Long as a teacher.
So in a way, that was great to have this. I always thought of that as some magical thing to have that. So in some ways, going to school, for me, started in prison camp.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: It’s amazing that he was there.
DALEY: Yes, it was amazing. It was amazing.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Some sort of karma.
DALEY: Yep. It was like – it seems like it was meant to be.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: How was it to be at Mass Art as a GI older than the other students that began school – who were not part of the GI bill? What was that like for a person of your age at that time?
DALEY: Well, it must have been hard. There were only two male students that weren’t veterans, and all the women who were there had come out of high school and so on. At the end of our graduation in 1950, there was – it was like West Point – everyone married someone in the class who was a student. So we all have four years difference between ourselves and our spouses.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Is that where you met Catherine?
DALEY: Cate and I courted each other in art school and that kind of started in our senior year more seriously, but we were friends all the way through. It must have been difficult – Cate has said many times that being a student at that time was a fierce kind of thing because of all the – all the veterans were so focused on what they – the urgency about going to school that I think we were difficult on the teachers as well – you know, that –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Well, I can remember because I was a co-ed at that time, and veterans were coming into our class, and I remember that the restrictions and the barriers among the art disciplines suddenly were just tossed aside.
DALEY: That’s right, that’s right. In fact, one of – in art history, we were studying Japan and of course – I guess it was sort of terrible in a way, but one of the students said he had a whole bunch of souvenirs from Japan that he would be happy to bring in. And he brought them in to the art history teacher, Ellen Munsterberg, who is a marvelous teacher, and they were Japanese soldiers’ gold fillings. [Laughs.] It was terrible. And poor Ellen Munsterberg was absolutely shocked and she called – she said, this class is peopled with barbarians, and she left.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: But it – had it been a metalsmithing class, then you would have melted it down and made a ring. [They Laugh.]
DALEY: Possibly. But anyway, I’m sure we were a strange breed to be students.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: But this is what was the center of the craft movement in a way – the fact that GIs entered the higher educational system and broke down the barriers by virtue of their presence.
Could you discuss the difference between the university-trained artists and one who has learned his or her craft outside of academia?
DALEY: Oh, I don’t know. You know, since I went to art school later on – I got accepted to go to graduate school at Columbia [Columbia University, New York] and I also was accepted at Harvard [Cambridge, Massachusetts] – we didn’t think we were part of academia in art school. You know, we really saw ourselves more as related to some kind of an academy or some kind of people that were –
[Audio break.]
DALEY: So, this is number two?
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Yes, this is disc number two.
DALEY: Well, you were asking me about –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: About academia versus a – someone who has learned their craft outside of an academic environment. For instance, a person like Wharton Esherick or George Nakashima or those individuals who went to study with studio potters in Japan or England, with [Bernard] Leach, with [Shoji] Hamada – you know, the difference between being trained as a potter within the university as compared with being trained outside with a master.
DALEY: Okay.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: With a master in an independent studio.
DALEY: Well, I always thought I was becoming an artist. I never was specializing in anything. I wanted to be a painter, but I was just as interested in sculpture. So when I did get to do ceramics, I knew that that was the thing I wanted.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right.
DALEY: But the other thing I think that was amazing about, at least for me with my background and most of the students that I was with, is that we were exposed to a kind of scope of things that I don’t think I would have been exposed to if I was working with an art – a single person like a potter. I mean, the idea of reading Education through Art by Herbert Read as a student, or John Dewey’s Art as Experience [New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1934] as a student, you know, was a marvelous kind of thing of opening up. And, like, getting the new directions books of – so of reading modern poets and writers – like, I read Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as a student. I just think I had a kind of exposure to a breadth of things.
And also as a student in art school, we would save our money and, like, I would – we went to hear “Peter Grimes,” Benjamin Britten’s opera, and so on. We were sitting up in the top of the place. But we had a kind of very intense interest in a whole lot of different things, and maybe I’m characterizing being educated as a specialist in too limited a way, but I found that, you know, we really had some scope to what we were about, and that wasn’t about becoming a potter or a sculptor or whatever. It was about becoming an artist, and I felt that way all the time I was learning how to be a potter.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: But you found your own mentor in that arena. I mean, you found that with Charlie Abbott.
DALEY: Well, that’s true, but, you know, in some sense, Charles didn’t – was a very strange mentor – marvelous mentor, but he had studied – he was an architectural engineer who went to the University of Michigan during the Depression to study Oriental art history. He was a New England Brahmin from Maine and there wasn’t any work so he decided – then we went down – found out there was a woman named Maija Grotell at Cranbrook [Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan] that actually made pots, not just studying about the history of them. And so he went down there to study with her. In fact, he and Toshiko [Takaezu] were the first students, I think, for Charles – for Maija Grotell.
But anyway, so he never – he thought Sung pots were the only kinds of pots, but he never told us what to do or any – he was very open and very mysteriously willing to let you proceed in any direction you wanted to. So in a way, he really fit the temperament of the students in the art school at that time because I’m sure that had he tried to show us how to – that this was the only way to do something, we would probably have rebelled. But in a way, we were interested in learning how to make things the right way. So we were susceptible to learning how to make handles and spouts and lids and so on.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: What would you say was one of the most rewarding educational experiences that you have had?
DALEY: Well, I don’t know. It’s interesting. Probably being in school as a senior and being in love with Cate and being a student. We had a class that they chose ten people to teach a Saturday class for kids that come in from all around the suburbs of Boston, and it was a real honor to have a chance to do that, and it was unbelievable because we would spend all week getting ready to have these kids come in. And of course, Cate had a class, and I had a class, and Joe Carreiro had a class, and John Cataldo had a class. And we would really be trying to vie with each other to see who could do the most intriguing thing with the students that would be the most – get the results that were the most fantastic. And being part of getting ready for it and then being part of the class and then showing the work and sharing it afterwards with each other and seeing the kids and what they did – it was unbelievable. I mean, there was – I have never – I have had a lot of thrilling experiences teaching since, but that was sort of the beginning of it. And I would have to say maybe that was the most exciting thing that I ever did as a student.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I suddenly had a memory flash, and I can remember that Cate also made pots at one time in the ‘60s.
DALEY: That’s right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And occasionally, her name is on a pot that you have made together. Would you like to speak about that?
DALEY: Well, when the kids grew up – well, Cate made wonderful pots, and she made – she had a bowl in the first Civic Center craft show – she won an honorable mention. In the “Young American,” she sent one of the early ones and had an honorable mention, so she really did make wonderful pots. And after the children were out and going to college and so on, she was thinking about going – getting a job or something, and she said, “Well, I could work in the studio with you,” and I said, “That would be great.”
So we made many – most of the pots that were in the early shows in your gallery [Helen Drutt Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania], Cate had worked on them with me, and she really didn’t want to have authorship because she said she didn’t design them or they weren’t her idea, but her touch is in the pots immensely and also her judgments. As a critic coming downstairs in the evening to look at the work and see how it was going, if Cate would give me a crit – I mean, sometimes I would not listen and make something horrible, but most of the time she would really be able to see what I was trying to get at better than I could, being in the middle of it. So in a way both her judgment and her touch and her ability to finish work coming down on it. It’s really hard for me.
I love generating it and I like the beginnings enormously because it’s so risky and it’s so exciting knowing whether you are going to make anything that matters or not. But the idea of then finishing it properly so that when you touch it, it feels great or you reach under the rim and you run your fingers under there. In some ways, Cate’s attentiveness to that aspect of the pots – I learned so much watching her do it, and now she has arthritis in her hands and doesn’t help in that way anymore. And in the early days, if she didn’t like what I was making, she wouldn’t work on it. So I would immediately be willing to change it so that she liked it. But she would go out to the garden and work in the garden.
So in a way I think that our – much of my doing is totally in the middle of her sensibilities, and in a bigger sense, no one gets to be an artist without being enabled by people. And in a way Cate has really made a kind of space psychically in terms of being rigorous about what I do and how I do it and also by encouraging and being able to make it possible to keep doing it, and she is still doing it. So in a way, I had a show out in the west and I had Cate’s name – I wanted Cate’s name on the title, and the person didn’t want the name on the title and we didn’t do that.
In some sense, I think it’s a naïve thing to just think of the pots as having authorship on one person, although I must say, if someone else told me what I had to do with a pot when I was making it, it would be a very difficult time for both of us.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right.
DALEY: So Cate would never say, do this, or do that, but she would say, you know, this bothers me, or that bothers me, or what do you think about this? So that negotiating, that partnership is fascinating.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I can sense her presence at times, and especially when I walk into the garden, I see that same kind of commitment to a certain kind of order –
DALEY: Right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: A unique attention to detail –
DALEY: Right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – and everything is very pristine and ordered in the way the flower beds are arranged and in which even the geometry of the shapes and the colors of the flowers are arranged –
DALEY: That’s right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – and it’s there, and it becomes a pervasive part of your entire life and your studio.
DALEY: That’s right. That’s part of the legacy of it all – of the house and the objects in the house –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Absolutely.
DALEY: That’s true.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Have you, Bill, had any involvement with alternative educational institutions like Penland School of Crafts [Penland School of Crafts, Penland, North Carolina] and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts [Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine] or Arrowmont [Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, Gatlinburg, Tennessee], Pilchuck [Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington] or the Archie Bray [Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, Montana]? Actually, I do know that you have been involved with them.
DALEY: [Laughs.] Well, as a – when I retired – well, when I was – the last 10 years of my teaching I had a residency program at the school, and I really would – and I was – finally gotten to the place where I could teach three days in a row from 8 to 7, and then I had the two days off. So I didn’t teach Thursday, Friday, and I would do workshops. And I had Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, come home Sunday, teach Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. So I have done workshops in every major summer school place that there is – Penland, Archie – no, I have never been to Archie Bray, but they don’t have classes there per se, but Haystack and Penland and Anderson Ranch [Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, Colorado] and Appalachian School [Appalachian Center for Craft, Smithville, Tennessee], and so on, and so on, and so on.
I think it’s a marvelous kind of occasion because the teachers come from all over and the students come from all over, so it’s a kind of way of switching, or making connection points between – it’s like you are the roundhouse of some kind of a rail system. And I think that it’s a great way to find things out. It also is totally dependent on the regular education system, and you could not be well educated by going from one summer class to another. There is something consistent about that kind of maturation that is false about these other schools, that you can make or to get some kind of inspiration, but the rhythm of learning and maturation of learning and being with a teacher in a community of students where there is an exchange going on that you can build on – you don’t get at those places. So I think that they are fantastic, but it – that it’s a marvelous auxiliary thing, or an extra thing, or an incrementally improving thing, but it’s not really a sound kind of education.
I love doing workshops around the country with students, but the idea that a teacher can leave and the student leaves has some merit, but it also has a tremendous difficulty about it because sometimes when your working time day-in, day-out together in some kind of rhythm, the things you are learning you don’t even know you are finding out. And even the things you are teaching, you don’t even know that you have taught. There is something about being a community as – in a group – with a group of people over time, where you build a kind of trust and a kind of insight that helps you be able to be the mediator if you are the teacher. And you can’t get that in these other places.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: The dynamics of the way in which you teach are different –
DALEY: That’s right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – in that situation in which you are a visiting artist.
DALEY: And they also – those places, for the most part you are working on the premise that it’s so special that you are coming there to get something special, and the teachers usually are able to respond in some sense where they are not accountable over a long period of time, which permits them to take kinds of risks which are good. But they also have found the things that they are sharing are the things they are most successful at. And most teachers learn the most when they do their worst teaching, and most students – I shouldn’t say most, it’s not right, but students often learn the most when they don’t want to learn something, or when they are having the most difficulty, or when the things are really not good. And good teachers can know the temperature of their people that they are helping, trying to mediate what the students are trying to get at, and work with that.
So I think that is one of the things – it’s not about skills. Information and formation are different things, and the main reason for thought is to gain trust and have belief. So the main reason for thought is to have belief, and then the belief is to gain trust. And your belief in yourself and trust in yourself and belief in your community and trust in your community, and that is what happens if you are in a good school over a period of time, so that you can grow in developing that, so you can practice.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Like family.
DALEY: That’s right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: The academic community is like family.
I know that in recent years, you have begun to travel much more than you had in earlier decades, other than the time, of course, when you were in the Second World War. But in the last 20 or 30 years, you have begun to explore different possibilities in different continents, and I know that you finally made a journey to Ireland, which was extremely important to you. And you went to the Orient. I would like to know if you would speak about your travels and if they have had any kind of impact on your work and your life.
DALEY: Well, I think that’s true, that I started to do late. I think I really started traveling early, only I didn’t go anyplace. I mean –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: You went to Arizona and New Mexico. [Laughs.]
DALEY: Well, that’s true, but when I was a boy, I had a half-interest in a little sailboat and we would go up and down the Hudson River, and, like, at 13, I sailed for four days from Hastings to WestPoint in a little teeny open boat along the Palisades. And really, I was both Leif Erikson and Columbus and Magellan, with this other paperboy, William – Billy Shields and I. And in a way, that sense of traveling – I think that is sort of the essence of it.
And another place that I traveled a lot is – I was a very bad – poor at reading because I learned to read by sight and seeing, not by phonics. And I suspect that I was, and still am, dyslexic in some ways. I mean, so I had a terrible time reading and I was lip reader and slow, but once I got into sailboats and started reading sea stories like Nordhoff and Hall and Horatio Hornblower, Forester and Rafael Sabatini, and so on. I just started reading up a storm about boats and sailing and traveling and the Three Musketeers and so on. And so in a way, I think my interest in journeying is much more than going the places and interior thing – that’s not – now, it’s true that when I – going back, going to Ireland, it was a great experience for me, in two weeks. But what was the greatest about it was that I spent a week at the School of Art and Design in Dublin with students doing a workshop, and I spent a week in Ulster at the University of Ulster doing a workshop. So the real journey was with these kids, and I did get to go to the Giant’s Causeway.
So in a way – like, when I went to Korea, it was amazing, but it was scary to me. I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying, I couldn’t read anything, I would – when I would go out into the city, I would buy things because I would see a sign that had an orange on it and I knew they had fruit in there. And then when I would get some, I had to hold out my money and so on, so on. I think, maybe, I’m a much better kind of traveler when I have a task or when I’m doing something as opposed to – I don’t know, it sounds insular in a way, but – [audio break, tape change] – travel in that sense becomes confusing, and it was great being in Ireland – like, even just walking around Dublin and going in churches. I found that very exciting. I don’t know if you ever read [Hermann] Hesse’s Steppenwolf about the person that is a journeyman that is estranged – the stranger. So a lot of times when I have traveled, I felt like I was a stranger.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I remember when we went to the Netherlands –
DALEY: That’s right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – just the sound of the Dutch language sparked that memory of the war in you.
DALEY: Yes, I know, that was difficult. And I did, I had this feeling of being an Auslander –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right.
DALEY: – you know, an outsider. So I guess I like my traveling kind of digested in some sense. I –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Need to be comfortable.
DALEY: Yes, right – being at home –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right.
DALEY: – to journey.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Do you think that going to Ireland has any effect upon your work?
DALEY: Yes, I do. I thought – you know, when I was a boy, I thought most of the Irish were alcoholics or policemen, or like my father – poet talkers or whatever. But I didn’t know anything about the Book of Kells, I didn’t know that we were marvelous jewelers; I didn’t know we had this heritage. I did know about – as writers, I knew about Yeats and, you know, James Joyce and art school and read Dubliners [1914] and so on. So it was a great thrill to – when these things came to Philadelphia. When the Book of Kells came to Philadelphia, I followed it to New York and then I saw it again in Boston. But to see it at Trinity College [Dublin, Ireland] was a great thrill.
So to be in that thing – so when I came back, I made a pot and put a Celtic meander on it that I thought, well, I had a right to it then. I never – I didn’t feel that being – my own heritage was one of a kind of self-discovery, and that was a culmination of it by being able go there and seeing how – seeing it there.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: You know, the carving that you did on that pot, which was like the Irish interlace carving, had the same continuous line – no ending, no beginning.
DALEY: Yes, yes, the meander –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And it just keeps dissolving and finding itself. It is like the Celtic consciousness – it’s the way in which you teach, the way in which you verbally explore in the classroom. There is this incredible magnetic tie between that symbol, and the Celtic consciousness and your presence as an artist, in our community.
DALEY: Well, I think that is true, that I really like not knowing. I don’t like certainty, and in fact, if I know the answer before I start, I get bored and I can’t do it anyway. So I love it when I can make my way and find it and have things come out as I am in it or of it. And I love it when I can teach and I can help people get to have trust in themselves, where they will listen to their own interior temperature and proceed with it not knowing – having certainty about outcome.
Most people think that learning is about having certainty about outcome. Learning is really a matter of learning how to overcome resistance. It’s how to overcome your own resistance, and how to suspend your disbeliefs so that you can venture, and then being willing to venture and maybe stand at least a 50 percent chance of not having it work, so that you have to – but I think maybe that’s – I think it’s true in everything that is really creative. If you don’t have that, you are not going to be really creative, or you don’t learn how to trust that. I think everybody has it, but we usually get it trained out of us.
And from my – I just was lucky of being slow as a kid and so on, and sort of always being third or fourth or – you know, I always had a place to incubate and hide and be inside, and giving that permission to other people as a teacher. So I think that is part of the gift of a heritage in a way, that at least it’s a kind of aspect of Celtic being that I am susceptible to, and that the romance of the quest is not where you end up, it’s the journey. And so I like that.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Has Catherine’s ancestry in any way invaded you or influenced you?
DALEY: Oh, I think so. I think Cate’s – I was interested to go to Dublin, that Dublin was the headquarters of the Vikings for 600 years. And really, in some ways, that Cate and I drove to a monument out in the middle of Iowa, which is a monument to the Norwegians – we went 200 miles out of our way, and when we – there were two farmers there – Norske farmers – and we said, “We came to see the monument” – it was just a big stone. But they looked at Cate and they said – the guy said to me, “Are you a Norwegian?” And I said, “No, I’m Irish,” and Catherine said, “I’m Norwegian,” and they said, “Oh, no, you must French or Italian.”
So I realized after I got to Dublin that I was – I’m really probably Norwegian – one of the Vikings at 600 years of the headquarters in Dublin. But the sense of order or the sense of system, or rhythm of system of the kind of geometry of plan is something that I think that – that at least I see as part of a Norwegian heritage, but if you think about the Celtic guys that did those interweaves and so on, the plan below those are unbelievable. Geometries of those are unbelievable, except they don’t end up in any decipherable absolute reality. They end up in an enigma.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I find it also interesting that though your family has been here for several generations –
DALEY: Yes, four.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – four – that you are still Irish. [Laughs.] I mean, for decades, you have always presented yourself as Irish, and I find that very interesting.
DALEY: Well, I guess, in a way, one of the good things is that the children are Norwegian, French and Irish, but I grew up in an enclave that the whole – you know, all the people that were associates in that community were Irish. So I guess in that sense – although, I have never – I, in some strange way, became interested in the culture, in terms of learning about it, awfully late. Although, I have always had a real pride in the fact that when I was a boy, my father would let me – I would go to the wakes with him because I was his son – oldest son – and I had to go, and they would let me sit in the kitchen and hear the stories. If I didn’t say anything, I would be all right. If I said anything, they would chase me out. But I listened, and the stories were fantastic. And I – oftentimes, I would never know they were talking about the man that was out – buried out – was in the living room in the casket, because they were all amazing stories about this person. Probably most of them were apocryphal. [Laughs.]
So in that sense, I think that even as a boy, I realized that I was part of something that was pretty special – totally unbelievable, but special.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Well, Maurice felt that way.
DALEY: Did he?
DRUTT-ENGLISH: He was fiercely Irish.
DALEY: Yes, right, right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And he loved the word “fiercely” next to being Irish. [Laughs.] So that was important.
Do you think of yourself as part of an international tradition, or one that is specifically an American tradition?
DALEY: I think I’m part of some really universal tradition. I mean, I really think that the people that have been trying to give a form to spirit – it has nothing to do with national boundaries. Everybody that has tried to become an artist – and by that, I mean a maker, and the intent of the making was to give a shape to something that was about a feeling or a thought or a necessity or whatever – they are all the same. They all deal with the same primary questions, they all overcome the limits of materials, they all become enamored of material, they all learn that your hands direct your mind, not that your mind directs your hands. People that become scholars think that their minds are the central thing, people that become artists know that the wedding between the touch of their fingers and their head is the thing, and material.
So you are part of a three-way thing, so I don’t – in terms of who we are, I think that we really belong to a tremendously big, universal thing. And I don’t think that – I think it’s neat that – I’m glad we are not part of any real national tradition. When I went to England to lecture at the museum there, Victoria and Albert –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right.
DALEY: – I was amazed several people had said that they found that being in the Victoria and Albert Museum was such a drag for them, that it bound their possibilities so deeply that they couldn’t – they were locked up in the history of their own people’s past. And I went in there with my – I took, like, 2,000 slides in two weeks. I couldn’t believe all this stuff. For me, it was just sort of stuff to see and glory in. So one of the things that is great about the craft movement since the war was that most of us really didn’t even realized there was any tradition, and there wasn’t because we were ignorant.
And I think when you asked earlier about the difference between an art school person and an artisan – an artisan are all trained in the history of the touch and the automaticity of their teacher’s touch, and they transferred it to someone else. All the people that went to art schools or whatever after the war were coming from other directions and saw all of this as something without tradition. So, you know, when I first found out about Picasso and Archipenko – I saw Archipenko’s things at the old Whitney [Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY]in 8th grade going down on the school bus. You know, it was just unbelievably exciting and interesting, but it wasn’t about a ceramic tradition of anything, it was really about finding out about how to make art.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: But in the past, let’s say, four decades, there has been kind of a ceramic movement in America that has been very forceful and energetic, which is under this larger umbrella that you speak about.
DALEY: Yes, and you know, you know yourself that when you started with the PCPC [Philadelphia Council of Professional Craftsmen], you know what that consisted of were a whole bunch of strangely maverick human beings in very dispersed places across the country, all pursuing very myopically on one level that there was something inside them that needed to get out or that they had some desire to make something that had not happened yet, and that is what they were at. They weren’t – it wasn’t a movement.
Charles Abbott never showed us one slide of anything that anyone else had ever made. He would bring in a Mary Scheier pot once in a while and we would go and see the Syracuse show [Ceramic National, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York] and see that this guy up there in RIT [Rochester Institute of Technology, New York], you know – who am I trying to think of that was the teacher there for so many years and his wife [Marguerite Wildenhain] was at Pond Farm [California] –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Oh, Wildenhain. Frans Wildenhain.
DALEY: Yes, Frans Wildenhain.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right.
DALEY: You know, when I first saw a Wildenhain pot, I just about climbed up the walls because it was so exciting to me. So I think we were really a bunch of individuals that I think it really – to call it a movement, no one was writing any canons of anything. You know, so many people in that 50-year anniversary issue of American Craft cited the fact that when they read Bernard Leach’s A Potters Book [1940] that it meant so much to them. But none of us had that in our being.
Now there are a few people that studied with him who really studied to become studio potters, but I think a tremendous number of the potters were iconoclasts. I think I was one, I think [Peter] Voulkos was one. You know, there were people who came, like the Natzlers [Gertrud and Otto], who bought from Europe a tradition, and I think we bought into it to some extent. But I think what happened was really a responsive something coming out of art movements. I think we owe much more to modernism as artists than we owe to the craft tradition as craftsmen. I don’t know if that makes sense.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: It does make a lot of sense.
Does the function of objects play a part in the meaning of your work?
DALEY: Sure. My pots are really pots, and a pot is something you fill up with something and none comes out until it gets to the top, you know? So that is a vessel, and it has to stand up right for that to be true, and all my pots are vessels. Now if you say to me – and also, they all have enormous necessity that they have to be able to get made. So when you make something out of a sheet of clay, which is like uncooked liver, and you make it stand up and resist gravity, it’s very hard to do well. And then when you get so you can make the most volume with the least amount of material, that is even more difficult. And then when you can make a pot that has the least amount of material that is a true vessel and enjoys geometries so that it is engaging – totally engaging – around and in and over and through, that is even harder.
And then if you can make those geometries speak about you – I – in some really special way, that where the things that are engaging to me as a person can be personified in the work and meet all those demands – see, that is a wonderful thing I think that all artists have that nobody ever talks about is that the necessity of the constraints that they make in their own spirit about what they will not do, what they want to do. And making that become extraordinarily clear is the great joy. It’s the great joy for the artist and the great joy for the perceiver – that they can feel it.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: How do you feel when you see your pots being used in a functional manner?
DALEY: Oh, I love it. I love it if somebody wants to do that. The pot I made that they bought out at St. Charles Seminary on Good Friday when they took that animal pot and they bought it out of your gallery, and they put a big thorn tree in the middle of it – a black thorn bush with no green on it, standing in front of the altar. It was a really a powerful – what a functional use for that pot.
When Charlotte got married, we had one of my pots in the living room and I had a bushel of Granny apples – green apples – in it.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: How would you feel if umbrellas were in it?
DALEY: Oh, I wouldn’t care a bit. In fact, a great pot will lend itself to anything and still be happy. You know what I mean? I don’t mean – you know, I think that if you make a pot that is going to pour cream, it has to do that. So I think that most utilitarian pots – really great, functional pots – are truly great pots because they have met all three of those requirements. They meet all their own necessities. And art – most art, if it’s totally open, doesn’t do that – doesn’t have that need. But all art – all the arts that address that – the necessity of meeting your own constraints – [Henri] Cartier-Bresson just died, and I heard his – was reading about him, that he would say that some kind of thing about discernment of realizing the geometry, how the geometry of something had to be perfect and the story had to be perfect, and he called it this decisive moment. Well, when you get to the end of making something and you have really accounted for all those things and you can feel it inside yourself – you can’t kid yourself about it – it’s a marvelous feeling.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And then if it is communicated to an audience, then it is even –
DALEY: Well, you know, it’s amazing – you know, it’s amazing. Everybody that I have met that is passionate about pots – they don’t have to be makers of pots – they all – we all call it having a good eye, you know. And of course, your eyes are the least of it in a way, but the kinds of things that – I’m amazed that when somebody comes to a show, that the persons that I know who will come up and rub the best pot there and smile at me and nod, or whatever they do – they are affirming that they know what I know and I know what they know. It’s a marvelous thing that someone that is a real aficionado or a really discerning person about entering the world that you have spent so much time working in, you know. Like, I just spent 250 hours making a big pot that I blew a whole in, although that the persons that came to the show in Chicago and looked at that big tall pot, which is it’s sister, and nodded at me, and it was a great joy. When Dan Dailey came up and rubbed that pot and just started smiling, it was just like –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Because he knew and you knew that he knew.
DALEY: That’s right, that’s right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right, right. There was –
DALEY: And there was a communication.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right, absolutely.
DALEY: Yes, that’s right. And all the people that – like Edna Beron, when she went to that symposium that Garth [Clark] gave, and the art historian that was asking the questions.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Philip Rawson?
DALEY: No, it wasn’t Rawson. It was –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Clement [Greenberg]?
DALEY: No, no, it wasn’t Clement. But anyway – I can’t think of his name right at the moment – but they asked Edna what it was, and she said, “I know immediately in my stomach.”
DRUTT-ENGLISH: [Laughs.] I remember that.
DALEY: “I get a tremendously strong feeling, like a cramp in my stomach.”
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right.
DALEY: – and it’s absolutely immediate, and when it happens I know that it is absolutely true. And, you know, years later, reading, I found out – reading in Scientific American or something – that you really do have brain cells in your stomach, and it’s the flight instinct. They really discovered that there are – there is a thing there that goes off, for instance, when you are – and it was in your mind because – in that part of your system so that when you were terribly frightened, you would learn to run away before you thought. And I thought, that is what Edna had about art. So having that connection.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right. But it is true, you do get an amazing feeling in your abdomen when you –
DALEY: That’s right. Well, you have that.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And you can’t sleep and you think about it and try to come to terms with – it’s like love. [Laughs.]
DALEY: Well, yes.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: It’s passion.
DALEY: Yes, it is passion, but in a way, it’s very unpopular to make your discerning judgments. I always used to tell students that intuition is the most complete kind of knowing as opposed to analytical thought or reason or didactic thought, or whatever. And that is what they were working on developing – that sense where everything came together to make them have real certainty about their judgments.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I agree. [They laugh.] I totally agree.
DALEY: Yes, we are speaking to the choir.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right, totally.
DALEY: I have to think about Kuspit. That is who it is.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Oh, right, Donald Kuspit.
DALEY: Donald Kuspit.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Donald Kuspit, right.
DALEY: And he was erudite to the eyeballs, and when Edna said that, it gave me great joy, but there was no answer to it, you know?
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right.
DALEY: There was no rejoinder to the – and you remember when – I remember when we went to Edna’s funeral, and seeing her work in her house, in her home – she had the most diverse, impeccable insight into recognizing the voices that had a kind of clarity.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: She was the only person I knew who could buy a William Daley and a Rebecca Horn in the same day.
DALEY: Okay.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: [Laughs.] I mean –
DALEY: Yes. She was uncanny.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I mean, she knew.
DALEY: That’s right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And the essence of each of those works and the essence of those artists, as different as they were, spoke to her –
DALEY: That’s right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – and she understood.
DALEY: And she also – they spoke to her not by some sense of logic, but through –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right there.
DALEY: Yes, right. Well, anyway, we agree about that. [Laughs.]
DRUTT-ENGLISH: It was her famous story about her husband giving her money for a fur coat and she came home –
DALEY: And she bought an Evergood.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Philip Evergood. [Laughs.]
DALEY: That’s right. Yes, it was a marvelous painting.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And then she bought a Louise Nevelson wall –
DALEY: Yes.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And he said never again would he fund an acquisition of a fur coat, or the possibility of that.
Does religion, or a sense of spirituality, play a role in your art? What would you say?
DALEY: I say yes.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Or in your life even?
DALEY: I think that the big rub comes in how you define religion. I think every artist that gets to the bottom of something or managed to isolate something and offer it back to – in community, with great clarity or sensitivity or wit or feeling so that other people can communicate to him back in this connection that we were just talking about between the work and the maker and the audience or the owner, or whatever. Everyone that does that – that in itself is a spiritual journey. You can’t do that without – now whether that means you are Orthodox in some faith or whatever, I’m not – I don’t – to me spirituality and being religious is not about that.
Now, I was lucky that I grew up with a father that, you know, adored Franklin Roosevelt, but if he wasn’t talking about Roosevelt, he thought J.C. was – that Jesus was a pretty hot property. And so in a way, his religious life in terms of – was a very real powerful thing in his thing, and I think growing up in that – but in a way, he was also unorthodox. I mean, he believed in the canons of the Catholic Church in lots of ways, but he despised more priests than he liked, okay? So I thought of him as being a very spiritual man, and also in terms of his actions.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: But also, Bill, you were also very spiritual, and you were also very strong in the way which you addressed the accoutrements of the church, and I remember the baptismal fonts that you made. You were –
DALEY: Oh, well, that’s a great –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right, but you are drawn to that and you find a strength in responding to those ceremonies and making work that responds to it. Or perhaps even last December, the wreaths that you made for the cemetery, and each one was a work of art.
DALEY: Yes, but all of those – every symbolic act that is done to give a form to the ineffable, okay – to spirit – is art, and it’ a religious act – I mean, that is how I’m trying to describe it. So if I can make a Baptismal font and somebody says, yes, and it’s eight-sided and all these guys have made it because it stood for the eight day – the first day of new life – might be a good Monday teaching instead of the hereafter, and that is – and if that geometry can signify that, and then to be able to use that and make a Baptismal font for a community of worshippers who by – whose faith, tradition embodies that symbolization – it’s a great treat to do.
And every time I have had a chance to do that, I just adore doing it because I’m really inside something. And all of the art that comes out of that – a lot of it is dead, you know. I mean, a lot of people make ritualistic art and think that the symbols are – if you use a triangle you are talking about the Trinity, and if you put that in a vestment or something. But unless you embody that triangle, it’s part of yourself that you have dug up out of somewhere that makes it done in a way that where it’s singular, peculiar to either there or the people there or the place or the time or your own aberrations.
And when I made the font at St. – for my church – I made it for Akaru Amachi (ph), who was a Nigerian veterinarian who had a booming heart attack at 50. But when I made the tunnel through the thing so that the kids could look at each other through the bottom of the font, I got it out of Hindu mythology of Nandi the bull – or the sacred cow – being in the center of the cross, but being looked at down the tunnels of the temple. So anyway – or looking at it through the idea of Janus – Janus is the god – Celtic god of the doors who the Romans turned into January. But it meant that you could – if you were in the doorway looking forward or looking backwards, so he was a kind of time god, but also he is a perfect thing for baptism because it’s looking forward and backward to live a life that is blessed. So I didn’t have any qualms about putting a tunnel through there. I didn’t care if the Episcopalians liked it or not. It wasn’t an issue.
Can you see – I mean, in other words, I added something to the font. I made a circle of animals around the font because Akaru was a veterinarian, and I would make a chain of things. Later on, I found out that the first baptism of the world was the flood in the Old Testament – cleansing the world by water. But when I made the circle, I made it for my – I made a wheel of animals as continuousness. But later on, I was able to say, “Yes, I really was loading the ark,” but I didn’t have that in my mind because I didn’t know it. So the story and the form can be different, and the artist needs to add to the form if he is a sculptor or a form-maker, or add to the story, or both. So each time an artist brings himself to making something and adds to the traditions – if it’s part of a tradition – he is involved in a sacred quest.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: How would you define religion?
DALEY: I would define religion as people who are engaged in that deeply, and I don’t care what it is. It can be what they do when they work. If somebody really can invest – like, if a baker can really, deeply be invested in making magnificent bread – now you can say, “Well, he is really an artist.” I would say, “He really is a religious person,” okay, so that people that can have enough avidity in the days to live them with the kind of intensity that one would romantically ascribe to an artist, maybe – one of the things that artists do is learn how to overcome resistance enough so that they can keep having a sense of wonder about the days. It’s very hard to do now with all the terrible things that’s happening to us.
So I really think, in a way, defining religion is always too – way too parochial – way too parochial. But the real wonder of being here, you know, is that, like, consciousness is such an unbelievable gift that anybody that isn’t religious is crazy. I mean – well, they are if they are grateful for it and they use it well. You could say, well, is that ethical or not? I’m not worried about that. I don’t know if that makes sense, what I’m saying, that – so that I think there are a lot of irreligious people in church all the time, and there are a lot of marvelously religious persons who don’t go.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: So we are really talking about commitment and passion –
DALEY: Yep.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – you know, integrity.
DALEY: And trying to be accountable for those feelings.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right, right. Those are the real issues, and those are the issues that are central to your teaching, your life with your family, your work, your relationship with your students.
DALEY: Well, the worst part about it is that probably maybe the religious part is coming is that you can’t do it. You can’t succeed at it. You can aspire to it, but you can’t really pull it off, you know? And sometimes in art, you can pull off the illusion that that is possible, you know? But in some ways, almost everybody really – you know, it sounds terribly wonkish but we really are all maggots. You know what I mean? Our best efforts are pretty paltry. I mean, I keep thinking about that about art all the time. When I see guys that I think are really the unbelievable artists, I always say to myself, “Boy, Daley, what are you doing?” You know?
DRUTT-ENGLISH: When I saw those pots in Crete two years ago –
DALEY: Yes, yes.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I wondered, why? [Laughs.]
DALEY: Yes, yes.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I thought, why? Why am I even looking or caring about contemporary pots?
DALEY: That’s right. So in a way, you can’t – in other words, failing isn’t part of it. Trying to make it happen is what is part of it, you know. And when you get even the corners of it going, it’s a great joy, you know.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: It’s true.
DALEY: You are really trying to give it some kind of shape to possibility. I don’t know who said it. Some guy said that he was looking for the place where temperament and possibility intersected as an aspiration, and to me, that is the religious quest. I mean, that is the spiritual quest of finding the places where your own temperament and the possibility of being deeply in community meet each other, or cross or join so that you are in exchange or you are part of a chain or you are part of a continuance. Yes.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: This has nothing to do with that conversation, but I went to church with the Earle’s [James and Barbara Earle] last Sunday in Mantoloking [New Jersey] – an old church made of wood, and the interior was like an old Norwegian stave church –
DALEY: Oh, right. Oh, yes.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – with scallops of wood from 1856 –
DALEY: Oh, nice.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – or 1860, and it was the children’s – it was their day, and they were singing and they were reading from the text, and the rains outside were torrential and pouring, and –
DALEY: It was a really moving experience.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I had an amazing time. I don’t think I had such a good time in years. It was amazing.
DALEY: Well, I go to church every Sunday and –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: But I don’t. [Laughs.]
DALEY: Well, you know, I don’t always tune in either, but every once in a while, things – I really realize that I have another way of making connection.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: You know, I’m not Christian, and they were singing, “Let My People Go” – [laughs] – and there I was in the midst of this amazing, amazing experience. I wanted to go back.
DALEY: When they were saying that, those were the people that were trying to get out of Egypt.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right. [Laughs.]
DALEY: So you were right in your own faith tradition.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: As I left the church, I walked out in a torrential rainstorm, I turned to Barbara Earle and I said, “I haven’t had such a good time in years.”
DALEY: Yes.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: It was very special, just the connecting, the communication among all of the celebrants that were there, and it’s what you’re talking about.
DALEY: Well, I find a lot of – I belong to a group at church of a kind of search for new Christianity – I mean, of modern readings of the gospels and discerning who wrote them and when they happened and what their agenda was for having written them and so on. But so much of what we are talking about in terms of formalized religion really has – over time, and in history – is tremendously divisive. I mean, you think of the Islamic thing and Christian right at the present moment. You know, they are not forces for unity; they are forces for isolation, and it’s just kind of a shame.
So I think you can make – I guess William James wrote a book about religion that was – I can’t remember the name of it now, but an awful lot – he claimed that most of the great things that happened in the name of religious thought. You could also make an argument for an awful lot of the things that are most troublesome are centered in the wrong kind of religious thought. So I like the generalization that all artists that are really good are religious. They are spiritual beings, and that is good enough.
[Audio break.]
DRUTT-ENGLISH: This is tape number three.
How has the market for American craft changed in your lifetime?
DALEY: Well, this is the first boring question that we have had. I mean, the other ones were pretty interesting, but –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: This could be a question that gives you a point of departure to really discuss the amazing change in patronage as well as the market.
DALEY: I think that the awareness of what it is that people do when they make things has shifted enormously, and that the number of discerning people who appreciate and enjoy it has increased enormously. I think that, you know, the education efforts of so many people since the war have brought that about. And when I think of Mrs. Vanderbilt Webb, you know, giving her whole fortune to making people in America aware of what we are interested in.
There is a whole – I mean, and a lot of people when I think about people like Victor D’Amico at the Museum of Modern Art in the ‘40s having classes for children, and people a Greenwich House [New York, NY] doing the same kind of thing, people at Penland having courses and so on. So this has been going on for a long time, and I think since the war it has accelerated enormously that the notion of the – again, the GI Bill – of the number of persons who wished to do something with their lives, and had an opportunity through education. The increase in the number of schools that let people learn how to make things in order to become artists instead of, say, in the industrial arts attitude where you were being trained to work – do a specific task and be useful – that you could use in other ways.
Then a number of people have gone, or turned around, and that is where I happen to be in a way, and my having opportunity to teach and continue doing it. That has happened over and over again, and I think – well, when I started, the kind of store, whatever you want – the co-op at Woodstock, New York, was the only place you could take a pot to offer it in community – either that or you could go down to see Florence Eastman at America House [New York, NY].
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right.
DALEY: Then in New York City, there was one gallery that handled work, or you could go to Bonnier’s occasionally at – and –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: See some Scandinavian work.
DALEY: – see some Scandinavian – but it just wasn’t – there wasn’t any place that you could even offer it, and there wasn’t any place that you could see it.
DRUTT-ENGLISH : Until Shop One in Rochester was opened.
DALEY: Yes, in Rochester. But anyway, so the – and then what you have done, and Alice Westphal’s efforts and, you know.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: But just think of the difference of craft fairs, when you think of Mount Snow [Vermont] in the ‘60s, when craft fairs were rather small and intimate and drew major figures of the field as part of the fair, and think of the craft fair today, and think of how that has altered along the way.
DALEY: Oh, I think that the – I think the scale of it has changed enormously, and the work has changed. Well, you know, the – if making work – if the purpose of making work is to sell it, then we have succeeded enormously. If the purpose of making work is to make art, which people are going to take pleasure in or gain sustenance from or whatever, then that maybe is another question.
One of the things that I felt that as the craft fair thing emerge and kept growing, that it really would make a chance for a whole kind of community of makers to – [audio break, tape change] – do really good work and be useful and make beautiful things that would give – embody spirit and people would enjoy much more widely. And I think in a lot of ways that has happened, but I also think along with it the emphasis has shifted. But it’s not only shifted in terms of the fairs, it’s – on all levels the idea of a person making something to have a market, it’s different.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: But if that market was controlled by a small community and they could satisfy the community, then the aesthetics would remain constant. When the market becomes national and there are orders to be filled, something happens, because it does become something else.
DALEY: I don’t know if that’s why it happens. You know, I know a lot of people that are making marvelous pots and people want to have them, and the people that are making the pots are doing what they think is important; they’re doing it with real conviction and real quality, and they’re quite successful, I think. It’s just I think there are a lot of other people, though, who are making things, and the purpose of their making them is different. It’s really to have a market. And I don’t know what the answer to it is, but it’s an interior thing to me that – how you get so you make things that – I think the biggest part of it is educational, that one can develop a discernment on the part of an audience more deeply, and that’s what we’re not doing. Everything is getting to be sound bites and superficial. And our grade school programs and – you know, we don’t have – craft programs in schools are not increasing; they’re diminishing. And the idea of the visual arts being part of the life of everyone’s education is very, very unusual.
You know, visual arts are crafts or the making – being discerning about things that are made by people is not keeping up with the way in which one can promote or present their information. Maybe the Internet will help change that; I don’t know. I don’t think there’s – you need to have larger and larger discerning audiences to have larger and larger numbers of persons making objects that merit the sermon. And we’re not putting our energies into that in terms of education. Arts education is educating people in the ways that they think. The way your mind works is the way artists are. And we’re not doing that, for the most part. We’re really dealing with information all the time; we’re not dealing with formation. So I don’t think we have – we’re not getting more and more people who are in on it.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: If you think about the so-called market for American craft, you think about the late ‘60s and the ‘70s. There was a generation at that time that was really being educated.
DALEY: Yes.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And that generation is now retiring and many of those people are discussing the fact that the generation that follows them doesn’t have the same kind of commitment to the work.
DALEY: That’s right. But the – well, we can take you as a case in point. When you did 1625 Spruce Street you had a gallery. But when you’re a gallery – maybe you’ll disagree with me – it wasn’t about selling things.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: That’s correct.
DALEY: Your gallery was really an educational outpost, and people came down Spruce Street and went in there, and you shared with them the things that were exciting to you, and you spoke to that, and I think some people acquired things. But what you were about, the central purpose of it, was not that you were marketing.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: It wasn’t a shop.
DALEY: Okay.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: No. It was a commitment to a group of artists and their work –
DALEY: That’s right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – and to their ideas.
DALEY: But in terms of the craft movement I think all of the people were doing that too, the people that had shops. A person that had a shop didn’t have – wasn’t able to deal with the merchandising techniques that have got a lot of mass kind of appeal. I mean, it was really for a small group. And in some ways they were educating their customers to be responsive to what it was they offered.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Absolutely.
DALEY: And I think maybe that changed.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: How has it changed?
DALEY: I don’t know, because I think in some ways that the kind of media exposure it involves, in some ways, early on in the ‘60s there were maybe feature articles in the paper in the cultural section or something of this sort, but there weren’t ads on TV or on radio about the scale of something. For an artist now to be a participant in Baltimore and how much it costs to go there and do that, for the booth fees and all the rest of it, and the advertising for the people that are traveling, for the people – the advertising to get the word out, to get the people to come in, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, but it’s not about the – the jury system is much more open in a way, and the values that it espouses are not as clear.
So I think that that’s one of the things that happened and there’s no longer the education of a discerning group about what the real wondrous work is.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: There’s also been a massive proliferation of artists.
DALEY: Oh, yes, absolutely.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Somebody once told me that the Museum of Modern Art gave a party for all the artists in New York in the late ‘40s and there were 50 people in attendance. Can you imagine if MOMA gave a party for the artists in New York today, what the attendance would be?
DALEY: It would be thousands.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: True.
DALEY: No, I think that’s true. But in order for that to be – for that work to be vibrant and engaging and call for people to give themselves to it and to find a responsive chord that we were talking about earlier, you’d really have to do enormous amounts of education, so that when a kid was in first, second, third, fourth, right up through high school, this was part of their life.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And you have to have institutions that will have exhibitions that will also support the education of the audience.
DALEY: That’s right. We’re not giving priority to that.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: No, not at all.
Would you like to describe your relationship with dealers?
DALEY: Oh, yes, that’s simple.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: That’s a word that I really don’t like, but I would prefer to say with those people who have served you and supported you in a gallery situation.
DALEY: Well, the notion of a dealer is something that is a card person that’s a skilled manipulator –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: [Laughs.] Right. When Allan Frumkin called me a dealer – I think it was in the early ‘80s he asked me how I liked being a dealer and I started to cry.
DALEY: Yes, well, I agree. You know –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: However, would you like to describe the relationship with dealers?
DALEY: Yes, the relationships with all the people that you have in your life as an artist need to have the same care and attention that all other human beings are supposed to have in your life if you’re really trying to live a good life. I’d say you have people that are interested in what you’re interested in, who care that you have mutual benefits to that activity, and that you serve each other well to bring those about. And in that sense you can speak about artists who don’t honor the people that they are in a relationship with and you can speak about people who are – the persons that present that work to a public who don’t honor the artists as they should.
So I just don’t – I think in some ways that it’s difficult because it’s a very small number of persons that have this interest, as we’ve just said, and then finding – and the number of people who want to be participants keeps getting larger and larger. But I find that the persons that are in accord with the people that present their work over time, that there’s a mutual thing going on that’s beneficial.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Do you think the division of duties between the artist and the dealer is a good division?
DALEY: I think the person that has to present the work and make a case for that work and be persuasive with others because they’re persuaded themselves, that that’s one task. I think making the work and being engaged in that is another task, and they’re different, and they compliment each other, and if you don’t have all parts of it you don’t have a complete system. They way institutions are short-stopping the gallery presenters, or whoever they are; the number of places that are having fundraisers and where the artists give their work and sell it through a fundraising thing and the persons that – their agents, if you wish to call them that, or their enablers – we call them enablers – that’s the gallery persons – you know, the very institutions that are trying to make money or earn funds are doing it at the expense of the galleries.
So the thing all the way around is a whole bunch of people scrambling for a small piece of a small pie and not honoring each other. I don’t know how many benefits – I really could take all the work that I can produce in any given year and do it to help out some organization that’s supposedly helping art, but for the most part it’s not about helping the artists, and oftentimes at the expense of the people who represent the artists.
So I think that in a way, that in the best possible of worlds, that you could have a lot of very critical kind of thought about how one ought to proceed in the world of the arts in terms of where everyone honors everyone else. I mean, it sounds Pollyannic, but you see it all the time. The person that has a show for artisans and lets a lot of people in more people in than can sell their work, and the artist goes in hoc to rent a space and all the rest of it, and the person that’s renting the space makes their earning by the amount of spaces they sell, and the person that goes to the fair and sells nothing pays the same amount as the person that sells a lot, and that’s okay – it’s free enterprise. And in a way it’s not fair.
The people that hold the show have a different goal than the artists that are in the show. So I’m not – no one can take everyone into a gallery that wishes to be in it, but if somebody is in a gallery, it’s the job of the person that’s in the gallery, the person that’s the enabler, to represent all those people equally and fairly.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Absolutely.
DALEY: That’s right. And very often, taking a person’s work on consignment and using it as merchandise and not giving people access to the things that will help them be perceived as an artist more clearly, that’s not honorable.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I’m not quite sure I understood what you said.
DALEY: I mean, I know in my own past that people would take your work on consignment and not present it or not offer it with clarity or –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Not exhibit it appropriately.
DALEY: Not exhibit it, not speak to it, and just have it there, you know? They’re not really serving the artist when they’re doing that; they’re really – the idea of buying something wholesale is not what that relationship is about.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: That’s another one of my least favorite words.
DALEY: Yes, no, sure, of course.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right.
DALEY: So what the arrangements are for transactions really depends on the honor of the people that are making it.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right.
DALEY: So the people that plan for it and the people that organize these things really have to think about whether their objectives – whether these various alliances, or whatever we call them – councils, alliances and so on – are they really about promoting art?
DRUTT-ENGLISH: But the role of a good dealer or gallery person goes way beyond just selling art.
DALEY: Of course. It’s representing the artist in a public forum –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: That’s right.
DALEY: – to the artist’s benefit, and if the artist is successful, so will the person presenting them be successful.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And also representing an artist, if you believe in them, even if they are not successful.
DALEY: Well, of course. Of course. One of the things that happens also is that the people having conviction about what they’re doing, they can’t be good artists unless they do, and the people that represent them have to have the same sense. Otherwise they shouldn’t represent them.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Absolutely.
DALEY: So to me that’s what it’s about.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: In your own working environment, what are the qualities of your environment, and what is your studio like? What are the things that you find necessary for your personality in order to work?
DALEY: For me, the place that – you need to have a place that’s safe to work. And you don’t need much. You need light, you need water, you need to be warm, you need various tools. My whole career has been, you know, give me a rolling pin and a table and bag of clay and some time and I could make something. So I’ve never had a classy studio.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Well, but you’ve had a studio in your home.
DALEY: I’ve always – I’ve had no overhead. It’s called a cellar.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Cellar door. [Laughs.]
DALEY: That’s right. And now I have a special cellar door so that you can go in and out. But I’ve always had a safe place to be in. It’s called a home. And when the kids were little they could come and get clay and I could help put them to bed and Cate would come and help me – give me a crit. And so I’ve had the best possible kind of studio life, and most of the times – and it still is, I think – an extremely modest kind of space. But, really, it’s very freeing because if I do any work it doesn’t cost me any more than if I don’t do any work. I don’t have any overhead. I mean, I have overhead because I’m part of a family, but my art life, it’s always begun by taking money out of the house money. I mean, my art life was subsidized by the house money, okay?
So I think I have a marvelous studio, quite frankly. It’s not very fancy but it’s grand.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And it’s a fabulous studio and there’s a wonderful visual sense of order in the studio –
DALEY: Well, yes. Thanks to Cate.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – that is an extension of the work itself.
DALEY: That’s right. But, I mean, it’s a working, workable place. And when Dan Dailey came and did an architectural commission with me and then 25 years later I went to visit Dan – he was teaching at Mass Art and I went to his studio and he took me down in the cellar. And stood at the cellar steps and started laughing. I mean, I was immensely pleased to see how much fantastic work that he was doing in this very modest place.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Is his studio still a cellar?
DALEY: Oh, no, it’s a great big, huge barn up near Exeter Academy [Exeter, New Hampshire]–
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right.
DALEY: – and it’s – but at that time it really was. So for me, I’ve been tremendously advantaged by being able to make whatever I wanted, even when nobody wanted it, because I haven’t had any expense to meet.
[Breaks to answer phone.]
DRUTT-ENGLISH: [Rudolf] Staffel also worked in his cellar on East Oak Lane.
DALEY: Yes, right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I remember that.
DALEY: Absolutely. So in a way, to me, the idea – my studio has always been very close to home and maybe I could work two hours or go down after supper, whatever. Some of the best times of working in my studio used to be Sunday evenings. And I’d listen to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and be working on a pot in a one-car garage that I had in Feasterville [Pennsylvania]. It was celestial.
So the studio is psychic space. Like I don’t like letting anybody into my studio. When the American Craft Council came to [Warren] Seelig’s up around the corner, I wouldn’t let anybody come down to my studio. I don’t – I like my friends to come and I’m not trying to be exclusive, but I very seldom will let anybody see my workspace.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Do you know what, Bill? I feel –
DALEY: I think of it just like a bedroom.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I feel that way about my home.
DALEY: Okay, right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: It’s like those whom I invite –
DALEY: Right. That’s right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Not the tourists. [Laughs.]
DALEY: But a studio is a psychic space.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: So is a home.
DALEY: Well, that’s why I’ve always –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: A home is a psychic space.
DALEY: I’ve had the best studio in the world, and that’s the cellar. When I put windows in it so I could see that – my first studios I couldn’t tell whether it was raining or spring or winter, because you couldn’t see out the windows. They were cellar windows. When I got this house I put new windows in. I dug the bricks out and built bigger windows. So now, anyplace you look you can look out and see the garden.
Well, anyway, we answered that one fast.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: [Laughs.] That’s true. That’s true.
Is there a community that has been important to your development as an artist?
DALEY: Oh, I think there is, and that community for me has come about through my teaching, that I really became – learned how to be an artist by being around artists, and they were all – and they happened to be teachers. They were teachers, so that both informationally and socially and artistically being – having – being with them and among them and learning from them about all aspects of doing – being connected with the Philadelphia College of Art for 30 years, and each community I’ve been in, being the Iowa State Teacher’s College and State University of New York at New Paltz and Fredonia – each time I’ve been in the community of artists, people aspiring to become artists who were teachers, this has been the community that has sustained me: learning, teaching with really great teachers who knew a lot about art, who were teaching me while we were both trying to teach, period, and that exchange over a long period of time of people being exemplars, like getting to know people like Morris Bird and Larry Day and see how they conducted themselves as artists: what they did and how they did it. It was just a – being with Bill Parry, you know, who I think is one of the greatest teachers I ever knew, and also just being in his presence and trying to address teaching every day with him – the same way with Dick Reinhardt. It was just a marvelous kind of experience.
And then Philadelphia, as you know well, that went beyond just a school that the students, the teachers in the other schools who were craftsmen – Bob Winokur and so on and so on and so on, we were all a community early on, and you were part of that community as well. And then it gradually got to be also so that the people who cared a lot about crafts, or what we did, were also part of it. So when you had your gallery at 1625 Spruce Street – that little paper I wrote about that, that you went to an opening and the discerning people who cared about what you did, the people – your colleagues in your school cared about it, your students and the people in the other schools that cared about it were all there. And that’s – when we met that was the occasion, and that was a marvelously supportive kind of environment to be in. And I’ve always kind of had that. I mean, I think that’s enormously important.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And they painted the stands.
DALEY: Yes, well, it wasn’t the – it’s kind of interesting; you talk about presenting your work. The first one-person show I had was at NYU and Jules Olitski gave me the show in the Education Gallery. So I had – I made the cases. I carried them to New York City from New Paltz. I painted the gallery and put up the show and had the opening. [Laughs.] And I loved it.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: But didn’t you also exhibit with Arnold Glimcher?
DALEY: Well, I had a show at the Pace Gallery in Boston also –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right.
DALEY: And I didn’t have to do that. But what I’m saying is everyone really was enormously willing to do everything that needed to be done. You know, when you had an opening, the last thing you did were clean the toilets.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right, and wash the floors.
DALEY: That’s right. That’s right. And somebody had to go and buy the jug wine and –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right.
DALEY: But, I mean, it really was a communal effort of conviction that had – and it was extremely professional as well, but it was – in way it was about the beginnings of things.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I remember the first time somebody bought something and I didn’t have any money in the gallery and I had to give them a check for $7 and change. [Laughs.]
DALEY: But I’m saying, that sense of being in a community –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right, absolutely.
DALEY: – and the interconnectedness of all the parts of that community was very, very exciting and very satisfying, and very supportive.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right, and it also brought the clients, the patrons, the students and the artists together as one family.
DALEY: That’s right. That’s right. That’s right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And there was no division. Everybody was equal. Everybody spoke to each other; everybody discussed ideas with each other.
DALEY: Yes, there were no openings for the people that gave the most so they were patrons – special openings. [They laugh.] Every opening was special. Well, they were special because, you know, that was a great social occasion and you couldn’t get anybody to go home. I remember at 1625 Spruce Street where in the middle of – you would have an opening in June or July just before school ended and the people would be lined up outside and the whole gallery would be loaded with people and just totally jammed.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: How do we do that again? How does that – how do we create that kind of camaraderie and energy again?
DALEY: Well, in a way, for me I don’t want it. I don’t mean it – I see it nostalgically in some ways but –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: No, but I mean for this generation. How do you –
DALEY: Well, they have – they’re doing it. They’re doing it and we’re just not part of it. It’s happening.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Oh, all right.
DALEY: No, it’s just like the The Journey to the East [1932]. Was it The Journey to the East? Yes, Hesse’s story of – the journey is still going on but we’re not –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: We’re not there.
DALEY: We’re not.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: No.
DALEY: Like Nick Kripal has just bought a new building in the city for a co-op. But anyway.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: It’s different.
DALEY: It is, it’s just different, but it’s still happening. So when Nick Kripal has his opening, I don’t have a great need to be present. I mean, I just don’t. I don’t even want to use my energy doing that. So when things happen in the city and I say, “You know, I really should go to that,” and oftentimes I say, “Yes, but I just feel like it,” which I think is okay. I’m not sad about it.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I understand. It’s moving on.
DALEY: Yes, right. It’s the “tired” in “retirement.” [Laughs.]
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Where does American craft, or American ceramics rank on an international scale? And is the field moving in any obvious direction or not?
DALEY: Oh, I think that, you know, in terms of – since the war that what happened in American crafts has been – had a really profound influence on the way crafts were perceived in the rest of the world. I think that’s still going on.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I think in particular in ceramics, that the American position –
DALEY: Yes. I think in the United States that the ceramic edge of it has sort of been the leading edge all the time, but if you think of what’s happening now in the wood-turning world, you know, Albert LeCoff’s group – I mean, the last two weeks they’ve had people down at PCA this summer from all over the world having a symposium. So that the energies in it I think that are still being generated – you know, a lot of the – if you think of Haystack and Anderson Ranch and Penland and the number of people that come from Europe and all around the world to go to the summer sessions and so on, it’s still a pretty amazing thing.
So I think that our leadership has been pretty profound in a way, organizationally, but I also think in terms of the work. I mean, when I think of that Petrified Pizza that is sitting over there – it’s in the bedroom – apart from the 1950s and how strange it was for the time – an unbelievably ordinary pot now, but in terms of the way one looks at what ceramics can be about now as opposed to in 1955 or 1960, it’s enormously – it’s shifted enormously, and I think it’s largely been due to what people have done here.
So I think we’ve contributed. Now, to say that – if I start thinking about really fantastic ceramic artists, I don’t think that they’re all here. You know, Korea and –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Korea – Asian –
DALEY: They’re all right. And I think somebody like Jan van der Vaart and people in Holland, you know, people in France, people in England, I think they’re amazing in the international kind of community of makers.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: But the great diversity that exists in this continent is extraordinary, and the expansiveness in which the –
DALEY: No, that’s true.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – medium has been explored has been extraordinary, just as in metals it has been extraordinary in Europe.
DALEY: Right. Well, I think the idea of the kind of multiplicity of precedents are very broad, but I think that comes out of what’s happened because of collegiate education, if you want to talk about it. It’s fostered that. It’s also made for lots of strange apparitions too.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Absolutely. [Laughs.] We’ll discuss that.
What are the most powerful influences in your career? And we’re talking about people, art movements, technology.
DALEY: Well, I think books would have to be right up there at the beginning of it. And I think museums would have to be right up there in the beginning of it, over time. And then the next thing I’d do is kind of I’d say kind of colleagues, associates, people, a passion to be with that are inspired to me.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And students.
DALEY: Well, I count them along with – I think that the – there’s the passers and the receivers. If you think about that, there aren’t any teachers. But the people that can catch passes are not just students and the people that throw passes are not just teachers. It’s a kind of reciprocal thing that goes on all the time.
Like, I know when I was teaching experimental design classes, I learned way more than the students by seeing the scope of the ideas that they were willing to entertain and trying to internalize that and respond to it. And I’m the same way with fellow teachers. I learn probably more about form from watching Bill Parry as an artist and as a teacher, and [Marcus Aurelius] Renzetti and Rinehart and so on than I learned from my teacher teachers – you know, I learned from Abbott. So I think that the community thing, again, people.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: But it’s also because you allow certain individuals to become close to you and the dynamics of that exchange become greater.
DALEY: Well, I think in a way, if you’re in school, that there’s a set of conventions that you’re all operating under that permit you to exchange things at very low risk, and if you’re willing to venture, you have a very permissive and understanding climate that you’re living in that allows you to find out what you don’t know yet and learn from each other. That’s the essence of what a school is about is lowering the level of risk so that you can venture, and being encourage to do that and to avoid failure by being intelligent and having insight and learning how to have insight and take chances and have good outcomes. I mean, there’s some kind of strange reciprocity going on.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: But you found, in [Richard] Reinhardt in particular, a soul mate, on so many different levels.
DALEY: Well, I did because he was like a big brother, you know. I mean, the thing about it, I never realized that he had a brother that was killed in the war and his name was Billy. So every once in a while over the years he would say, “Now, Billy” – in fact, I didn’t realize it until after his death that in some ways I was his younger brother. So you’re absolutely right –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: That there was a greater attachment between the two of you even beyond that –
DALEY: Oh, I think so – I think so.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – you know, even in your intellectual thinking and your aesthetic sensibilities and how you taught and what those criteria for teaching were.
DALEY: Well, I think there were things that – you know, in some ways Bill Parry was my guru and Dick was my teacher in terms of my attitudes about duty and rightness and commitment and that kind of thing. It’s an interesting thing. And Dick’s attitudes about making and process were absolutely extraordinary, and he was such an unbelievable exemplar. I mean, when he would say, “Bill, do you like this better than making stuff?” And Renzetti of course was the same way. I mean, they were poets of making.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And Petras Vaskys.
DALEY: Oh, Petras.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Yes.
DALEY: But Petras was much more than just a marvelous maker too. Petras was a personification of a spirit on Earth that no one – there was no one like him. He was so wise and so smart and so contained in a way that he would know what was coming down weeks before it even dawned on me.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And he was the most gentle of all human beings.
DALEY: That’s right, and he would never speak to it until someone began to ask him about it. Yes, right. Absolutely.
Well, those are the biggest things, more than the books and more than the museums. But developing discernment is a big part of having a career, and associating with people who think that that’s important is that – going in – PCA, in the early days, of going to the lunchroom and brown-bagging it and listening to the discourse and hearing people discussing something about art for the hour and a half that you could linger there was unbelievable. I thought, you know, unless somebody nails me to the stake I’ll never say a word in this company. I mean, it really was so magnificent to be a listener. And it made any seminar that I was in at Columbia or any other place seem like Cream of Wheat. And discussions I had in taverns at art school as a veteran, drinking Pickwick Ale, about whether Picasso was better than Matisse, or whatever – you know, unbelievable kind of exchanges.
And that’s what I think is so magnificent with having been part of – in a community.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And when the community has expanded beyond Philadelphia, for instance, the relationships that have developed with people like Yvonne Joris as a result of her attachment to your work, how do you perceive that?
DALEY: Well, I feel that like my going into that thing at the Renwick [Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.] and that there are people there that I have come to know over time who regard what I’ve done and I regard them, it makes you feel that you’re part of some larger community, which is very confirming. I just got asked to make the closing remarks at NCECA [National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts] in Baltimore. It’s very exciting to me to be invited. But when the wood people had the thing with Dan Jackson they asked me to give a lecture on what I thought about furniture.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: When is NCECA?
DALEY: March sometime – early March.
And in a way, if you go to these wood – this wood community and see also there people like Alphonse Mattia and students, but also know so many of these – like Jere Osgood and all these artists through my experiences with them, it’s very confirming. I feel like I am an older person in a community of people where we have mutual regard and interest.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Right, and that media has nothing to do with it.
DALEY: No, no, it’s not about media, but it’s very much about discerning, being regarded as someone that’s discerning and having professed by making as someone who is discerning. And that’s the thing that you exchange and you like doing – workshops all over the country. I’m just amazed always when I see somebody that I don’t know at all in a week and just by watching them work and seeing the moves that they’re making – and sometimes it might be a workshop of all pros, or it might be a workshop of all students, or it might be all graduate students, or it might be all high school students. It’s amazing how immediately you build in this sense of both trust and belief in what you’re experiencing. And the quality of that spirit, as manifested in what’s being done, is so clear that it makes you – well, it makes you relate to these persons much more deeply, and you’re part of some kind of real esoteric society, and it’s wonderful.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: What do you see as the place of universities in the American craft movement, and specifically for artists working in ceramics?
DALEY: Let’s see, one kind of enormous worry, that it’s getting so that the public education is being called into question again, so that it’s only going to be for the elitist persons that can afford it. So that scares me.
The greatest thing that happened for crafts education is public education: community colleges. And that’s not to say that there are – there are four-year places that are extraordinary and have an extraordinary history – a place like Alfred [New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, Alfred, New York], you know? The University of the Arts [Philadelphia, Pennsylvania], if you think of Edmund DeForest Curtis and the program that he had in the ‘20s, and it’s a long history, it makes it extraordinary. [Audio break.] But I think in some ways, public access to this.
So in a lot of ways, the art centers, places like Cheltenham Art Center [Cheltenham, Pennsylvania] and places all over the country –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Wallingford.
DALEY: Wallingford [Wallingford Art Center, Wallingford, Pennsylvania] – and then a lot of them are commercial now. They’re really clay houses that are selling supplies and giving workshops. But that kind of underlying energy I think is an amazing kind of thing that’s a feeder for this. And having places where one can go and study intensely in a university setting I think is enormously important. I think a lot of times that they have it backwards. I think that the beginning part, they should – graduate school should be undergraduate, and then undergraduate school should be graduate. In other words, you ought to be able to go to undergraduate school and specialize – just do one thing until it comes out your ears. And then you ought to go to graduate school and diversify and go deeply and learn general things. Learn more academic things; learn all the connections and so on.
So that’s another whole topic, but arts education – the idea of learning more and more about less and less at the end I think is very unsound.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: That’s true. But also, in the university, the involvement in the crafts in studio work are always electives; they’re never majors – in the university structures.
DALEY: Well, Penn now has a – Penn has a –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: It’s not a major.
DALEY: Yes, I think it is. [Audio break, tape change.] I think you can major in it. Well in the real esoteric Ivy League places you can’t even take it for credit.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Toshiko [Takaezu] taught at Princeton for years, but it was a studio.
DALEY: Yes, that’s right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: But the main problem I have is with the academic section in the art history departments. They’ll teach the history of video, they’ll teach the history of film, but they will not allow the history of the craft movement to infiltrate into the history of 20th century art.
DALEY: Oh, I think that the politics of arts education, you know, are pretty entrenched. So you’re right. Most of the people don’t teach it because they don’t know anything about it.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: They have to begin –
DALEY: No, I understand.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: They have to have colloquiums in which they invite people –
DALEY: I agree – I agree.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – in to discuss these issues.
DALEY: I agree.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: How has your work been received over time? In your opinion, who are the most significant writers in the field of American craft and why is their writing meaningful to you? Let’s begin with how has your work been received over time?
DALEY: Well, my work – you know, I’ve been sort of a sleeper in a way. Over a long period of time I’ve just been working, and over a long period of time the perceptions about what I’ve done and I’m doing seems to, from my point of view, get clearer and become more convincing to both myself and the people who’ve supported what I’ve done. And I think people who have helped me – people like you and others who have leant their energies to being supportive of that are prevailing in terms of – so in that sense I have a very good feeling about – I also have a feeling of enormous kind of arrogance that I have real certainty – and I’ve had it for a long time – that what I’m doing is about something that’s extremely primary. And I have deep belief that people that do that and manage it somehow will persist. Now, I guess that’s having belief and having trust, and I really feel that. So, in a way I feel it doesn’t even really matter. That’s terrible to say.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: But it does matter.
DALEY: Well, it does matter – it matters in the deepest sense that it gives me enormous joy when somebody whom I admire as being discerning makes judgments about what I do that confirm my life.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I remember the first thing –
DALEY: And, you know, it’s very, very important to me – it’s like everything, but it doesn’t – it’s not about a career thing in terms of – in a way I don’t see any way that the work, if it’s good, will live on its own as it goes – if it gets out in the world. And that’s sort of my faith in it. Maybe that’s naïve, but I think that politics of approval are much too complicated to be able to figure out by having a career. I mean, if you do it as though you’re having a career, I think it’s really that you’re really living a life.
So, like after I had the traveling shows in some ways I thought, well, I said everything I wanted to say, and now I find that –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: You didn’t.
DALEY: No, I haven’t.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: You haven’t.
DALEY: And maybe the things I might find out next might be the best things I’ll find out ever. And I have a feeling that if I find them out and offer them, there will be someone to help present them, like what you’re doing.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Maybe those few years of just growing and just staying with the paper really were years of gestation for you, because what’s happened now is sort of extraordinary; you’ve gone way beyond, you know, those forms that you did 10 years ago. They’re much more robust, they’re more adventuresome, they’re taking chances with balance. You’re cutting into surfaces.
DALEY: Well, it’s not even a matter of what you’re doing and what you’re not, but in a way it’s somehow how you’re bottoming out in terms of what it is that you’re about, and I think that’s neat in a sense.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I’m suddenly thinking of the first time.
DALEY: Having that permission is an enormous permission, you know, that so few people get that permission. And I’m really – I went down to the Veterans’ Hospital last week and I saw my peers there, people in my age group and, you know, I really came home and I thought, man, I’m so blessed. So in that sense I don’t – I feel like I’m in some wonderful pool of water floating, or being held up and able to swim in any way I want, however I want, when I want, as much as I want. It’s pretty amazing to just think about – just having health enough to be able to do that.
So I don’t know about – but what it is in the work, in a way it’s like all of the stuff that went before it. I mean, somehow you’ve really gone down a path that permits you to make sets of judgments that you’ve been privileged to be aware of through a long, long time of working and being connected up in all the ways that we’ve been discussing – you know, that the – and it’s just such a neat time if you can just ward off becoming tired.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: I was thinking before that the first time I saw your work was at Gallery 1015 –
DALEY: Right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – in 1961.
DALEY: Right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And even then your work was presented with such clarity. The work had clarity; the presentation had clarity. There was another basement situation on Greenwood Avenue – Gallery 1015.
DALEY: Right.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: – in which your work was offered in a very –
DALEY: Gladys Myers –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Gladys Myers, that’s right.
DALEY: Well, I think in terms of – like your work in my behalf through giving me permission is enormous because part of this chain is having people – if I think of all the things that Cate has done which have allowed me to do what I have tried to do – when I do that, then I can see people in many domains of my doing that have – given me the kind of benefit of the doubt or this – and it’s a marvelous thing to have and I feel in a way that I do have that, and it gives you – it’s a marvelous sense of people offering their energies to something.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: And you, in return, giving yours.
DALEY: Well, it’s reciprocal, hopefully.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: In your opinion, who are the most significant writers in the field of American craft, and why is their writing meaningful to you? And is criticism by artists more valuable to you?
DALEY: Well, I think that the most meaningful modern writer in my career is Philip Rawson, that when I read his book I felt that there was someone who was an historian that had a grasp of all the things that pots could – ceramics could be about, and elucidated it with a great clarity and style. And I’ve learned so much reading it, you know. I think there have been books in my life – I don’t know of anybody writing now whom I read that fills me with wonder about what I’m trying to do, or informs it deeply. Now, I think – I read things that Wayne Higby writes; I read things that Stuart Kestenbaum writes, and I see them more as friends, but they write things that are moving to me. I mean, they have insight about what I care about. In terms of like criticism or awareness about what making things is really about, I just am not in touch with the – I don’t read anything that feeds my psyche.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Even outside of the field?
DALEY: Oh, outside the field is different. I wasn’t thinking about that.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Well, I’m just curious about –
DALEY: Well, you know, for me, reading – like I’ve been reading about Charles Sanders Peirce, and I’ve just been reading an essay over and over about what he wrote about how to think clearly, and – he’s a philosopher at the turn of the century and I just am totally whacked by his insight and the power of his arguments and his discussion. I find that reading it is very satisfying to me. I’ve been reading things over again, like rereading Art As Experience [John Dewey, New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1934].
Yes, it’s amazing to me – it’s just amazing to me about this – it’s like reading somebody that’s didactic that’s really thinks he’s Walt Whitman about what might be possible.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Have you read Benjamin – Walter Benjamin?
DALEY: No, I have not.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Okay.
DALEY: So – no, I –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: It doesn’t really have to be within the field of – I mean, great writing and great thinking is there for us to grasp no matter where we are.
DALEY: Well, I read a – I can’t remember who wrote it. It was A Soldier of the Great War [Mark Helprin; San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991]. I just finished reading it a couple of months ago – it’s a novel. And I thought, oh, it’s about an Italian aesthetician who had been a mountain trooper in the war – in World War I, and it was just absolutely thrilling to me, the book. I can’t remember the author, but it was, you know –
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Well, when you do, let me know.
DALEY: Yes, I – that’s terrible. I should remember. But it’s a fantastic book about someone’s recollections.
DRUTT-ENGLISH: Another great book about someone’s recollection is World of Yesterday</