Creativity is Inherent in Humans: Artists of Philo

Story by K. Andarin Arvola

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.
—Pablo Picasso

The common thread that weaves through the lives of the artists I spoke to in Philo, in the Anderson Valley, is the sense of community, of support, of gentle critique they find in this “big, big family,” as Susan Spencer puts it.

All the artists spoke of how much they appreciated being surrounded by the glorious hills, forests and open plains, and of the inspiration they find in their natural world. “If you drive through the valley you’d think it was just wineries and tasting rooms, but the beauty is everywhere,” Bill Allen says.

Each artist approaches their art in their own remarkable manner. As potter Alexis Moyer explains, “Teaching people over the years, I notice I can show them how to work with the clay, how to hold their hands, but what they make is uniquely theirs and theirs alone.”

They may come to art in a structured, educated approach or not, but all share the sheer need to create that springs from within. They look at the world with a unique view and translate that into paintings, wearable art, pottery, furniture and assemblage of found objects. All expressions of art tell a story, and those stories I invite you to view and to listen to as the artists speak.

‘It’s their gift to me’
Just off Highway 128 in an old gas station sits The Pot Shop (as in pottery). Alexis Nichandros Moyer has used this location as her studio and gallery for twenty-one years. Her work is both practical and functional, with joyful colors, and larger art pieces, many of which look like modern-day totem poles. You never know what will be perched on the totem; a bird, a cat, a frog but not any you’ve ever lived with! Silly, amusing, wonderful creatures that bring a chuckle or an out loud laugh.

“I like to laugh and see people’s faces bloom into a smile when they look at my work,” Moyer tells me. “I have no idea where the funny stuff comes from. I seem compelled to create whimsical sculptures. All the dogs and cats, for the most part, are out of my head.”

Lucky for us. Some of my favorites are the dragons that are large enough to be out in the garden. Imagine a young dragon seeming to undulate across your lawn.

Moyer says she has two separate bodies of work—the functional pieces decorated with small frogs, and the totem poles. “The totem pieces are all unique and have to be created individually. The totem is like a blank canvas. The functional already has a framework. The functional pieces have some repetition in shape or form, for instance when I make a salad bowl,” she explains. “I think of the functional pieces as my ‘day job’ in that they have built my skills so I can build the totems.”

I remark on the frogs hopping around on her pottery. “They’re my favorite creatures. They come into the studio and surprise me by their presence. I started putting their likenesses on the pots, and over the years it’s grown into a whole line.”

That she has two distinct art forms gives her added freedom. “Sometimes I don’t feel inspired to make a grand piece so I can work on the small things and then when I want to make something big I can,” Moyer says. “I don’t feel that every day I have to make a major piece of art.

“It’s been interesting to watch my work change over the twenty years I’ve been doing this. To see the growth. I think you have to work at this for ten thousand hours before you become proficient,” she emphasizes. “When I started out I loved to throw on a wheel. It was the magic of being able to take the clay and build it into something. It is hypnotic and mesmerizing. With hand work I have to slow down and plan ahead.”

In addition to having her own studio and gallery, Moyer has given classes. “Teaching people over the years I notice I can show them how to work with the clay, how to hold their hands, but what they make is uniquely theirs and theirs alone.”

Moyer is following in her mother’s footsteps since her mother also does pottery. Moyer studied at the California College of the Arts in Oakland and has a B.F.A. in ceramics. “I studied with Viola Frey and Art Nelson.” A trip to Greece to study Minoan and Mycenaean pottery on Crete was a return to her roots.

Moyer is married and her daughters, Amanda and Bailey, were featured, along with her mother, Leona Nichandros, in their own show “Three Generations in Clay” at the Mendocino Art Center in July of 2004. She is a founder of the Edgewater Gallery on Main Street in Fort Bragg. “We’ve been there for six years which is a strong testament to the strength of our group.”

Wherever people see her work she says that it’s important to educate them about having hand-made objects in their life. “I enjoy people coming into the studio, getting to meet them, have them collect my work; it’s the closing of a circle. What I made is what they take home and it will be part of their life. It closes the circle, the creative cycle. It’s their gift to me,” Moyer says with reverence.

The natural world inspires
On a spring afternoon I wind down a country road into a lush canyon retreat; I hear the distinctive song of the black-headed grosbeak through my open windows. As I wait on a seat in the vegetable garden, frogs croak in a old bathtub nearby. As quietly as I can I walk closer to see if I can spot them. Not quietly enough, they fall silent and crouch out of sight.

No hiding on the porcelain pottery of Jan Wax and Chris Bing; frogs figure in abundance as a design element. These are easier to see and study than the garden variety.

Jan Wax and Chris Bing lived in the Bay Area, and after one too many air-pollution alerts decided “we wanted clean air.” A friend suggested Philo. In 1979 they first bought the Cornelius Prather House (the man who named Philo) which is an old stage coach stop. They had a pottery studio in the back and the main building was a bed and breakfast inn. “It just grabbed us, we even love the long winding drive,” Wax says with enthusiasm. “The beauty of the valley continually amazes us.” Now they no long live in Philo itself but out in the country on seventy-five acres.

This husband-and-wife team have created their designs together for thirty years. “It’s all we do, it takes diligence to keep working at this for as long as we have,” says Wax. “I throw the clay forms from scratch; we don’t use molds. Chris sculpts the decorative additions.”

Their pottery is a mix of functional and decorative but even the functional has a decorative aspect. The glazes they use are copper-red (oxblood), temmoku (black) and celadon (blue-green) and are fired in a propane-fueled kiln.

Bing hand builds the porcelain pottery; he also hand sculpts the wildlife. “I’ve always been an observer of nature. I’ve been a birder since I was a kid.” His rows of books and field guides on wildlife, ocean creatures, insects, trees and other plant life line the studio. Photos, postcards, pages torn out of magazines are a little like an archeological dig on the walls. “I’m particularly inspired by native species,” he informs me. It’s easy to see why the natural world inspires, surrounded as they are by nature.

While I’m there, nature makes its presence known; a female skunk has been found dead and her kits are far too young to take care of themselves. A wildlife rescue place is found; a week later when I talk with them, the baby skunks are thriving. Hmm, I wonder if their image will show up on their pottery.

Wax and Bing enjoy creating individual pieces that people will find pleasure in using for years. “They’re very personal, not mass produced,” Wax tells me. “We will also work with people to create just what they want. It happens fairly often that someone will see a piece in a show, gallery, or on our website, but maybe they want it larger or with more frogs; we’ll do it.”

They travel to about fifteen craft shows a year. Many years ago I saw them at a very prestigious craft show in Baltimore! Locally their pottery is in Rookie To Gallery in Boonville, Highlight Gallery in Mendocino, and in Philo at Scharffenberger Cellars.

Fabric around the world
After a long drive through the redwoods, I step off a gravel pathway onto a raised wooden walkway that zigzags across a wetland to the gallery of Helen Papke. It’s difficult to get far without being intrigued with the wearable art pieces hung here and there. Combinations of beautiful fabrics, buttons and lace are but a fraction of the materials making up each unique creation.

Papke tells me that the Japanese Gardens in Portland Oregon were the inspiration for her bridges across what is a boggy area much of the year. Her studio, a former playhouse, is tiny but packed with clever shelving to hold the multitude of fabrics she uses in her work. “It’s the first year I’ve had a studio, before it was all in our bedroom until my husband renovated the playhouse.

“I get fabric from everywhere; garage sales, boot (trunk) sales in London, people give material to me, old clothes and wedding dresses; anything,” she exclaims. “I love hand work, but I don’t like weaving.

“I come from a line of hand workers, they could crochet, knit, make and tailor their own clothes; grandmothers, mother, aunts. I’ve always been a sewer but I don’t think of myself as an artist.” On the floor is a huge basket of old wooden spools of thread that were her mother’s. We look at the jacket she has on. “It has Japanese and Chinese fabric and some material from my daughter’s bridesmaid dresses from twenty years ago in England,” Papke informs me.

She used to do street sales or craft shows but it was exhausting to talk all day. She’s enjoyed this art tour and from the many people who have come by as we’ve talked, so have they.

Colorful quilts
“It’s a wonderful supportive community,” Deanna Apfel tells me about living in the Philo area. She lived in the City [San Francisco] and moved to Philo in 1998. “I got my direction from the art classes in color and composition that I took from Paula Gray, that led me to working with color and fabric. I belong to the Mendocino Quilt Artists and although most of the members live in Ukiah we get together twice a month and show each other our current quilts.”

Apfel’s work features fabric birds and contemporary quilts using a variety of textiles: vintage tablecloths, African fabrics, silks and cottons.

Playful art and furniture
For thirty years Nancy Macleod and Bill Allen drove through the Anderson Valley on the way to Mendocino to visit a friend. “We really wanted to live in the valley so we finally moved here in 2003. It’s so beautiful and we felt we would find kindred spirits.”

They built a house, a straw bale house. “I love the aesthetics of the house and when it’s hot, the house is cool and when it’s cold the house stays warm,” Macleod informs me.

Macleod and Allen collaborate on the furniture they make. “We made cupboards for ourselves long before we made them for sale. They’re great for people who collect things! We also wanted crazy and fun things to store CDs in; everything on the market was so boring. Then we went on to larger pieces. Our furniture is very playful; I mean life is serious enough.”

Macleod is also a painter. “My main goal in painting is to make political, social and spiritual commentary in a way that is playful and fun to have around. My paintings are meant to enhance your home environment (of course!), cheer you up, cause you to think, maybe to laugh. Done in what I call ‘Folk Art Fantasy’ style, some are acrylic on canvas, some
watercolor, gouache, and ink on paper,” states Macleod.

Even the titles of her painting cheer you up or make you think: Her Friends Oblivious To The World’s Problems, She Tries To Hide Behind Her Mask, Learning To Control Snakes III, and The Cat Woman Instantly Recognizes Buddha and Invites Him For Tea are but three examples. The snakes, she explains, “don’t mean the literal snakes that inhabit the natural places left on this earth; I mean the figurative ones who have been controlling our lives—the ones on Wall
Street, the ones in Congress, the ones who control our media...”

Fabric has always been a major factor in Macleod’s art; she put herself through California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland making custom-ordered, one-of-a-kind, art-to-wear garments.

Macleod was fortunate because her late father-in-law, Bob McKenna, owned Cassidy’s Interiors on Mission Street in San Francisco. She used the Thai silk he had in his interior decoration business. “I got tons of it that he had left over, all shades of greens and golds and blues. His workroom made drapes, wall coverings, and throw pillows for wealthy San Franciscans, as well as the museums and fancier hotels, among them the Saint Francis, The Palace, and even the Awahnee Hotel in Yosemite. He was thrilled that I wanted his leftovers, and I was equally thrilled to have access to all the great fabric!”

‘Boxes of treasure’
I wind up, up, up to the top of a ridge over looking panoramic views of the Anderson Valley. It’s an unexpected view for one who usually just drives through the valley. Breathtaking!

Spencer has lived on that ridgetop since getting out of college in the mid-seventies. “Michael and I met in 2001 and have inseparable ever since. What draws us here is the talent, independence and free spirits. It’s a close-knit community of artists. It’s more like a big, big family. Sometimes, you may not see each other for awhile but when we do, all the time drops away.”

Susan Spencer and Michael Wilson live and work high above the valley floor. The philosophy surrounding their work involves recognizing an international art community and being part of that and participating in the local art scenes of their hometown as well. “We encourage everyone to view www.ferusgallery.com which is a major historical site for contemporary art on the West Coast.”

Both Spencer and Wilson create in various mediums, enjoying the creative process that flows through their hands at any moment in time. “We work independently but go to each other for advice and gentle critique,” Spencer says.
Primarily they are assemblage artists but also incorporate contemporary mixed media and watercolors.

I ask Susan where they get all the objects used in their work. She laughs with delight, “That’s what everyone wants to know! It’s the only art form where people actually give you boxes of treasure. Or they walk up and say, ‘I was thinking about you’ and reach in their pocket and bring out a bunch of cool stuff.”

Both feel strongly that creativity is inherent in humans and that it should be nurtured and recognized at all levels and ages; that “art for art’s sake” needs to be supported by our culture, enriching our lives and mirroring our common humanity.