For potter, art imitates natural life

By Kim Boatman
Mercury News

Cathryn Yoshimoto finds inspiration in the curl of a new leaf, green as a first day of spring. A spindly, dry weed, mown and discarded along a roadside, is preserved for its architectural majesty. The color of a winter morning deep in the Los Gatos hills is worthy of tribute.“

I just revere nature,” Yoshimoto explains. “I think artists are always trying to capture nature, this beautiful, perfect thing we call nature.”

In that case, Yoshimoto has found the perfect place to feed both art and soul. She resides and turns her potter’s wheel on two sylvan acres in those Los Gatos hills.

The home she shares with her husband is the sort of retreat that requires visitors to count mailboxes and hairpin curves while anxiously checking the odometer. To arrive at Yoshimoto’s gracious home is, indeed, to understand her art. On a recent summer morning, the hillside was awash in bird song and adorned in green. The stately, silvery blooms of acanthus had overtaken one slope, while dainty lavender and cloud-white wild impatiens bloomed near the house.“

The living room of Cathryn Yoshimoto’s home in Los Gatos

features some of her creations on its shelves

It’s very enchanting, very quiet,” Yoshimoto says fondly. “You don’t even really need house.”

Yoshimoto came late to her work. She is a lifelong gardener who first tried to tame the land around her home when the family moved there in 1975. She and her husband raised three kids and assorted critters there, and Yoshimoto, always bursting with creative energy, tried her hand at interior design and calligraphy before taking a couple of pottery classes at West Valley College.

She learned to let her land be -- “One day, my husband said, ‘You know, Cathy, the weeds look better’ “—and she found her calling. As a potter, Yoshimoto is allowed a three-dimensional way to express the beauty of the life around her. She had her first show in 1996, and today her work is sold at the Dunn Mehler Gallery in Half Moon Bay and at rare appearances at shows, such as the Association of Clay and Glass Artists’ annual Palo Alto Clay and Glass Festival this Saturday and Sunday, where more than 185 clay and glass artists will sell their work.

A Yoshimoto sake cup sells for about $20. But she has sold a piece for as much as $2,400. In an effort to make her work accessible to more people, Yoshimoto will unveil a line of necklaces at this weekend’s show. The pieces feature her trademark glazes, echoing the colors she finds around her, and some pieces even work as miniature vases, perfect for a sprig of this or that. The necklaces will sell for perhaps $25 to $60.

Artist Cathryn Yoshimoto stands in her Los Gatos living room which is filled with orchids.

Yoshimoto’s porcelain clay pieces with crystalline glazes and bronzing have been called Tiffanyesque. Indeed, there is something art nouveau about some of her work. But Yoshimoto thinks her influences run deeper. “I’m fourth generation removed from Japan, and I can’t even speak Japanese, but I think what’s inside you comes out,” she says. So, a pair of cranes and a distinctive Yoshimoto vase share space atop a rustic tansu chest. Across the wide bowl of the vase, the crystals that so fascinate Yoshimoto bloom, organic and somehow alive. They resemble lily pads in the blue-green glaze. A bronzed, sculptural leaf forms a portion of the rim. Like most of her work, the vase is functional and begs to be caressed. Yoshimoto believes pottery should be touched and used.

Much of her work is displayed gracefully and simply on built-in, halogen-lit shelves. (Yoshimoto loves the natural look of halogen lighting.) And of course, there’s plenty of natural light pouring in. When the couple remodeled, Yoshimoto planned the downstairs so that the low-ceilinged living space would open more to the outdoors. Overhead beams continue on to the outside patio, light floods in, and there’s a flow of slate tiles inside and out, as well.

The weeds of which she’s fond reside in one of her vases, and a great manzanita bough, with its hints of iron red and twists and turns, occupies a corner.

Amid all this soothing beauty stands Yoshimoto, slender as a blade of grass in blue jeans and a black scoop-necked knit shirt, long black hair pinned up. She hums with energy and bursts with life, and it’s hard to believe she has the patience for the lengthy processes involved in creating her work.

She uses 10 to 12 formulas for heating, then cooling, then taking the temperature back up on her kiln during the 30-hour firing. She uses cobalt, copper, nickel, iron and other natural substances to achieve her colors. But she never knows until the process is over just how the crystals will appear. Yoshimoto, who sketches her ideas -- “I close my eyes and start scribbling and doodling”—before she works in clay, spends about four hours a day at the wheel. And even her smallest pieces require six or seven stages and a bit of bated breath, since the pure white porcelain clay in which she works is fragile as it dries.

“This really slows me down,” she says of her usual high energy levels and her work. “When I’m on that wheel, it’s like meditation.”

Contact Kim Boatman at kboatman@mercurynews.com.