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Michael McLeod
I love writing about interesting characters - and individuals who deserve attention.
There's one who makes an appearance in a supporting role in this column whom I really, really like. Given what I know now about how hard the people in this profession have to work, especially these days, and what I remember about those very few who tolerated my craziness and saw the potential in me, I was really happy to honor her, and told her so.
I have a souvenir from my visit to this guy's backyard, having bought a small wood-fired cup from him. It sat on my desk next to my keyboard, providing inspiration as I wrote this.
It ain't your average coffee cup.
Here's the story, which won't be published until next month. So you're getting a sneak preview.
The mid-century neighborhood where Richard Munster lives with his wife and their two children dates back to an era when people took a big back yard for granted. There’s plenty of room here for swing sets, swimming pools, gardens, and barbecue pits – or in Munster’s case, for one shed, three stacks of firewood, a collection of oversized plastic pails filled with earth and clay, a monolithic red brick monstrosity roughly the size of an SUV, and an array of folding tables bearing some of the creations that emerged from it.
Munster is a potter. The red-brick monster is his kiln, an old-school, wood-fired affair that he built himself.
You can set aside any preconceived associations, be they literary or domestic, that the words “potter” and “pottery” may conjure up for you, courtesy of Harry Potter, Beatrix Potter,, Pottery Barn etc. Munster creates a broad range of abstract sculptures that wind up in the homes of local collectors, though it is true that some of his smaller works – cups that fit into the palm of your hand with a deceptive heft, smooth on the inside but honeycombed with sharp planes and mottled, earthy hues on the outside – look a bit like what the Neanderthals might have used if they’d had time for tea.
Pottery made in electric or gas kilns is relatively predictable. Pottery that emerges from a wood-fired kiln has an element of surprise and a primal, organic quality in color and surface texturing, thanks to being exposed to the scalding storm of random ash that circulates in the kiln.
Munster’s obsession with pottery dates back his years as a disconnected punk rock devotee, slogging through classes at Bishop Moore High School in the 1970s. “I just couldn’t see the sense of being taught a math formula I knew I’d never use, or getting written up for wearing the wrong color socks,” he remembers.
What he needed was a challenge. It came his way in the form of a newly-created, hands-on pottery class taught by the school’s beloved art teacher, Jolie Spelman, who decided to include it in an innovative art practicum program that still flourishes under her direction.
She reasoned that the way pottery combines creativity with practicality – or as she puts it, “Pottery just wants to be touched. It wants to be used” – would engage students. Munster was one of the first to prove her point.
“Richard was an eager, hungry kid,” she remembers. “He was the kind of student who pushed me, who challenged me as a teacher. That’s what the good ones will do. He would say, ‘Can we make it bigger? Can you do this, can you do that?’ “
Munster has been doing this and doing that ever since, first as a hobby, then as a profession, with a degree in visual arts and design from the University of Central Florida and a stint as an artist-in-residence at the Maitland Art and History Center to his credit. He also teaches art classes as an adjunct at Valencia Community College and has a studio at FAVO, an artist collective in a converted motel in the Mills-50 district – not to mention an ongoing, open-air classroom of his own design.
His backyard kiln is made entirely of special bricks designed to stand up to intense heat: a factory that makes them is headquartered in Florida, the better to serve a steady customer in the Kennedy Space Center, which needs them to help rebuild pads after every launch.
Munster’s needs are more modest, but in their own way, just as intense.
Two or three times a year, he gathers up dozens of clay vases, cups and sculptures ready for firing, most of them his, but some representing works by a circle of fellow ceramic artists.
The works are loaded into his kiln, known as a “train kiln” because its profile suggests a vintage, coal-fired train engine. One chamber of the kiln is loaded with firewood. The air flow draws the fire it produces through the ceramics chamber next to it and then up through the chimney.
“Basically,” says Munster, “it’s a single, continuous, 2400-degree flame,” one that needs to burn for 48 hours to glaze the pottery, hence the need for someone to tend the fire, day and night, for two days. Sometimes Munster loads up on coffee and handles that task himself; sometimes a small circle of fellow ceramic artists manage it in shifts.
Dan Hess, chief curator of the Maitland Art Center, was invited to attend one of those firings. Hess moved to the Orlando area several years ago from New York City, where he was immersed in one of the most vibrant visual arts scenes in the world. He misses it, sometimes more than others, though he never expected a visit to a suburban back yard and a glimpse of faces glowing in firelight to bring back the sense of fierce commitment and camaraderie that he remembers from the city that never sleeps.
“The feeling I got when I walked into that back yard – it stopped me in my tracks,” he says. “That focus, that singular intensity, that sense of community, that dedication to an art – it was like walking into a really good restaurant in Soho. You didn’t just feel it. You could smell it in the air. ”
Literally and figuratively.
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