Home and Pottery
In the hearts and minds of many people—both Montanans and those who live elsewhere—Montana is the last best place. Why? It is the land, the weather, the history, the people—it’s all of these elements and more—and it’s the way these elements blend together in remarkable ways to create the last best place.
The bond that ties Montanans to the state is woven of many strands. But, before all else, it involves our personal feelings and our pride, as citizens of the state, for its beauty, history, and people.
To us, Montana is a symphony.
Senator Mike Mansfield 1992
Brian Persha decorating a pot.
Pot bought at the Bozeman Farmers Market.
From July 18, 2007
“He had gorilla arms. I first saw him throw pottery cylinders at the county fair in Great Falls. I was 5 or 6 years old. His arms were much longer than an average person. This was before his ‘throwing the clay at the wall to see if it would stick’ phase. Back then, he was throwing big cylinders and then making sculptures by slicing them up and putting them together again. Rudy Autio loosened him up stylistically.” Tall with his hair pulled back, Brian Persha paused briefly and continued his story while standing in the middle of the ice pavilion at the Gallatin County Fairgrounds. “They were master production potters. Techniques of throwing, glazing, firing held no challenges for them; Peter Voulkos and Autio were looking for challenges. People try to tell me I studied in Bozeman. I didn’t.” Brown eyes flashed black for an instant before twinkling again with their enthusiasm—a stranger might not have noticed—but I first interviewed Brian for the MSU Exponent in a lively discussion of art and life almost 30 years ago. “I got both my degrees from Rudy; he died last month. They’re doing something for him next weekend in Missoula, but I might not go. I’ve got to be in Spokane two days later. Can’t be away too long. Got to work. I’ll wake up next Saturday morning and I’ll know what to do.”
Saturday, I went to Bozeman’s Farmer’s Market. My late husband loved the Farmer’s Market back in Indiana. Lafayette’s bumpy brick streets hosted the Market since the 1850s and usually only produce, baked goods, and plants were sold. The Amish brought in lovely pastries and we would stroll home with odd assortments of lettuce, sweet rolls, and tiny cactus plants. While I didn’t know the farmers, we often would meet good friends. I knew one solitary person at the Farmer’s Market in Bozeman.
In amongst the other vendors, even after all these years, Brian stills looks like Albrecht Dürer’s youthful self-portrait painted in 1500; and Brian’s pottery still tempts my wallet. I don’t need any more of his pieces, but with the pot’s curve resting smoothly in the palm of my hand, Brian points out the serendipity of a wood burning kiln with the aura borealis swirls of orange spun around the bottom as the flames painted their finishing touches on a thrown vase. This one is coming home with me, I know because I can’t put it down, and this one is special because the fire didn’t ruin the glazes as it blew ash around in the kiln. Brian’s drawing and dipping is still intact, the blowing ashes and the arching flames only added their delicate touches. A wood fired kiln can result in total disaster with the glazes running off the pots from the unpredictable heat and sticking the pots to the shelves.
I remember the days, long before I married, when Brian had a wood burning kiln off Sourdough Road and every load included a little figure to appease the fire: a kiln guard. In those years, people lined up around the block outside Ray Campeau’s art co-op in the historic brick Ketterer house on the corner of Grand and Mendenhall waiting to get into one of Brian’s pottery shows. The gallery owners would hand out five dots for each anxious customer to put on the pots they wanted. Within an hour, rooms in the old house full of Brian’s pots would all have dots on them. My father and mother took me, as a youngster, along for the extra quota of dots and I was well-trained in the art of making fast aesthetic decisions. As I recall, Brian seemed embarrassed by the frenzied behavior of his Bozeman fans—my father being the most opportunistic. While I stand there in the quiet moments of the early Farmer’s Market there are no dots, no lines of customers, and Brian tells me stories about Montana’s famous potters who revolutionized American ceramics—Peter Voulkos born in Bozeman and Rudy Autio born in Butte.
The evening before, I had walked downtown along the old railroad tracks where my brother and I used to wave twice daily to the locomotive engineer. Crossing the creek where my friends and I made our hands black with creosote splinters from mucking about all day around the railroad bridges, I looked at the spot where Grandma always found wild raspberries, but didn’t see any. Everybody has stories about changes in their hometown. If you’re from the Hi-Line chances are your grandmother’s hometown has blown away, leaving only a name on atlases printed before the Second World War. If your hometown is Bozeman, well quite frankly, it’s hard to know what to think.
I’ve been out of sorts ever since I moved from Lafayette on the Wabash River, following the death of my husband, to a split-level house in my Bozeman childhood neighborhood. I miss my river, the music scene in Lafayette, and especially the closely woven network of friends—shop owners, artists, musicians, mayors, state representatives, neighbors, and fellow parishioners from the church started by Henry Ward Beecher’s camp revivals in the 1840s. I miss my old life; I hadn’t realized how wide and deep my Indiana roots had become after 21 years, because I always thought of myself as a Montana girl. Every week in Bozeman in an attempt to stay positive, I pick something new to do as I try to rebuild another life without my life partner and my children. This week I picked the Gallery Walk.
Two months ago when I went back to Indiana for a visit, I went to the first Gallery Walk of the season in Lafayette. There were multiple bands and musicians playing along the old streets. I know most of the shop owners and gallery dealers. Every time I turned around during the Walk, there was a familiar face with the accompanying warm embrace. The gallery walkers included families and people from the town. In Bozeman, there are two types of gallery walkers: Newcomers swapping stories of fly-fishing, decorating log mansions, and lot rolling while guzzling free wine, and young people strolling hand in hand. I didn’t overhear anyone discussing art. As a recent widow, I still miss my husband —I don’t like to admit this because I know it isn’t healthy—but happy people make me really depressed because they remind me down to a molecular level of my lost life. Mobs of overly tanned newcomers with botox smiles are standing in front of the paintings of bears, cowboys, and tranquil mountains that I want to see. I’m allergic to the sulfites in wine, so I can’t even get artificially happy. Along the whole Main Street of Bozeman, one band tried to play loud enough to fill the empty spaces. Two contrasted experiences of a Gallery Walk in Lafayette and one in Bozeman grate my nerves and I trudge home grumpy. Nights like this make me so frustrated that I want to lock my front door, throw some clothes in my car, load the dog, and drive back to Indiana. Against the increasing bustle of Bozeman’s Farmer’s Market, I’m complaining to Brian about the Gallery Walk the night before; crabbiness blackening my mood like a two-day hangover.
He’s philosophical, “Changes are coming, you can’t even imagine, but they’ll be good ones. There’s lots of good energy here and good people moving in. Those people down on Main Street,” Brian smiles and winks, “It’s party, party, party.”
I listen carefully to what he tells me about energy, life, and art; I feel my tension easing a bit around the edges of my frustration. Born on the Hi-Line; Brian grew up in Great Falls, which he compares to living in the bottom of a vacuum cleaner bag; and went to University of Montana to study sculpture and ceramics with Rudy Autio. Brian knows Montana. As an adult, he’s lived overseas and in most of the artist hot spots in the US. Galleries all over the world have exhibited his metal work and his ceramics. Wherever life takes him, Brian always comes home to Bozeman. As friends often do, Brian gently tells me in his round-about way that my choice in coming home was the right one.
In my living room, while unwrapping my Farmer’s Market purchase, cradling an exquisite work done by an old friend, I think upon my strident reactions to changes in Bozeman, trying to come to terms with my impatience. My old life is gone and so is the Bozeman of my childhood. I knew the reality of Bozeman when I moved back, my husband and I had come every year; Ray died outside of Chicago returning to Indiana from a summer visit to the Sweet Pea Festival. Too many life changes, too rapidly, but when your sons are 16 and 19 when their father dies in a violent SUV roll-over, they are going to leave home despite family tragedy. Four years later should find them pursuing their life dreams in far flung places and they are doing what they had planned before their father died. I suppose I can’t expect to be happy, given the fact the accident left me unable to do most of the activities that made my old life exciting. Robert Frost once wrote, “Nothing gold can stay.” Not the clear skies of Gallatin Valley, not the empty foothills, not the rolling hay fields stretching from the edges of Kagy to the canyons of Hyalite and Cottonwood, and not the same life after catastrophe.
Severe loss produces an edginess and an urgency to preserve memories. Having lost my life’s partner and a healthy body; story telling still remains. I heard the discordant note in Brian’s voice amidst the humor of his reminiscences about his pottery teachers. I’m beginning to understand why I came back to Bozeman. I need these stories of the people and the place that raised me. I’m trying to find myself again, hoping that in the Valley of the Flowers I can reinvent a useful life.
When I want a hug and a place where I know everyone, I can always find my car keys and take my dog back to my adult home in Indiana. While it’s true that I can’t do the things I used to do with my husband—mountain biking, jogging, whitewater rafting, hiking, canoeing, ball room dancing, restoring houses, or playing the piano—I can listen and I can write. Real Montana stories, not artificial tales of lot rolling, interior decorating, and botox sun tans, are waiting; I just have to be in the right places while the people of my childhood are still here to tell them.
The author moved back to Lafayette in the spring of 2008. Brian Joseph Persha passed away on December 16, 2020, in Hawaii. His creativity and imagination are sorely missed by his friends.