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Twenty years have elapsed since I first encountered the pottery of Harvey Young.
He impressed me as a soft-spoken young man with light blue eyes which seemed to draw one closer... quite removed from the image which most Japanese have of Americans.
After his first stay in Japan, Harvey returned home and set about trying to create pottery, not as manufactured goods, but as part of a ceramics culture and as works of art. He soon discovered, however, that in America, pottery is not sufficiently recognized as an item of culture. (Previously, in the early 1900s, when Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada [important figures in the history of Japan's Mingei, or Folk Art movement] went to St. Ives, England, built an Oriental style nobori, or "climbing" kiln and began making pottery, the term ceramic artist did not even exist; they called themselves artist-craftsmen, at least so the story goes.)
In the end Harvey came back to Japan where ceramics is part of the cultural tradition.
Upon his return, he made his home in Mashiko, and although a Western style rationality compounded with a yearning toward the East predominated in his earlier works, these past several years he has been working mainly on such things as a greenish hued, iron based caramel glaze (which he developed on his own) and a milky Shino-type feldspar glaze, to produce stoneware pottery with the sort of Mashiko flavor which has been disappearing in more recent times.
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Seeing Harvey's approach to pottery making, in which he is attempting to create a richness of variety from a limited number of glazes and clays, reminds me of Shoji Hamada, who in his time developed a style of ceramics which could be said to contain an infinitely wide range of artistic nuances, using just the six traditional Mashiko glazes.
As a student, Harvey majored in psychology at the University of California, and it is because of this, perhaps, that he empathizes with the deep spirituality residing in Eastern ceramics. His experience as a young man looking at and learning from many different varieties of pottery remains with him now that he has passed fifty. The designs he creates as utensils have gradually assumed an ultimate serenity; and although he speaks of his own works as traditional, and plays down any attempt at new and original shapes, still an expression of his own individuality is apparent in his unaffected designs. His crane necked vases, for example, have gone beyond mere utility, and seem to have acquired a Japanese sense of "timing" and "balance".
Looking at the pottery of Harvey Young, and the high degree of perfection it has attained, I have the impression that his path is leading to the achievement of an awareness of beauty which perceives another reality beyond surface appearance, such as we here have nurtured over a long period of time, and which lies at the heart of Japanese pottery.
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