Throw, spin, shape — create
When Eric Landon first encountered a potter’s wheel as a sophomore in high school, he instantly became hooked. Two weeks into the course, his teacher said she couldn’t keep up with him, so he began teaching himself.
Today, the American-born Landon, 41, owns a famed ceramics studio in Denmark, called Tortus Copenhagen, teaches workshops around the globe, and has over half a million followers on Instagram (@tortus).
Landon was in San Francisco this spring giving workshops, and ceramics studio Clay by the Bay sponsored him as a guest teacher. For ceramicists, his visit was a big deal and drew students from both San Francisco and around the state.
Among them, Juliet Ar-
nold and Christine Olivero from Half Moon Bay picked up ceramics in the late ’90s and have mostly taught themselves since then.
“We’ve been watching lots of YouTube videos and getting tips from them, but it’s just so valuable to have a real person that we can ask questions,” Olivero said.
Landon’s autodidactism at a young age enabled him to develop techniques that set him apart from the rest of the ceramics community. Experimenting with “bad habits,” learning the “wrong” way and challenging conventional methods of making pottery led to his unique style and success.
Landon translated these skills into his workshops and teaches them to his students. For those at an intermediate level, he pays acute attention to hand placement and body posture, occasionally correcting someone who is on the wheel.
“It’s like learning to play tennis and realizing you’ve always held the racket the wrong way. You’re never going to hit an ace,” Arnold said.
Many other students say they are “going back to the basics,” and feel it’s necessary. Most see almost instant results. The beginning stages of throwing, like wedging and centering clay and forming cones, are where Landon often looks to make corrections when people are having trouble shaping their vessels.
Landon started a recent class demonstrating some of his most routine practices. Even the way he wedged clay, creating spirals upon spirals that folded neatly into one another, awed some of the students.
As long as the clay is still wet, on the wheel or not, potters can work with it, or even destroy it and start over again. One class watched as Landon threw the clay on the wheel, centered it, and pulled it upward into a curvaceous vase. As the wheel slowed its spin, Landon picked up a wire and cut his work in half, eliciting an audible gasp from the class.
Throwing extremely thin vessels is one of his many specialties, and he wanted to show the class just how thin they could learn to make their own creations. By spinning the wheel extremely fast and pulling the clay up very slowly, they could achieve the same result, he said.
“It’s kind of like crafting a really nice poem,” he said. “It’s using few words extremely artfully instead of using lots of words to say very little.”
Landon studied economics at Xavier University in Cincinnati, and not ceramics. In fact, he took a hiatus from creating pottery altogether after high school. It wasn’t until years later when he was traveling around Europe, met his first wife, a Danish woman, in Portugal, and decided to settle in Denmark that he found himself delving back into the world of ceramics. At the age of 24, Landon enrolled at the Danish School of Design and studied product design. When he co-founded his own studio, he called it Tortus because of his slow approach to the wheel. Two years ago, he started teaching workshops and put his work on Instagram. The success of his site led to a massive increase in demand for his workshops and his handmade pottery.
“The moment I was able to have students was actually the moment I was really forced to analyze my technique,” Landon said, “and analyze why it is that I can manipulate the clay in the ways that I do, so I can explain it to other people. I’m much better now even than I was a couple years ago.”
Landon attributes his success on social media mostly to his mesmerizing and soothing videos.
His 15-year-old son, joining Landon as he discussed his work, chimed in, “It’s peaceful. All my friends like it.”
Landon’s work is known for its muted tones and pastel colors, and light, clean lines that bolster his Instagram appeal. He acknowledges Danish influences, but also said he made a conscious decision against using vibrant colors.
“I’m really focused on the throwing technique. I’m really focused on unique forms each time,” Landon said. “To get people to notice these subtle differences between the volume of pieces, the subtle differences in proportions of pieces, I really need to mute down the color.”
What captures Landon’s attention most, though, are the imperfections of each object — perfectly made but not perfectly fitting a mold.
Of African American and Mexican descent, and having grown up in a white Milwaukee neighborhood and attended a mostly white college, Landon, who lives in Copenhagen, said he is used to being different and that has influenced his artwork.
“The beauty of difference between people — the things we have in common but also the things that make us different — gives us a sense of union but also makes us quite special,” Landon said, “Each time I sit at the wheel, I don’t go after the perfect shape, I go after something that’s a little bit unique, something that’s not classically beautiful, but something that has its own character.”