Those two teachers [Kathleen Blackshear and Robert von Neumann] were just fantastic, I thought. They never directed you in a single direction, but they just encouraged you to think for yourself.

In fact, I believe to a certain extent a person today who starts with just clay, with no drawing and no painting and no figure drawing, still-life drawing, various things, they miss a great deal.

Here is this ability to explore ideas, but with minute changes, and then look at the results. Often you get so excited about what you're doing that you think, "Oh, wow, this is just great." And you look at it a week later and you realize you'd been excited by the act of creation, but what you've created is not really exciting when you look at it in cold blood. And so that, to me, is a valuable lesson also.

Robert von Neumann taught painting, and when I finally got into a painting class of his, he reacted in much the same way.

When you're young, you think you can do anything, and we thought.

We both [with Alixandra Kolesky MacKenzie] got into ceramics, you might say, by the back door. Looking back on it, I think this was a very good thing.

These narrow-footed forms I was making, I thought, gosh, I could push those further, not to construct them the way [Hans] Coper did but to work in my own manner but push it more toward that form. And I learned to do that and enjoyed it for a number of years.