David Largo: A Cahuilla Potter
More than five-hundred years ago, the story goes, the Cahuilla Indians of southern California brought a new idea home from the Colorado river peoples. This new idea was earthenware pottery and it could have arrived in Cahuilla land in any number of ways. The techniques may have arrived with a bride from the river area, or the techniques may have been orally relayed across cultural boundaries. It is even possible the Cahuilla developed the practice independently.
Without a time machine we can never know for sure how the practice was started, but we do know that at least five-hundred years ago earthenware vessels enjoyed wide-ranging popularity among the Cahuilla and their neighbors to the south, the Kumeyaay. The typical Cahuilla vessel was round bodied and round bottomed, a form which demonstrates a perfect balance between maximum volume and minimum surface area. The height was slightly greater than the vessel’s diameter, some ollas were fully two feet in height. The vessels, called by their Spanish name, ollas, were nested in the sand or set upon a ring woven of Yucca fibers, both provided a very stable foundation. The vessels could easily be positioned at nearly any angle in relation to the user, facilitating adding or removing contents. The neck of the olla was more or less constricted according to the proposed use; water jugs had narrower necks than seed storage jars. The clay body was of a medium grit, had a rosy red-brown color, and contained a high percentage of mica inclusions. The oxidation patterns left on the surface of the ollas by the firing process range from black to light tan and the mica chips make the surface sparkle. Most ollas were left unadorned but a few had hand-applied circles, dots and lines applied in red or rarely, black pigment.
Earthenware ollas were used as storage vessels for food and water. Used in meal preparation nearly every day, ollas were also filled with surplus goods and cached in rock overhangs or caves, against hard times. The jars provided excellent long term storage; they were vermin and insect proof and water tight. Many have survived until today, patiently holding the contents deposited many years ago.
Nature’s helping hand was instrumental; surface deposits of clay were needed to support a vigorous earthenware industry. Clay was abundant in the mountainous regions of Cahuilla territory; the low-lying desert communities also had fine clay deposits and a large number of shards have been found in desert sites, suggesting a highly developed earthenware technology.
Pottery ollas fell out of use during the 1800s for a number of reasons. Western diseases devastated Cahuilla communities in endless waves of sickness and death. As more and more of the people died, fewer people were left to make and teach the making of pottery. Life was so disrupted for the Cahuilla who survived that untold amounts of food remained in the field ungathered, mitigating the need for storage vessels. Perhaps the most damaging blow to earthenware manufacture was the introduction, toward the end of the 1850s, of consumer goods and a cash economy. An enormous variety of manufactured containers became readily available, and for the most part, these substitutes were lighter and less fragile than earthenware. Buckets and pails, crates and sacks, tins and canisters began to appear. Alternate containers could be obtained cheaply, many were free or nearly so. They didn’t require a long trek to a clay deposit; the days it took to finish a vessel were freed for other activities.
Most of the remaining ollas found their way to private or public collections. No new ones had been made for fifty years. In 1990 it appeared that the tradition was lost forever. There were some examples of pottery in individual’s homes; they had become family heirlooms, no longer used for storage. No one knew of anyone still producing pottery. A few elders at Santa Rosa reservation remeber ollas used in everyday life. Elders from other reservations recalled their relatives making pottery, but many of the details had slipped away; no one really knew how to make an olla. The day David Largo began his work, a new chapter of the history of Cahuilla earthenware was initiated.
When I first met David Largo, half a dozen or more years ago, he was making the painful transition from boyhood to manhood. He had accompanied his mother, Donna Largo, on a visit to the art gallery where I worked. Donna is universally known for her basketmaking skills and frequently teaches classes and gives workshops in various aspects of the art throughout the Southwest. Donna’s whole family has been involved in her basketmaking over many years, so David learned where the juncus and deer grass and yucca grow; he learned where the old village sites are located, and where the clay deposits his forbearers used are located.
David was quiet that first afternoon and stood, literally, in his mother’s shadow. His eyes were cast down when in conversation, but when his attention was not required he was eagerly observing/absorbing the art which surrounded us in the main gallery where we talked. There was something angry and frustrated about him. He lacked self-assurance and seemed dark and moody. I had heard a few stories about David, too. He had survived his own share of hard knocks.
The thing I remember most about David on the day we met, were his hands. His fingers were constantly moving, but not fidgeting idly. They surveyed the fabric of his levis and his jacket. When he showed me the silver jewelry he was currently working on, his fingers moved deftly over the surfaces of the unfinished wrist-guard, and they quickly charted the topography of the leather enclosing the silver. I watched him see his silver with his fingers. He was measuring it against some internal, nonverbal standard that was in his body, not just his mind. I could tell by watching him that his fingers gave him a set of data, different from anything his eyes were capable of delivering.
And this, I think was the problem. Silver is not as plastic as clay. David couldn’t turn silver into objects that felt right. Silver work frustrated David because he couldn’t get the right feel from metal. It’s true the work was awkward, not bad, but not great. The surfaces were unevenly finished; the lines of the work lacked clear definition. David recently showed me some of that early jewelry and he reminisced about how frustrating the work had been. He still is intersted in creating forms in metal and stone although he works more easliy with clay.
David is not likely to be remembered most of all for his silver work, it was an important endeavor, because through it he trained himself to work long hours and to persevere. He spent countless hours in the study of form and surface. He experimented with leather work, too, but leather was two dimensional. It was not his medium either.
Then, one spring day in the early 1990s the women from Santa Rosa Reservation invited Tom Fresh, artist and art educator to teach a class in pinch-pot ceramics. Tom taught David and the women how to recognize clay deposits in the earth and test its usability. David’s interest was sparked and he continued to develop his technique while attending an early summer class given by potters, Nicolas and Reynaldo Quezada at Santa Rosa Reservation. During this class David was to meet Tony Soares, a local ceramist who learned pottery making from his own grandmother and who has worked with the Quezada family and a number of other professional ceramists. Tony introduced David and the women from Santa Rosa Reservation to paddle and anvil technique of constructing ceramics and to the science of pit-firing.
Later that summer ISOMATA, a school for music and the arts located in the San Jacinto Mountains, offered a week-long class in Acoma Pueblo-style ceramics given by Emma and Dolores Lewis, daughters of world renown artist, Lucy Lewis. David was awarded a full-scholarship and learned another new style and technique of pottery. Four years later he had the opportunity to sit in on a class at ISOMATA given by, Diane Calabaza, a relative of Blue Corn, a world famous San Ildefonso potter. He has formed fast friendships with all the potters who have helped him on his way. They recognize his natural ability and love for the material.
David’s pottery education really began when he was a small child. Ollas were a common sight in Cahuilla homes when David was a boy. His parents, Tony and Donna Largo, helped David and his older brother develop and maintain a love for the land where his family has lived for countless generations. As a child he walked the hills with his brother and cousins, playing in the open places and near the abandoned home sites of the old ones. He had first seen pottery shards here, at home.
As an adult, David worked as a tribal representative monitoring archaeological excavations where countless bits of broken pottery were unearthed. He soon gained enough expertise to determine exactly which part of the olla a given chip came from. Using his fingers to measure and map the chips, he learned to reconstruct a vision of the entire finished pot from a tiny shard. He can effortlessly determine if a piece was from the rim, from the side where the jar was widest, from the bottom, or any other location.
The quality of David’s pottery rose immediately and dramatically. From his first fairly successful attempts to the beautiful vessels he now coaxes from the clay, the forms seem to emerge with ease. It is as if he has an ancient knowledge of the material in his bones. The walls of his vessels continue to become thinner and more uniform. He has reinvented the art by careful observation and by thinking out and applying the strategies and techniques of the old ones.
One day David invited me to watch him fashion an olla from scratch. He first took me to the mountain where he digs his clay. As we walked an old settlement, David was excited; abandoned settlements offered the hope of finding pottery shards. He was good at scanning the ground for shards, too. Monitoring sites and working with archaeologists and anthropologists had helped David train his eye to spot the slightest suggestion of ceramic form. We found several shards that day, by touch he could instantly discern where in the pot the shard was originally positioned. His fingers told him as much, and perhaps more than his eyes. He usually grinds his clay at home, but that day he took the time to use an ancient bedrock mortar to grind the earth. In no time, he had reduced the block of clay-earth into powder.
David works in a small but comfortable studio behind his house. Broken experimental ollas decorate the cheery flowerbeds at the gate and under the studio window. The room is filled with light by an east and a west window and by a south-facing doorway. Ollas waiting for firing are upside down in a row. Ollas already fired, grace the shelves on the north wall. A single, mustard-colored, pipe, shaped like a hollow cone with a fin and burnished to a high luster waited to be fired, too. Handmade tools of wood and stone for smoothing and forming pottery lay on a table scattered with pigment minerals. Some of the minerals were in rough chunks, others were ground as finely as baby powder. They were white, red, black, and yellow. David had been testing paints by concocting them from the variously colored powders. Small jars contained the current samples of experimentation. “Mineral pigments,” David told me, “are hard to get a hold of. The old people knew where to get them, heck, they even traded for them.”
To make the clay, David mixed the ground earth with water to form an elastic mass. The potters of the Pueblos of the Southwest usually add temper, finely ground particles of pumice, quartz, or broken pottery included to help control shrinkage. David usually finds it unnecessary to add temper to his clay because it contains a high enough level naturally. The clay rested to allow the water to penetrate each grain of earth uniformly. David then “wedged” the clay mass, a process which forced all of the tiny air bubbles out of the clay, by slamming it repeatedly, from one hand into the other. Any small bubble remaining in the clay will expand during firing, causing the vessel to explode.
By this time, David had invested hours in the process and the clay still bore little resemblance to an olla. While the clay rested David worked to decode other riddles from the past. He is continually experimenting with new types and proportions of materials, developing clay formulas as well as formulas for paint pigments of various colors.
David separated a chunk from the clay mass and began to round and flatten it, as if he were making a pizza crust. He made a base for the olla by pressing the newly formed slab onto a form covered with a cloth; the cloth offers a quick release from the form, a trick learned from Tony Soares. I have seen other potters who make ollas by this method use the bottom of an olla as a form; that day David used a bowling ball as his form. Once he was satisfied with the feel of the base he removed it from the form and began to build the side walls of the vessel. He made ropes of clay and added them, one by one, to the rim of the base, adhering them to one another. After adding each clay coil he held a palm-sized smooth stone against the inside wall of the olla and patted the outside with a flat paddle carved from a pine 1” x 5.” David modeled his paddle after a paddle used by Tony Soares and after a paddle made of a fence board David once saw in a museum. The paddling compacts the structure of the clay, strengthening the ollas’ walls and evenly rounding the surface. To make the diameter of the olla larger, David slightly offset each coil he added toward the outside. Conversely, when he wanted to reduce the diameter of the olla, he offset each coil he added slightly to the inside of the olla. To keep the diameter consistent he placed one coil exactly atop the previous one.
So the process continued, coil after coil positioned and blended into the whole, the olla rising gracefully. As David worked, he judged his progress in several ways. He visually surveyed his work, turning his head this way and that to get a full-perspective view. But mostly he judged his progress by feeling. Many times as I watched him work, he stared off into the distance; his focus turned inward. His fingers were sending him messages, reports on texture, form, and solidity, measurements of thickness, moisture, and elasticity. His fingers were telling him the most important things he needed to know to successfully complete the vessel.
The neck coil and rim can be the most tricky part of the construction, and I wondered how David would meet the challenge. Finally, the time came to build the neck of the olla. As he prepared to add the neck he asked me to stop taking photographs of the process. “This is the secret part, here,” he said, “I show students one way to finish the neck, but I don’t show anyone my unique finish. It’s something I worked out by myself. I wondered what the old-timers did and then I figured it out. I encourage my students to try to figure out their own solutions, too.” I watched as he fashioned the neck in a special way. He had so simply and cleverly met the challenge of constructing the neck of the olla, I no longer wondered if the knowledge of working the clay really could be passed on genetically.
David has found his niche, his talent, his heart. He has found, at last, his medium. He can carry forward the tradition of Cahuilla earthenware manufacture, a gift to the future. Here is a teacher, at long last, to share the art with those who will follow. I reflected on how far the developing master before me had come; how different he was from the David Largo I had met so many years before. Like a butterfly, he shed a painfully insecure demeanor to reveal a mature, motivated, confident, satisfied artisan. Few if any names are associated with the ollas made by the old ones, but the name of David Largo will long be associated with the rebirth and revitalization of Cahuilla-style earthenware manufacture.