VERO BEACH — When Eric Olson sailed his 36- foot boat into the Vero Beach Marina a year ago, he was not exactly entering uncharted waters.
He and his now ex-wife had spent two months here in February 2010, before heading to the Bahamas for a planned year of sailing. It was to be a break in Olson’s long career as a professional potter, throwing pieces in his Madison, Wisc., studio and selling them at art fairs.
The plans for a cruise went awry though as the couple decided to separate.
Now, he was returning to Vero alone with only his dog, Lucy, a Schipperke.
Through a chance friend at the nearby dog park steps from the marina, he quickly found someone with several crucial things in common.
Sherry Hickman, a biology professor at IRSC, had her own Schipperke, Boscoe. She was also an avid follower of the local arts scene, and proved to be Olson’s one-woman Welcome Wagon.
Hickman volunteered to dog-sit Lucy while Olson vacationed in the Ukraine.
When she learned that Olson was a professional potter, she led him across the street to the Vero Beach Museum of Art, where sculptor Shotsie Cain Lajoie had corralled her potter friends into the annual bowl-throwing for the Soup Bowl event.
A Vero Beach tradition for 19 years, the simple $5 midday meal at 30 locations next Thursday — and the sale of more than 1,000 handmade bowls — benefits the Samaritan Center, a Catholic charity providing long-term shelter for homeless families.
Once he saw the museum’s pottery studio and the volunteer potters at their wheels, Olson launched into action.
Brought in to observe, he quickly offered to throw a few bowls. Before long, the potters were casting a wary eye in jocular competition as newcomer Olson slapped hunk after hunk of clay onto the wheel, pressed his hands around them, and turned them into perfect bowls.
“Everybody was just all of a sudden, ‘Who is this guy?'” says Olson with a modest grin. “I can throw pretty fast, and my bowls are almost all exactly the same size and shape. It really comes down to muscle memory and your hands knowing the form that you’re throwing.”
The artists’ community brought Olson back to Vero.
“You would think a city of this size wouldn’t have that saturation of support for the arts, but people really embrace the arts here,” he says. “That’s hard to find.”
Since his arrival in Vero last Thanksgiving, Olson has been in his “pottery cave” – a warehouse space off Old Dixie Highway for his kiln and clay.
He is testing out a new thrust in his craft, tile-making.
Where before the only tiles he made were placed in frames, he now is pitching his work to local tile stores, taking commissions for countertops, backsplashes, floors and even pools.
He is also making friends.
Since finding LaJoie and the bowl-throwing crew, he was invited to show at Flamevine Gallery at the season’s first Art Stroll last month.
There, in a group show that included many of the area’s potters, his carefully wrought vases and bowls stood out with their distinctive surface decoration.
Olson took up pottery after trying a semester at a technical college in Madison, Wisc., and deciding it wasn’t for him.
He didn’t find his calling – pottery making – until age 32.
He had started a greenhouse business growing gourmet lettuces. In his third winter, he shut down the greenhouses and took a five-session class in pottery.
“After the first night, I pretty much felt that was what I was going to do for a living,” he says. “It was the feel of the clay that was so amazing, to have something that was so responsive to touch. That’s what really drew me in.”
Early on, Olson worked as a “production” potter – “producing a lot of something,” as he puts it, for a local pottery in Madison. “But I didn’t really like production pottery. You’re working to specs and it’s got to be within certain dimensions and you’re throwing the same forms over and over again. I can make 30 bowls in an hour. But it’s not what I enjoy. What I enjoy is making art pottery, which is much more specialized. It’s looking at the aesthetics and design and individuality of the pot, and not just cranking it out.”
He decided to build a studio at his home, equipping it with a large gas-fired kiln; within two years, he was applying to art fairs.
One day, he sat in on the jury’s deliberations, and noticed that the winning potters were decorating the surfaces of their pots.
Over the next year, he began working on using a technique known as “resists,” where tape or liquid – everything from wax to Downy fabric softener — is applied to the surface of the pottery to control the areas coated by glaze.
His favorite method involved using masking tape to leave a line of unglazed pottery separating the areas of color.
It turned out to be an ancient technique known as “cuerda seca,” or dry cord.
“I thought I came up with it,” he says with a laugh. “Moroccan tile has been decorated that way for hundreds of years.”
Soon Olson began selling at fairs for collectors of vintage pottery, making increasingly elaborate pieces inspired by antique pottery with names like “Roseville Della Robbia” and “Newcomb College.”
“At collectors’ shows, people know what they’re looking at. A vase that I was struggling to get $75 for at an art fair was getting $250. I thought, Wow, I have found my people.”
After making 125 bowls for the Soup Bowl, Olson was invited to make a tureen for the event, one of a half-dozen large pieces sold each year by raffle.
Raffle tickets for the tureens will be sold Thursday at the Soup Bowl locations, and for the rest of November at Tiger Lily Gallery, where the tureens are on display.
On the barrier island, the soup bowl lunches are being offered at the Indian River Shores Town Hall (hosted by Coldwell Banker Ed Schlitt Realtors), Weichert Realty, Christ By the Sea Church, Holy Cross Church, and Brown and Brown Insurance.
An evening meal is being hosted at Polished salon. Private homes are also encouraged to stage their own Soup Bowls, and hosts can ask to sell the $10 bowls while supplies last.
For more information, call Shotsi Cain Lajoie at (772) 453-9049.