Honor Thy Father - Remembering Weston Neil Andersen

Weston Neil Andersen was an American ceramic designer, craftsman and entrepreneur who in 1952, established Andersen Design Stoneware with his wife Brenda in the coast of Maine, USA, . He was also my father whom I loved and cared for and was cared for by during the latter years of his life. This is the story about the last five years in which he suffered from a brain injury. Weston was known throughout his life for his analytical mind, which was not affected by the brain injury but it compromised his ability to express his thoughts in complete sentences. During the last five years of his life, Weston spent many hours in deep reflection, seldom seeming to be bored. At times he would sleep for a very long time and when he awoke , he would say that he gotten a lot of work done. In mild weather, he spent many hours of the day sitting on the front porch taking in the natural surroundings and the community walking up and down the street which usually left him in a very good mood.

During his younger days, both Weston and his wife Brenda professed to be agnostics but both in their own unique ways came to accept the existence of God.

Brenda died in 1994.  Before her death, Brenda was in a coma for many hours with the family gathered around her. I was at a turn of holding her hand when suddenly I felt a spiraling motion swoop down. encompass and transport me into an open sky colored pink and filled with gold rimmed clouds. I felt an indescribably deep love and then just as suddenly l was back in the room and Brenda was conscious and calling for Weston. Brenda told Weston that she loved him, not words that came easily to her during her life and then she died.

Some will surely find the telling of this experience unbelievable but I can only testify to what happened as I experienced it, which seemed an experience in which there was no separation between my mother and myself as she/we were embraced by God's love. My Mother's encounter with death as revealed to me through the experience was as emotional as the way that she lived her life. As Dad used to say, she was always emoting. The visual imagery that I experienced was consistent with the Catholic background in which my mother was raised as a young English girl in London before and during World War II.

Weston & Brenda in the 1950's - photograph by unknown

During the years after Brenda's death and before Weston suffered macular degeneration which interfered with his ability to read, we shared many common reading interests uncommonly found in our larger community. Dad and I both read extensively in esoteric wisdom and quantum theory- which is to say the philosophy emergent from quantum physics, which does not prove the existence of God but which is consistent with the teaching of esoteric wisdom. Dad read Carlos Castaneda and I read Christian Hermeticism and we both read David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order and The Non-Local Universe by Menas Kafatos and Robert Nadeau among many other books. When he could no longer read, Weston listened to the entirety of the New Testament on tape.

These three early wine decanters display Dad's approach to ceramic design and glazes

Through out his life Dad was accustomed to seeing ghosts in our very old house in Maine. This did not frighten him, nor did he consider it to be anything unusual. The ghosts were as much a part of the natural world as any other phenomenon  He often spoke of the Sea Captain in the living room. Once he told me that the woman in the other room was very up set and that I needed to go that I needed to go and talk to her. I did so, although I could not see the woman.

Weston was a man of great intellectual and analytical capacity but with the brain injury limiting his ability to express his thoughts, his heart took on a stronger presence. He spent hours contemplating his life and often spoke of his wife, his mother, father, siblings and others he had known in his life. At his age he was aware that his days on this earth were numbered and it appeared to be that he was preparing himself for his own judgment day as he spent hours upon hours in contemplation of his life, past present and the future when he was gone.

 During the period after his brain injury, Weston relived his life chronologically and so we came to know him at many different stages of life As a boy.Weston lived on a chicken farm. One day, as an elderly man he suffered a seizure. When we entered the hospital we heard someone screaming  "Chicken" . It was Dad, who appeared to be reliving an early memory when he first realized that the chickens were destined to be killed. and was very upset by it.

When World War II broke out.Weston considered declaring conscientious objection but realized that if someone were trying to kill his family, he would kill them and so he enlisted. One day during his latter years he was in tears over a recollection of a man who had returned from the war missing his legs.

The morning that I took this picture of Weston, the expression on his  face was clear and innocent. I probably told him that he looked so handsome. Many of the caretakers who saw Dad over the years would say the same. At many times he had a engaging  and gentlemanly nature that charmed the people around him.

On other days he looked like this:

I am thinking thoughts too intense for words !

When my parents started their ceramics business in 1952, they did so on a shoe string budget and so they took their own photographs and published their own catalog

Years later I followed in their tradition designing our website and taking the photographs of the ceramic work. I set a makeshift studio up on the kitchen table where my father usually sat. 

In this picture Dad is sitting at the table on which my makeshift photography studio is being constructed. The bright sunlight comes streaming in through the window as father is sleeping in his chair.  Weston designed and constructed The kitchen table in the 1950's when we first moved into the house and it became the center of many different activities.

This is a photo that I took  in one of the kitchen table photography sessions of of the ceramic Blue Jay designed by Weston,

This Portrait of an Eating Dick is the last sculpture that Dad created in his life time.

The bright afternoon light streams in the window interacting with the shadows and light of the makeshift photography studio on the kitchen table. Suddenly Dad became very animated and was in a verbal rhapsody describing the rhythms and forms in the display and counting them.

After Dad's brain injury counting and the spelling of words took on particular significance, used for emphasis or explanation. If in pain, the word "ow" was spelled. Once when we called the paramedics because Dad had fallen out of bed, Dad explained everything to them by spelling the words as if spelling the words clarified the meaning, a curious phenomenon indeed. Spelling has to do with the ability to express thoughts to others involving the part of Dad's brain, which never fully recovered. leading one to wonder if the actual process of thinking is primordial to the process of communicating in language. Did spelling take on such meaning because of its function as a tool of communication?

Despite the brain injury and despite the fact that cameras had changed dramatically in appearance since the days when Dad took photographs, he understood the process of taking pictures from within and without. Once, when the afternoon sunlight was particularly bright, he said "I hope you know what you are doing !" It amazed me that he grasped the process of taking a picture and how such a bright light might affect the results. In this picture he is smiling for the camera,  So sweet !

In the years after Brenda died, Dad worked on this sculpture. After his brain injury he spent time observing it. One day while sitting on the front porch as he often like to do, he turned to me and asked that I would make a sculpture of him.

Dad would become involved when I worked on a sculpture, turning it as I worked and always letting me know what he thought. Here he is touching some wax sculptures in the works.

Here Dad sits in the morning having his coffee. The mug on the table with the funky tear drop designs is a form created by Weston, who designed a series of original mugs and a large line of functional forms  in addition to a line of wild life sculptures.

The day Dad fell and injured his brain, he was working on a project to have the mugs produced for the commercial market. I have now taken over the project. This is one of my favorites. Dad hand scraffitoed the spiral on the mug himself. I have to figure out how to translate this decorative technique into a commercial process. I understand his thinking on this project, not just in terms of the mug but in terms of the evolution of our family ceramic business.

Two hand cast stoneware steines, one decorated by Brenda and the other decorated by Weston

 One day Dad was looking sad and said that he had nothing to do. A few weeks later he said, "There are three people here and so there a three musicians." (This was said as a full sentence which was extremely rare.) I gathered up all the instruments I could find and we all played. Dad took to the keyboards. As a young man Dad's mother had wanted him to learn to play the piano but he refused. He did not play in a learned way but he played with deliberation, He preferred to play when no one was around but we could hear him in the other room.

Throughout his life Weston enjoyed classical jazz. As a young adult he went to Chicago and New York and listened to the greats playing in small venues.

One day we put on Sade and he listened to her for several hours. He said it is very involved. We introduced him to Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan and Mazzy Star, He stayed up late into the night listening to trance like music of Mazzy Star over  and over again. A few days before Dad died I was picking out the notes to Sweet Georgia Brown. I asked Dad if it sounded right and he looked at me and smiled his sweet smile,

During his life Dad was in the hospital on many occasions and we became accustomed to hearing the  lectures about how he may not make it this time around. The most convincing time was when he fell down and suffered the brain injury. The doctors said that what was good for the heart was bad for the brain and that Dad would never be off the breathing tube. That night as I drove from Portland to Boothbay with my nephew we both agreed that although Dad had had many miraculous recoveries this time it sounded much more challenging and then we both said at about the same time- But this is Weston! The next day Dad woke up and removed the breathing tube. By the time I returned to the hospital he was already walking around the place in his walker although he had a giant bruise on his head. The older doctor looked at the younger doctor and said "Forget your ever saw that MRI !"

In the days afterwards, while recovering from the brain injury Dad was speaking over and over again about system management. That is when it hit me how that Dad's unique talents were as much about system management as about art and design. He was system managing his own brain recovery. He was also speaking a great deal about fishermen and fishing, It did not escape me, with the common interest I shared with my father in esoteric wisdom, that the fish is an ancient symbol of Christianity.

Dad survived that injury to live five more years, dying at the age of 93. Three days prior to his death he was sleeping deeply and as peacefully as I had ever seen him sleep. Around five in the morning of the day that he died, my sister checked on him and found him sleeping with a karge smile on his face. Dad often worried during his life time and I would tell him, you just have to have faith. I think he found that faith. He chose when to go. Of course I wanted him to stay longer but I have accepted the wisdom of his decision. People say the are sorry for our loss, which I appreciate, but I really do not feel a loss because I do not feel my father is gone, he just went on to another stage of his journey, like the ghosts he used to see in our house and consistent with the nature of time in quantum theory and esoteric wisdom, Dad is still very much with us. 

And still enjoying the view from our front porch.

A Vision and A Process

A lot has happened since I last posted and it begins back in the 1980’s when Joe Randall worked for our production studio in Portland, Maine. It was there that Joe was introduced to the fascinating process of production ceramics, the same process that my father was introduced to by the illustrious Eva Zeisel, when he studied industrial design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, before and after World War II.

Joe was so inspired by the production process that he went on to study ceramics at Alfred University. He has since been involved in the ceramic business but we had lost contact with him.

My sister Elise volunteers her “service’ to the local land trust- (Yes – this is even before being promoted by our presidential family to do so). Elise helps to organize the Boothbay Region Boat Festival, which takes place at the shipyards around the bend from us in August. Last August I saw a slip-cast ceramic whale by a young artist, both different and similar to our work, similar enough so to say that the influence is there. I asked my sister about the work and she told me than she had put the young designer in contact with Joe.

When I saw the competition for a small business grant that the Juice Conference is offering, I formulated an idea for the grant and wrote to Joe for an estimate on doing molds. A few years back, Joe had done a block mold for us when we had a large order of baby penguins for the Smithsonian catalog.

After I had composed my introduction and contacted Joe, I learned that the grant process was an America Idol style oral run-off- and so did not pursue it, but none the less a process had been set in motion, merging with the larger process that began in the 1940’s when Eva Zeisel taught her land mark class in slip-cast ceramic production and a young man by the name of Weston Neil Andersen was a student.

When I called Joe I asked to have the block mold for the baby penguin, which I had never seen. The block mold makes the production of production molds very easy. I am interested in having block molds made of all our small sculptures, which was the basis of the grant proposal. Joe was planning a trip our way and said that he would stop by and deliver the block mold.

Last night Joe stopped by and we had a most interesting and inspiring meeting. It seems that Elise’s introduction of the young designer had set yet another stage of this decades long process in motion. Joe’s is a man fascinated by the mold making process and the design and management of a ceramic production shop. He does not want to do the actual production work but to be involved as a manager who oversees the process on a weekly basis. He has a colleague in New Hampshire who wants to set up a production shop and is ready to go but it hinges on the young designer, who wants only to design and market. The designer is going to the Atlanta and Rosen Shows with his own work and hoping to bring back enough orders to justify the financing of the project. Joe has another long-time associate who is their financing specialist.

Meanwhile, we have been side tracked this year with large projects not specifically related to our field. This has competed with our time and energy for focusing on sales- but the opportunities have been knocking on our door unsolicited. We are currently in the preliminary negotiation phase with three different enterprises that promise to yield quantity orders. We are also experiencing calls from former retailers with whom we had lost contact. The classical success of our line is a draw in these difficult times. Our line has retained its marketability for over half a century through out many fluctuations of the economy.

I was amazed to be sitting in the room listening to someone else as inspired and focused on the entire process – from design- to production – to sales and financing of a ceramic production enterprise. As I have written in my VISION statement, this enterprise hinges on love of the work and appreciation of the life style, and Joe clearly has that love and understanding. He was speaking about associates with whom he had a substantial history of dealings. We, ourselves, are a part of that chain of connections. Here I was listening to someone describe the emerging manifestation of the concepts expressed in my VISION statement, written a number of years ago. - And we are the link that can make the collaboration whole- not only because we can supplement orders should the young designer fall short of his goal and add to orders if he doesn’t- but because we have been involved in every aspect of the process for years-and we would like to have more time to focus on design, ceramic art and marketing – which is complementary to the project that is currently formulating.

It is formulating during a time when congress is discussing bills that may drastically alter the way business is to be done. If worse comes to worse and bills are passed that cripple the American economy with the highest taxes we have ever seen while simultaneously skyrocketing the cost of energy for every American -there is a back up plan. We would then look for a different nation in which to produce our medium priced line, while focusing on an upper end Art line here. Joe has experience dealing with overseas productions. Andersen Design has been recognized for art and design through our history and so we are poised to make this kind of transition. If best comes to best and taxes are left alone or even reduced and the Cap N Tax is defeated we can do both a medium priced line and develop a higher priced line in this country.

Andersen Design will be finishing the bisque ware in our own studio- at least initially. Our glazes are all of our own invention and are part of what distinguishes our work, only one other company has ever produced a line with our glazes and that is because a former employee stole the recipes from us. That company has since gone out of business. We also love the process and look forward to an opportunity to devote more of our own time and energy to that process. We expect to be developing more one of a kind work, which complements production work and often generates ideas for more production pieces.

In order to make this really work, we need to build a new ceramic finishing production here. This will provide interesting Maine Jobs- while the bisque ware production will provide interesting New Hampshire jobs. We will need to find financing for the new facility and possibly other costs.