Janet Lowe

Art and Life in Playa del Carmen, Mexico

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A Long Walk Home Through Philadelphia

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So, I walked and walked and enjoyed the architecture of Philadelphia, beginning in the middle of town with huge townhouses and immaculate streets and going south. The houses got a little smaller, there were more businesses, but further south there were empty shops and much smaller homes that are now being bought up by developers and remodeled for young working people who want to stay in the City. Construction was very evident in my son’s neighborhood where he rents a lovely row house with a park for his dog only a block away.

I was the dog walker a couple times a day and got to know some of his multi-cultural neighbors, amazingly friendly for such a big city.

Last Stop on the Fall Adventure: Philadelphia

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Family home and cemetary on S. 13th Street

The final stop on our month long adventure was back home to Philadelphia where I lived for 30 years before moving to Mexico and where my three kids still live. Jim took the borrowed car to visit his daughters in the suburbs and I explored the city with Uber and on foot. Rittenhouse Square is located in the center of town and is a haven of trees and benches which I returned to over and over again.

The Barnes Foundation was my next destination. A treasure trove of impressionist, post-impressionist, and early modern paintings, as well as old master works, Native American fine crafts, and early American furniture and decorative art. He was also an early and influential collector of African sculpture. I first saw the collection in the Barnes home in Merion, Pa – walls and stairwells covered with Renoirs, Cezannes, and Matisses. Logistics became impossible for visitors so the collection was eventually moved to a new museum on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia.

Unveiled only a couple days ago , I found the bronze statue of Octavious V. Catto on the south side of City Hall in Philadelphia. He was a civil rights activist here after the Civil War working to desegregate trolleys and bring Black voters to the polls, but was killed on Election Day 1871 at the age of 32. This is the first public monument honoring a specific African American in Philadelphia.

Remembering my Old Pots

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Teapot.

Feeling sentimental about my previous life in San Francisco and Philadelphia as a potter. I worked for 35 years in my own private studio, traveling to craft shows every other month around the northeast: Boston, Washington, D.C., NYC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, as far as Virginia (just once).

Craft Show booth at Smithsonian Museum Craft Show.

My studio in Philly was in my huge warehouse home with east facing windows allowing light to shine in over my shoulders as I worked.

All my pots were hand built although I originally did learn to use the potters wheel and taught university classes for several years. Hours and hours of rolling coils of clay on a canvas covered table then pinching layer after layer together using a hand powered turn table and leaving the texture of my thumb inside over and over again. I could build about 1 1/2 inches (4 or 5 coils) then the pot needed to rest so I went on to the next one. By the time I had finished the 6th or 7th piece, the first one was ready for more coils. It was a time of meditation. I would forget to eat. And if I had not had 3 hungry children I could have worked all night.

One series in 2004 was all black and white, just tiny bits of color every once in a while.

Coil- built pots.

After drying until almost leather hard handles could be attached, coils or spikes added to the top edges. Then a few more days to dry and I would paint them with underglazes (liquid clay with oxide colors added). Some took days to paint. Working women became the theme of this series. Ladies with objects above their heads designating their jobs: butcher, baker, pottery maker, chef, knife sharpener, seamstress and many more. All wore sneakers.

 

I think I must have been a painter at heart. Many, many plates were created with coils wrapped around large slabs of flat clay. Nothing was functional. Plates were all fixed with hangers.

My hands are paying for my compulsive behavior now. Wrists and thumbs are incredibly tender after yoga classes with too many downward facing dogs. But this was my passion.

After the pieces were totally dry I carried them down two flights of stairs to the basement where my electric kilns lived. Sometimes with very large pieces I needed to sit on the step and lower myself down a step at a time with the pot on my lap. After bisque firing the clay turned from gray to white but colors were still very pastel. Up to the studio the work went where details were often added with black underglaze pencil and then covered with clear glaze and fired again.

It was always a treat to open a slightly warm kiln to find the bright colors and rich blacks shining up at me. Then I would carry them all upstairs to the main floor of my warehouse living space which had two huge store front windows. There I would arrange the new creations on display for passers by. Often I would look up from doing the dishes and see someone with their nose to the window admiring the pots. Eventually they would all be wrapped in bubble wrap and carried to the next show.

I do miss the challenges I faced and the feel of clay between my fingers.

Coil-built pots, painted with underglaze and carved.

Selling the house on 2 Street in Philadelphia

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I went back to Philadelphia this winter to clean out 31 years of living from our big house on south 2nd Street and put it on the market. Both Zack and Dorsche had been living there with their partners and dogs but easily found other places and moved out. I was left alone in the house with Craig’s List, Goodwill and Thrift for AIDS as my best buddies for help. It went quickly at first, things began to disappear. Three men arrived and managed to move the piano out the front door, an antique dealer from New Jersey took a truckload, the kids divided up what they wanted in huge piles, I found a young man to take boxes and boxes of books, I took games and toys around the corner to the neighborhood center, and it began to look a little clear. We brought in a man to clean out the piles of stuff in the basement, but the morning he was coming I took one last look and found the wooden rocking horse Grandpa had made for Dorsche so moved it to the front window.
He came back a week later and tore out all the walls on the 2nd and 3rd floors so there was once again the loft space we had imagined.

And I began moping and polishing floors – then the snow arrived and with it salt on the sidewalks which was constantly tracked onto my clean red floors. So I moped and polished again and again.

I tried to sell the house myself and had a lot of lookers but no one came up with an offer near what several real estate agents thought I should ask. So a few days before I was scheduled to return to Mexico I signed papers with a real estate agent who is very active in South Philly. She listed it without a photo on Wednesday morning (the day after I left) and went to the property to take pictures. While there she got a call from another real estate agent who had a client interested and sent them over. The short story is that they fell in love with the place, paid full asking price and two months later I returned for settlement. They plan to live in the house, making some changes like building a couple bedrooms, but will leave the lofts and the brick walls. We are all delighted but sad to leave the place that held so much of our lives.