Bold & beautiful From functional to artistic, bowls hold a quiet power

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If you were stuck on a desert island, you might think that the best companion would be a book of Shakespeare. But you may want to rethink that plan. You can’t eat out of Shakespeare. You can’t gather food in Shakespeare. You can’t even boil water in Shakespeare.

We love the guy, but he can’t fill the belly.

May we suggest a bowl? It’s the most basic of all kitchen items. It’s the most ancient of all forms. It can be functional or decorative, or both. From spiritual to ritual to victual, the bowl is a basic survival tool.

“A beautiful mug and a bowl could get a person by,” said Squidge Liljeblad Davis, a Monroe potter who makes bowls from clay. “When people have taken a vow of poverty or have simplified their life to its essence, they have one bowl.”

When she’s throwing her curvaceous “smudging” bowls, Davis starts with a basic soup bowl shape that she then cups in her hands, hugging and pinching it to form a heart. The bowls are designed for burning sage and cedar, such as in American Indian purification traditions. Davis hopes that by holding the heart shape toward one’s own heart, the holder will find “access to a larger truth and give love to the self and out to others.”

The bowls also make nice wedding and anniversary gifts, even for the spiritually unenlightened. But you see a hand-crafted bowl – by Davis or by Orrington sixth-grader Alex McPherson – and you realize that sometimes a bowl holds more than cereal. In McPherson’s case, his bowl was part of a fundraising project. Leah Olson, his art teacher, is one the few in the area who still offers ceramics to her students. Proceeds from the dinner the students served in the bowl – $245 – were donated to Manna Ministries Inc. in Bangor.

“People are moved by a creative sense of a useful, beautiful thing,” said Stuart Kestenbaum, director of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle. “It can be a very humble form. It’s a human hand serving humans. There’s an implicit metaphor of nourishment, emptiness and fullness.”

Every potter is a bowl person, said Kestenbaum.

But some are less philosophical in their approach. Take Charles Grosjean, for instance. He makes stoneware bowls by the hundreds and markets them to tourists and locals alike.

“My mind is not an artistic mind,” said Grosjean, who began his pottery career in the 1970s after a stint as a biologist. “My things are all functional, familiar shapes. They are made for kitchen and dinner ware. I never took an art course in my life.”

Still, he has a sense of the special nature of bowlness.

“You hold them, you cradle and cup them in your hand,” he said. “Other shapes aren’t that way. And of course, that doesn’t apply to anything larger than a cereal bowl. As I make them, I enjoy making them. For some shapes, that doesn’t happen.”

When Donald Deschene of Medway carves burl bowls, he relies entirely on the shape and grain of the knot of a tree. He chisels, grinds, sands a block of birch or rock maple until it forms a bowl. Sometimes he oils them to make them usable as a food container. He has been carving bowls as a hobby for about 10 years . “I’ve always had a hankering for working with wood. I like to create stuff with it,” said the former millworker who is now a carpenter for a boatyard.

While Deschene relies on the block of wood to determine the shape and size of his bowls, Jacques Vesery, who works in local cherry wood, takes another approach.

“I don’t use the wood to reference anything,” said Vesery, a former scrimshander, submariner and Zamboni driver who lives in Damariscotta. “When I’m done, you’re not looking at the wood. My finished product is something you don’t know is wood. It has been carved, painted, textured.”

Kestenbaum described Vesery’s luminescent gold-lined bowls as having “emptiness.”

“Not too many people understand that you have to look a little deeper,” said Vesery, whose bowls sell internationally for several thousand dollars. “Most people look at a bowl as a container for something physical. They aren’t looking at it as a container for something spiritual. My work is more about the spiritual.”

For some, bowls are about cereal and soup. For others, they are about the soul. Think of young Oliver Twist and the courage his bowl inspired. “Please, sir,” the orphan asked. “I want some more.” He may not have received the porridge he was hoping for, but he sure got more.

Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.

The many roles of bowls

Bowls are not just for kitchens, studios and art galleries. Here’s what representatives from other “bowl” fields said when asked: In the context of your profession, what do you think of when you hear the word “bowl”?

Manna soup kitchen executive director Bill Rae: “Food. That’s it.”

Operating room nurse and administrator Tom Callan: “Basin. Instrumentation. Cleaning. Irrigation. Metal. Plastic. Solutions.”

Tropical fish and exotic pet specialist Vance Peters: “Microenvironments. We make little ecosystems.”

Bangor-Brewer Bowling Lanes pin setter mechanic Randy Perry: “Loud. Scores.”

Herbal Tea and Tobacco Co. owner Christopher Ruhlin: “A pipe. Absolutely.”

Percussionist Stuart Marrs: “We sometimes refer to the kettle of the kettledrum as a bowl. There are a lot of percussion instruments from all over the world that could be called bowls.”

Husson College football coach Gabby Price: “The Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl and, of course, the Super Bowl.”