By Edward H. Garcia
Bill Faulkner sets up his video by the side of a narrow street in Callender Lake and focuses it on Don Hollis who is kneeling by a patch of sand and clay, trowel in hand. As Bill makes final adjustments to tape Don harvesting “Callender Lake clay,” Don talks about the geology of the area which has produced the “wild clay” he uses in his pots.
The two friends, both retired from non-artistic professions, both living in Callender Lake, are making a film documenting the process by which Don gathers and processes clay from his neighborhood and builds and fires his pottery in a homemade kiln dug into the ground twenty yards from his front door.
Now the two late-blooming artists will show at the Flying Fish Gallery in Ben Wheeler during the July 9 Farm Road 279 Art Jam. Don will demonstrate how he builds the pots and talk about his process, and Bill will show his color photographs of flora.
Although Don had an early interest in art—and a professional interest in drafting, he spent most of his adult life working as an engineer in the oil industry. He began raising and racing pigeons and found himself in need of clay nesting bowls for his pigeons. That and his interest in the Caddo Indians native to this part of Texas, led him to try his hand at the kind of hand-built pottery the Indians made. He began air drying them and then began to explore the techniques and the chemistry of firing clay. That led to a series of front-yard kilns, each of which has become more sophisticated, the heat more controllable, the results more predictable.
Don’s art, like his life style, is all about self-sufficiency. The clay comes from the creek on his property or just down the street. The pots are shaped by hand, and the wood used to fire them comes from storm-felled trees. He sits in a small lean-to he calls his “loafing shed” handcrafting his pottery, frequently joined for breakfast by two grey foxes. He’s modest about his art, calling himself “just an old hermit in the woods making pinch pots.”
Like Don, Bill Faulkner also had an early interest in art—in his case photography—but spent his professional life working for the Texas Rehabilitation Commission and Social Security. He was born in his grandmother’s boarding house in the 200 block of Broadway in Tyler, but lived most of his life in south Texas and Dallas. His first camera came out of a cereal box when he was seven or eight years old.
Whatever the camera — and his cameras are much improved since then — Bill’s art is about using the camera to see and to show what might not otherwise be noticed. That is especially true in the photographs of flowers like the ones he will show at the Flying Fish Gallery at the July Art Jam.
Bill uses a close up lens to create wonderfully colorful images of parts of flowers and plants. Often they register as abstract compositions but with just enough detail to reveal their origins in the natural world. Bill produces his photographs digitally and has taught Photoshop at a Dallas area college. He plans for his film on Don to be the first of a series chronicling the processes of East Texas artists.
In Bill and Don’s case, the process of filmmaking has a definite social component. After a break from work to sit in the shed and talk about life, art, grey foxes and armadillos, Bill asks Don if he will talk on camera for another five minutes, and Don says, “Sure.” Don Hollis can always talk for five more minutes.
