Art strengthens life

When Yoshiro Ikeda suffered a stroke a year ago, the aftereffects barely slowed him down.

The internationally recognized artist — he is head of the ceramics department at Kansas State University — continued to shape clay vessels and teapots by hand. He continued to decorate them with glazes of his own concoction, and loaded them into the kiln for firing. He often repeated the process, adding marks and layers of colors to his designs.

The stroke a year ago didn’t bother Ikeda too much, he said. But he had a second stroke last December.

“The second one really hurts,” Ikeda said by phone from his office at KSU earlier this month. “I cannot speak right; balance was terrible, walking was terrible. I thought about quitting everything.”

Proof that he didn’t is on view at Trish Higgins Fine Art at Inn at the Park on Douglas Avenue. Sitting in the parlor of the neoclassic bed-and-breakfast are five ceramic vessels made by Ikeda last summer.

Ikeda’s spirit was put to the test when his body failed him last December. It was his physician who encouraged him to keep working with clay.

His art became his physical therapy. His condition has improved.

“I never take a break,” Ikeda said. “I am making work continually. I never slow down.”

At Trish Higgins, each vessel has a nebulous, organic shape — one is a tubby teapot sitting on stubby caterpillar legs, another is a large, crackle-skinned vase with curves like a dress form.

Each is coated in deep, earthy colors — turquoise splashed against tans, splotches of blue and orange, strips of new-spring green. Many are marked with slashes and circles and cross-hatches that look like a dried-out creek bed.

“It (the stroke) didn’t affect my art,” Ikeda said. “My thinking has always been the same. But I cannot take my pots to the kiln, all that kind of thing.

“Fortunately my students help me. They are very fine students, and cheap labor.”

Ikeda has taught at K-State since 1978. He was born in Japan and came to the United States as a teenager, graduating with a degree in painting and drawing from Portland State University in Oregon in 1970. He studied in Japan, then returned to the United States and began his career.

His ceramics fuse Asian elements with textures and colors he says are inspired by the Kansas landscape. His work has been in exhibits and galleries all over the world. It can be seen at the Strecker Gallery in Manhattan, and often in Wichita at the Wichita Center for the Arts and at Trish Higgins Fine Art.

The vessels at Trish Higgins start at around $2,000.

“The first thing you notice is the surface — how textured it is, how painterly (like a painting) it is,” Trish Higgins said. “There is a lot of drawing on the surface.

“He calls them vessels. I feel a real presence of the human spirit in them.”

When asked about the vessels on view at Trish Higgins Fine Art, Ikeda said, “Those are good pots.”

When he said it, it seemed more a tribute to the pots than self-congratulation. As his art strengthened his body, his artwork — those funny, colorful, odd-shaped vessels — took on lives of their own.

(This article was written by Chris Shull for The Wichita Eagle)