A small room above a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

Open before me, a recent publication by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, entitled Thrown: British Columbia's Apprentices of Bernard Leach and Their Contemporaries, a beautifully designed book that invites us into the world of ceramic artists Michael Henry, Tam Irving, Charmian Johnson, Glenn Lewis, John Reeve and Leach himself.

The page I am open to is "Entry 22" from art historian and novelist Herbert Read's The Meaning of Art (London: Faber and Faber: 1968):

"Pottery is at once the simplest and the most difficult of all the arts. It is the simplest because it is the most elemental; it is the most difficult because it is the most abstract."

Below is Bernard Leach's grandson, Simon, demonstrating what is known as "fluting":