I met Rudy Autio in Missoula, Montana, during the summer of 1974. I had just driven across the United States, from Tampa, Florida, with my wife and two German Shorthair Pointers (pulling a U-haul trailer) to accept a job teaching ceramics at the University of Montana.
I had accepted the job, with only a phone call, from the Dean at the University of Montana, a few months earlier. There were no interviews for the job, none, not even a telephone interview. There was no website, or Facebook page, in those days, or much of anything to tell me what I was getting into. I had really been mostly interested in returning to the western United States somewhere in the mountains after my experience in graduate school at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The University of Montana, Missoula gave me the call back on a blanket application I had made to schools out west.
I had come to ceramics through the back door. I was actually a painting major as an undergraduate. I fell in love with ceramics because I had to take it as a “requirement “ for the BFA I was working toward at Texas Tech. I was an artist, working in ceramics and mixed media. I didn’t really know anything about the history of American ceramics, or the revolution that Rudy Autio, Pete Voulkos and others had started at the Archie Bray Foundation, in Helena, Montana during the 1950’s and 60s.
Rudy and I met at the ceramics shop at the University of Montana. Rudy was a small, compact, husky fellow, and seemed somewhat shy. We stood in the glaze area of the shop (which looked to me to be a disorganized disaster at the time). He told me, with a slight grin, that they had hired me to “take over”. He told me that I could “do whatever I wanted” with more smiles and a slight chuckle.
In retrospect, and if you have ever been an academic, you will understand how extraordinary this was. No one was going to tell this new young faculty member how to do things, or what to do. No one was going to tell me where the “lines had been drawn”, and that I “had better stay within them”.
Rudy was a sensitive, intuitive thinker. He was always positive with me. He chuckled allot, like a Buddhist monk. As a teacher (even when his students did, what I thought, was mediocre work) he would grin, chuckle, and gently say, “Uh hm! Yeah”.
I always felt the full, and secure, presence of his support, and friendship, as an artist, and a young colleague. He raised me like a son. And I can still barely write those words without tears in my eyes.
Rudy was a squat, imperfect, absolutely beautiful soul. He had an incredible positive impact on a whole generation of younger artists. He was, and is, a genuine American icon. In his later artwork he achieved a superb blend of rough, bulky forms, with light, beautifully articulated line drawings of horses, and figures, all floating in this world.
I loved him. I am still learning from the ways he modeled to me years ago.
Lately his presence has come to my studio, in my work, and I have to gently smile.
I miss him everyday.
I still learn from him, everyday.
Thank you Rudy.
“Uh hm! Yeah”
Ken Little 2019