By Lauren Lochetto

Professor Paul Chaleff wakes up every Monday and Wednesday and gets ready for work. Typically, he puts on black dress pants and a button-down shirt, which directly contrast the final item, a pair of dirty old top-sider loafers. Odds are, by the end of the day, the entire ensemble will come home looking like the shoes.

A ceramics professor at the University.

Chaleff never can resist touching the clay or letting himself get it all over when he does. He is always telling his students how getting to make a mess is part of the fun.

Many of them laugh at his jokes and watch in awe as he makes throwing a pot half the size of himself look like a walk in the park, but in reality, they don’t know anything about him. To the students, this artist whose work is recognized by the most prominent art museums and collectors is just a short, middle-aged, twinkle-eyed man who likes to do pottery and appears to be in better shape than any of them.

“He throws with astonishing speed and grace,” Samantha Birnberg, a junior fine arts major, said.

For the most part, the students know nothing of the amazing journey from the Bronx to the rapids of Quebec and the curved roof huts of Kyoto that led him to their classroom. It was a journey that began when Chaleff was attending the City College of New York and majoring in biology in spite of his true passion for art.

Growing up in a working-class family struggling to get by hadn’t been easy for Chaleff. His parents combined salary (that of a baker and a secretary) wasn’t enough to provide their obviously intelligent and talented son the right opportunities to excel.

His father was able to appreciate art, which was encouraging, but did not effectively demonstrate that there could be any kind of future in it.

“I never knew an artist so I never knew it was an option as a profession,” Chaleff said.

When the time came to choose a university, Chaleff chose according to what his family could afford. He didn’t even want to apply to prestigious universities because it would only make having to turn them down for financial reasons even more difficult. In retrospect, Chaleff recognizes what a narrow scope he was looking through at the time.

“I didn’t realize what was out there, I didn’t feel I had a right to those opportunities because I was so poor and couldn’t afford them,” Chaleff said.

He continued to go through the motions, choosing Biology as his major and tucked away the little boy who was captioned “Rembrandt’s rival” in his fifth grade yearbook somewhere in the dark corners of his mind. Then, unexpectedly, something set him free.

On a canoeing trip in the summer of 1968, Chaleff and his good friend Bob lost control of their canoe and were thrown overboard. As he struggled to keep his own head above water, Chaleff was forced to watch helplessly as the furious rapids swallowed up his friend. Three miles of the same violent water that took Bob’s life lay ahead and Chaleff was without a life jacket.

“I didn’t think I’d survive,” Chaleff said.”I was a strong 20-year-old but I wasn’t a strong swimmer, I was being beaten bruised and smashed.”

Eventually, Chaleff was sucked into a chute. There were nothing but walls around him and water beneath him as he made numerous failed attempts to remove his jacket, that seemed determined to go under and take him with it. At the same time, he scraped at the slick, wet walls but found nothing to stop his advance downstream.

“I had what they call an out of body experience,” Chaleff said as he appeared to be remembering what he saw at that moment instead of what was in front of him. “I knew my friend was dead. I could see myself dead in the water. Living had been so difficult, it was relaxing to be dead.”

As he was thinking about his life, he concluded that he wanted to go back in order to do something good with it. He also worked to devote his future to his lost friend.

“It was in that moment I chose to dedicate my life to being very good at one thing. I chose to be a potter,” Chaleff said.

Chaleff chose pottery for its modesty. He knew his drive would be strong and he suspected a career in painting would lead to unwanted fame. Chaleff once joked about how he believed he could become the best potter who ever lived. He said the closest he would come to fame was someday, long after he died. “The Bennington Museum will have a shard of mine and think about attributing it to me.”

After Chaleff awoke safely ashore, it took several hours for him to realize he survived. In spite of remaining somewhat convinced that somewhere in those three miles of rapids his life had been taken, he made good on his promise to himself and worked hard every day to excel in ceramics.

The experience enabled him to set aside the childhood insecurities that crippled him earlier on in life and drive relentlessly toward his goal. He changed his major to fine arts and did not allow himself to be discouraged by his modest schooling.

At 24, Chaleff graduated college and took a teaching job at the City University of New York. His work was relatively satisfying but he was disappointed with the commercial-looking finish that ordinary glazes left on his pieces. His inability to find an alternative finish stood in the way of meeting his own standards for achieving good work. For Chaleff, it was about finding [his] voice, and he was still searching.

Finally, Chaleff said he found a piece that had the “guts” he was looking for. It featured a more random textural surface not much unlike what he had envisioned. At that time the work was unique to Japan and that meant just one thing to him.

“I dropped everything, sold everything I could get money from and went to Japan,” he said.

Chaleff expected the $2,000 he raised by emptying his savings and selling his assets to last a few months but he ended up staying in rural Japan for a year and a half in order to fully learn the Japanese tradition of wood firing. He learned mostly through observation and trial and error. When he returned, he and a friend were the only two people in the United States who knew the technique. It wasn’t long before he discovered that he was not the only one who could admire the organic-looking work that no longer came only from Japan.

Without realizing it, Chaleff was becoming famous. The Museum of Modern Art purchased four of his pieces and other big name collectors followed its lead. Other artists who recognized his worked questioned how he was able to part with it for so little money. By this time it had became pretty obvious that he had done exactly what he set out to do. Even he couldn’t question it. Chaleff was extremely good at pottery.

Today Chaleff’s work is featured everywhere from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and big name movies to wealthy people’s estates. Never the businessman, Chaleff admits to doing a poor job of capitalizing on his work, but since he wasn’t in it for the wealth or the fame, it didn’t bother him. It bothered him that he lost touch with the world of normal people, living simple lives and enjoying modest pleasures. Not only did he want to re-connect with normalcy but his work, which had become increasingly large, began to take its toll on his body. He already suffered from two major spinal injuries in 1979 and 1996, both of which resulted in major spinal operations, along with a hernia in 1995 and persisting heart and blood pressure problems. He knew he couldn’t continue in this line of work forever but he couldn’t afford to retire either.

He knew teaching was an option; he could have his choice of an art school or a prestigious university he couldn’t afford to attend in his youth. He eventually chose the University. Chaleff felt he had something in common with the students.

“I love being here because I love the students. Many of them come from a similar background to me,” Chaleff said.

The students have no difficulty connecting. Chaleff’s modesty allows them to form that standard, happy potter, perception of him.

“He enjoys encouraging students to branch out and find new influences,” Lindsey Dieringer, a senior fine arts major, said. “He is always willing to put in the extra effort with anyone who needs it.”

Dieringer said she admires his dedication to his students,

Chaleff is easy to talk to and always allows students to keep the pieces he makes during class demonstrations. It’s easy to see how fond they are of his work when they lovingly wrap them in plastic so they don’t dry out and carry them all around the pottery room looking for just the right place to keep them. It isn’t until midway through the semester that Chaleff gives a slide presentation where they find out a little about his life and what an amazing artist he truly is.

As they walk out of the classroom the day of that slide show, they take a few things with them: inspiration, admiration and sometimes, the pieces he made them in class.