t., he could not afford a college education and anticipated a career constructing floor molds for engine castings at a foundry in Portland, Ore., where he went to work in 1942, after high school. But in 1943, he was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Corps and was stationed in the central Pacific as an airplane armorer and gunner. After the war, the G.I. Bill offered him a college education, so he studied painting at Montana State College, now Montana State University, and took ceramics courses during his junior year, graduating in 1951. Voulkos had a natural aptitude for clay and soon was winning awards, including top honors at the 1950 National Ceramic Exhibition at the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts, in New York. Encouraged, he chose ceramics as a course of study in graduate school at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, from which he graduated with a master's degree in 1952. Around the same time, he married Margaret Cone and had a daughter, Pier. His work also was gaining attention, and he was invited to teach at the experimental Black Mountain College in Asheville, N.C., in 1953. Once again, timing was in his favor, as other artists on hand included John Cage, Merce Cunningham and David Tudor, with whom he later stayed in New York, where he met Abstract Expressionist painters Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov, Philip Guston and Robert Rauschenberg. That fall, he returned to Helena, and was resigned to selling his ceramics to make a living until the fateful call came from Sheets. "I was just a hick from Montana, so coming to L.A was a big thing for me," Voulkos remembers. "When I got that job, it was my big break. I didn't have to do dinner plates anymore. I got paid for teaching and didn't have to worry about selling. Being able to teach helped expand my vocabulary. I learned from my students. Ceramics in those days was quite boring," he says. "Scandinavian design. I fell for them for a while, but it was short-lived. It didn't ...
