WHEN I WAS A BOY in the late 1970s and early 1980s, 1 would see my grandparents’ handiwork everywhere: on the windowsill of a doctor’s office, on the coffee table at a stranger’s cottage, on display in countless retail shops from Boston to Bar Harbor.
One of their stoneware sculptures—my grandmother’s seagull, wings tucked for a rest on the ocean’s surface—even showed up on the set of a national morning television show (though nobody in the family can quite remember which one). It seemed to be scrutinizing the show’s hosts from a shelf behind their couch.
I think I was probably 10 or I I before I realized that the family business, Andersen Design, wasn’t one of the nation’s largest. Indeed, much of it operated out of my grandparents’ East Boothbay home; even in its heyday it employed fewer than 30 people, family members included.
While most of Andersen’s ceramics could be produced in volume, the undertaking was always artisanal, although looking back I can understand how I had thought it was industrial.
The workshops in the house’s wing buzzed with activity—men in clay-splattered aprons poured casting slip into the plaster molds that crowded the benches of the casting room; ladies shaped the vases, bowls, seals, chickadees, seagulls, and other animals hatched from the molds; great kilns incubated the castings into bisque ware and, after hand-painted decoration, into finished pieces that cooled on shelves like loaves of bread. (I was probably one of the few children in Maine who was told not to pat the puffins because they would burn my fingers.)Tour buses pulled up across the street; the showrooms in the front of the old Victorian house would fill with visitors from what seemed to be the most exotic of places: Cincinnati and Trenton, Hartford and Fort Lauderdale. Every day the UPS man would carry off dozens of boxes of sparrows and sandpipers, salad bowls and blue jays, bound for wholesale customers in Massachusetts, California, or Japan.
My grandparents’ company was already 30 years old by then, and now, nearly 30 years later, my grandfather and aunts are still at it, producing fine art at cottage-industry scale. Andersen Design is a smaller operation today. My grandmother, Brenda Andersen, passed away in 1993, and my grandfather, Weston Andersen, now 87, scaled back production to a more manageable size after a hospital stay. The casting room has returned to its origins in the basement, and my aunts load the kilns in the evening so the pieces are cool and ready at the start of the next workday. There’s more time for one-of-a-kind pieces of the sort my grandmother would create, on impulse, in the rickety old Southport Island barn where the company got its start.
“We’ve downsized, with a focus on studio work in recent years,” said my aunt, Christine Andersen, who has been collaborating with her father and sisters, Susan and Elise on a series of new pieces. “Now we’re contemplating a reentry into larger-scale production.”
It’s something of a déjå vu period for a family business that got its start 58 years ago in the attic of a tiny suburban tract home near Akron, Ohio. My grandfather had decided to strike out on his own after a stint as acting dean of the Akron Art Institute. “I’d put two kilns in the unfinished attic of my house,” Weston Andersen recalled. “It wasn’t zoned for that, of course, and I thought sooner or later it was going to catch up with me.”
He and my grandmother began looking near and far for a more appropriate location. It had to be inexpensive (they had little money), not too remote, and artistically inspiring. They reconnoitered the Northeast in their 1947 Studebaker and, after making a wrong turn in Boothbay Center, Maine, found themselves on Southport Island. They rented an old house and a swallow-infested barn near the Gut, and began producing a line of hand-cast and -decorated stoneware that would become a Maine coast icon.
“They were at the cutting edge of what we might call cottage industries at a time when there weren’t many craftsmen around,” said Ken Kantro of Lovell Designs in Portland, who started his jewelry line in the 1970s. “They produced work that was just stunning. They informed my work and really inspired me, because of the excellence of their design, the fact they were able to forge a business out of their talents, and because they contributed something to the fabric of life in Maine.”
Starting with bowls, vases, platters, and coffee mugs, they soon developed a growing line of animal sculptures, mostly of creatures seen regularly on the shores and in the forests of Maine. They sculpted the forms by hand in clay or Plasticine, and used them to make plaster molds so the pieces could be reproduced in quantity. The molds were made, filled with slip, tended, and carefully opened by hand—a delicate process with some of the more complicated sculptures. The cast pieces were hand shaped and, after an initial firing, hand-decorated. A final 2,200-degree firing produced finished stoneware that soon developed an enormous following.
“It was so refreshing, and it was made in Maine and related to the coast,” said June Hopkins, who opened the North Haven Gift Shop 55 years ago and has been ordering from the Andersens since her second season. “There was a certain group of artisans that came to Maine in that generation, and some of them were very short-lived, but the Andersens had a beautiful product.”
The Andersen line was a collaboration between my grandmother and grandfather (and later, various combinations of their six children) and was the result of their complementary skills. She was an artist; her work was inspired, free-flowing, sometimes moody, usually extraordinary. He was a trained industrial designer who still seems more comfortable calling himself a designer than an artist; he admits that his Depression-era upbringing probably has something to do with that.
My grandfather grew up in Primghar, Iowa, a small town near the South Dakota line. He was seven years old when the stock market crashed. By the time he was in high school, the town had filled with economic refugees from the urban East, seeking to ride out the crisis in what was a relatively stable and prosperous agricultural center. Others, from the West, passed through on US18. “You could tell by the license plate that they were from the Dakotas and they were just so desperate,” my grandfather recalled. “Families in old wrecks with machinery piled up on a trailer behind them who were just looking for some place to get a new start. It made a very deep impression on me.”
My grandfather’s own family was relatively secure. His father, a son of Danish immigrants, was a self-taught electrician who had electrified the town himself and, later, oversaw the building of the municipal power plant. He designed and built buildings, sat on the city council, and owned a chicken hatchery. My grandfather, by his own admission, was a bit of an odd duck, an artistic soul in a community of pioneering agriculturalists, making sculptures from the clay exposed by his father’s building excavations. \Vhen his older brother began collecting jalopies—rundown cars could be bought for a few dollars at the time—he helped him craft a stylish new body for a Model T from chicken wire and painted canvas
“My people worked very hard for what they got,” my grandfather said.
“The idea of going to school to be a sculptor or an artist… I just couldn’t do that to my parents. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself, to be honest.”
In the winter of 1940, during his senior year in high school, Weston Andersen came across a feature story in a magazine about a man named Donald Dohner who had created a program in a new field called “industrial design” at the Pratt Institute in far-off Brooklyn, New York. Dohner stood at the crossroads of art and engineering, improving toasters, electric ranges, ashtrays, and other mass-produced products by redesigning their form for both beauty and usefulness. He was the man who gave the GGI locomotive its iconic shape (readers of a certain age will remember one pulling their electric train set); today, he would be the sort of person who would turn an MP3 player into an iPod.
“I saw the pictures of what Dohner was doing,” said my grandfather, “and I thought that was the way to go.”
Donald Dohner, according to New York-based collector Hampton Wayt, who is researching a biography of the designer, was a great visionary and perhaps the most influential figure in the pioneering generation of industrial design.
“There were lots of schools that were interested in design,” said Wayt, “but it was strictly directed toward the fine arts, not mass production, which was regarded as a dirty, thankless job that was looked down on. Dohner was a preacher who did not consider this to be a lowly undertaking, but something that was going to change people’s lives, making all of America a better place to live in by giving aesthetic beauty to everyone. He wasn’t in it for money; his job was to go out there and train people to make a better world. Only now is it finally being considered art?’
Entering Pratt Institute three months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Weston Andersen studied under Dohner and became a personal friend of the celebrated Hungarian-born ceramicist Eva Ziesel. (Ziesel is still designing today at age 103). He downplays her influence, but many observers see parallels when comparing Andersen’s work with Ziesel’s plates and bowls, both clearly inspired by the natural world and human body, and both intended to be used in real life.
“When Ziesel designed a teapot it wasn’t just for the aesthetics,” Wayt noted. “She attended to the feel, the balance, how well it poured, if the lid fit correctly, and how it would pop out of a production mold. These are lessons your grandfather would have learned from Dohner and Ziesel.
“World War Il delayed my grandfathees studies. Of the multitude of draftees who reported for basic training in 1943, my grandfather was one of the few draftsmen. The Army Air Forces put him to work at a bomb depot in England, creating munitions flow charts for his superiors.
While on an early leave, my grandfather met my grandmother at a London ballroom. She was 17, a working-class girl who had “shown promise” and had been awarded a scholarship to an upper-class finishing school. There, she had just unlearned her family’s accent between dashes to the bomb shelters. Aireraid sirens sounded the night they met; the couple, enamored, finished their dance before they responded. They married a few months later. My mother was born a year later, three weeks after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The Japanese surrendered; my grandfather boarded a ship for New York instead of Okinawa.
The young Andersen couple shared Dohner’s idealism—the desire to make everyday objects beautiful. They chose to work in ceramics, in a sense, out of necessity.
My grandfather resumed his studies at Pratt. After he had graduated—and while he taught in Akron—he and my grandmother decided to work for themselves as independent designer/producers.
They had little capital (and a growing family to support). “I wasn’t in a position to set up a machine tool shop or a fancy woodworking shop,” my grandfather recalled. “Ceramics, however, were dirt cheap.” They moved to Maine for much the same reason: property was Inexpensive.
“The Boothbay area had a lot of diversity for a small place, like a miniature metropolis,” my grandfather said. “We didn’t want to live in some dead town where nothing was going on.”
Still, the Andersens were an anomaly on Southport Island in 1952. They were newcomers “from away” who were poorer than many locals; they were artists whose idealism, fashion sense, and lifestyle in some ways presaged the cultural revolution that began in the 1960s. (At the local one-room schoolhouse, my mother and her sisters were taunted by classmates for being “Redcoats” on account of my grandmother’s accent.)
By the mid-1950s, the Andersens were part of a small group of artists that had settled on the northwest end of Southport Island. “There was a little enclave of very artistic, Bohemian people who dressed quite exotically, almost gypsy-like,” recalled Barbara Rumsey of the Boothbay Region Historical Society, whose parents lived nearby. “I felt very exotic when I was over there as a kid. They were way outside the mainstream in terms of lifestyle and intellectual pursuits.”
There were years of privation for the Andersens—raising a family of six wasn’t easy—but their work soon gained a loyal and increasingly large following. As wholesale orders poured in from across the country in the late 1950s, the couple moved to their current Victorian home in East Boothbay, building a new wing to house an enlarged production workshop. By the 1980s, Andersen Design had a second production facility in downtown Portland, at least 25 employees, and an increasingly high profile in the booming mail-order catalog trade, the precursor to online retail. The Smithsonian Institution gift shops ordered sandpipers by the thousands, and Andersen pieces appeared in the catalogs of the Museum of Natural History, Mystic Seaport, the Horchow Collection, and the Japanese corporate outfitter Itoya.
An Andersen seagull perched on Governor John McKernan’s Blaine House bookcase; state officials gave Andersen pieces to foreign dignitaries.
“They became part of the cultural landscape,” said Lovell Designs’s Ken Kantro. “People would pause when they saw that work, it was so compelling.”
“We tried to produce contemporary design that was affordable to people of ordinary means,” my grandfather said. (In the late 1970s, Andersen pieces retailed for between $5 and $135; all were produced in Maine.) “We were never condescending to people in our work and made a heartfelt effort to do things that would better people’s lives.”
Today, Weston Andersen’s children are helping carry on the tradition, working with their father to develop new forms, glazes, and decorating techniques. They have been increasingly active on the summer festival circuit and have been reorganizing workshops to allow larger production runs.
“We want to continue into the second generation using our father’s ideas and criteria,” said daughter Elise, who has worked in the East Boothbay operation for three decades. “We’re reminding people that we’re still here and still creating,
Colin Woodard is an award-winning journalist. He is the author of three books, including The Lobster Coast. He lives in Portland.
This article was originally published in Maine Boats and Harbors, April-May 2010 issue 109. It has been reconfigured for larger text with different images by Susan Mackenzie Andersen
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