Clay Studio molds his artist's soul

ONE DAY in 1991, when Byron Walker-Bey was 11, he went to Strawberry Mansion Middle School with a paring knife in his pocket. Now 36, he can't remember why.

"It was a knife you peel apples with," Walker-Bey said with the smiling openness that is his trademark. "I wasn't bringing it there to harm anybody."

The knife fell out of his pocket. He was ordered to perform community service. His ceramics teacher steered him to the Clay Studio in Old City.

"I was a kid around grown-ups whose lives were dedicated to art," said Walker-Bey, who works as a security guard. "Instead of making little ashtrays and soap dishes, there were artists from China, building pieces as big as me.

"I was so young, I sucked it all up like a sponge," he said. "For the first time, I realized people make a career out of doing art, and I knew, 'I've got to do this.' "

Clay led to painting, which led Walker-Bey to his adult journey as an artist, riding the Market-Frankford El into Center City from his Frankford home, sketching scenes from his Strawberry Mansion childhood.

"You walk to 33rd and Diamond [streets], then into Fairmount Park and you're in nature," he said. "Deer. Wild rabbits. Water where you can flip rocks and look for crayfish. My dad took me there when I was a child. I never forgot those moments. I go back to them in my sketches, in my mind."

Walker-Bey sold his paintings at 3rd Street Gallery south of Arch, thinking that the Clay Studio on a quiet stretch of 2nd Street near Elfreth's Alley was as long gone as his childhood.

It wasn't. "He was walking past here during our 40th anniversary last spring, looked through the window and saw people throwing on the wheel," said Josie Bockelman, the Clay Studio's education director.

Back inside the Clay Studio for the first time since childhood, Walker-Bey found he prefers hand building.

"Either way, you work out your issues in the piece," he said. "If you don't follow directions while you're throwing, clay is going to be everywhere. If you don't follow directions when you're hand building, everything falls apart."

Walker-Bey works one day a week as an intern in exchange for class and studio time.

"He's learning to run a contemporary urban ceramic studio," said Theo Uliano, his supervisor.

"He loads kilns, mixes glazes, does a lot of cleaning," Uliano said. "I mean, we clean toilets, too. He knows it's all part of the machine."

Walker-Bey said Uliano is his mentor. "Just being around him makes me better," Walker-Bey said. "It's not like he's my teacher but he really is my teacher, you know? Hanging with my man, Theo!"

Walker-Bey smiled, dropped a big block of clay on his work table and got ready to dig in, fully committed to going wherever his imagination took him - an artist for life.