In the creative process, we find freedom, relief, release, expression—and redemption. But for noted Southern California ceramicist Rich Lopez, the creative process and the hummingbird ceramic that became a part of his identity had to wait. He had to die first, to experience this new creative life. “That second time, I tell people I committed suicide. It wasn’t an attempt; I died that day,” he said.
Lopez, whose life had become a series of short “highs” followed by deeper and protracted “lows,” had given up on life—twice. “The first time I tried to end my life, I was driving on the freeway. A huge semi was coming right at me. At the last second, I guess I swerved. I don’t remember swerving, don’t remember moving my hands, but I ended up in a ditch. I don’t know what saved me.”
Lopez grew up in an explosively abusive household with a brother who used him as a punching bag and a father who had been irreparably scarred by World War II. “My father would run the neighborhood naked and terrorize the neighbors while alternatively terrorizing me. He passed that trait of abuse on to my brother. I had to learn to fight to be able to beat up my own brother, just to survive. I met my wife Cheryl when I was 16. I turned 65 this year, and through all but the last 20 years, I was constantly abusing drugs, alcohol ... and my family,” he said.
Cheryl Lopez had known and loved Rich since their sophomore year in high school. “I remembered the night-school pottery classes we took as kids,” Cheryl says. “I remembered how Rich loved working with the clay and the wheel. I thought that maybe he could use it to help himself. He was in such mental pain, and I didn’t know how to reach him.”
Cheryl’s seemingly small act of hope led to an amazing transformation in her husband’s life. But that transformation did not come easily ... or quickly. “For years, the wheel just sat there,” Cheryl says. Lopez tried everything to stay clean and sober, just as he had tried everything he could think of to hold onto his job. Nothing worked, though he kept trying. Then came The Haven incident.
The Angels
“It was about 18 years ago, and my wife and I had just moved to Beaumont, a neighboring city of Banning. The city of Banning was attempting a revitalization. My wife was not very happy with having to drive all the way to Fontana where she was a special education teacher.“We were arguing, and Cheryl said, ‘Why on earth did we move here?’ I began to get nervous. I really needed a drink. I nervously picked up the newspaper, and read about a revitalization project in Banning. A voice in my head said, ‘Drive there. Go to the city hall.’” When Rich Lopez hears voices or sees visions, he follows them. “I just blurted out, ‘This is why we moved here. Let’s take a ride to Banning.’ I had no idea why I was going, but it broke the tension.”
When Lopez and his wife arrived in Banning, that same voice said, “Ask for the mayor. But talk to whoever you can.” The mayor wasn’t in, but the city manager was. That meeting eventually led to Lopez’s being promised 3.5 million dollars for a “downtown arts district,” and coming up with the idea for revitalizing what the city manager called “the ugliest building in Banning.”
Lopez said, “We’ll call it The Haven, and it will be a place of peace and revitalization.” A church was chosen to share The Haven. The city gave the church, which seemed to be the perfect place to entrust such funds, control of the 3.5 million dollars. The funds were unfortunately misused, and the entire revitalization project was scuttled. A broken, seething, disgusted Lopez walked out of the meeting after cursing all involved. He couldn’t think clearly. In desperation, Lopez decided to end his life for a second time.
“I was never taught how to cope with setbacks or anything negative, so one day, while no one was in the house, I drank two bottles, two full fifths of alcohol, and I downed a bottle of pills. The last thing I said was, “Let’s do this.”
Enter an angel. “Suddenly, I wasn’t upstairs sprawled out on my bed anymore. An angel had taken me downstairs to show me what was going to happen. He said, ‘You’re going to be a well-known artist.’ I said, ‘I’m a coffee salesman, not an artist.’ He quieted me with a finger, brought me downstairs, and showed me the wheel that my wife had bought years before. He reminded me that I loved to work with pottery as a child.”
Ever the salesman, Lopez made a deal with his angel. “He showed me the wheel, he showed me the sequence of events, the actual places where these things would play out ... even the museum where I would have my own show, but I didn’t believe it. I didn’t know where I was at the time. I said, ‘If all of this is real, and I wake up, prove it to me. Let me wake up without a hangover.’”
Lopez soon awoke needing none of the alcohol, drugs, or the many medications for PTSD-related stress, depression, and diabetes that he had needed to help keep his then-400-pound frame going.
“I woke up and I felt fine. I was amazed. I rushed to tell my wife that I was done with the alcohol, the drugs, and the abuse.” Lopez’s wife was not so amazed, or amused.
“I told Rich, ‘Show me, don’t tell me.’ That was pretty much the overall feeling and what I said and how I felt. I had heard those words so many times before, that I gave up on hoping and believing,” says Cheryl.
The drugs and alcohol stopped immediately. The need for psychotropic drugs ended four years later. The worst case that many people, including many of his doctors, had ever seen, was and still is now, alcohol- and drug-free. He’s also down more than 200 pounds.
“My comeback started the minute I sat down at the wheel. To me, the wheel is life itself, playing out in front of me.”
That first night, Lopez sat at the wheel hour after hour, “throwing” a total of 200 pounds of clay. When he was finished, at nearly 4 in the morning, he had made figurines, bowls, pots, and dishes. “I looked at my wife and said, “Honey, you bought me a wheel ... now you have to buy me a kiln. I smiled. She didn’t smile.”
Lopez had somehow managed to learn and remember his craft through every gin and drug-soaked meeting with many ceramic masters. “Somehow I retained it all, and never forgot a thing. Within months, I was selling my art at the Village Fest in Palm Springs,” he said. Still, Lopez’s wife and children were skeptical. The weight of all the years of broken promises, shattered hopes, and bartered dreams littered the floor of Lopez’s life like bits of clay thrown from his potter’s wheel.
Lopez applied specially created paints to his artwork.
“I learned that life is like the clay: it’s in my hands—but I can’t force it or I’ll destroy it. I had to learn to work slowly and use my very life as the persuasive proof that I had changed. I tell people that I don’t mold the clay into shape. I persuade it.”
Lopez had gotten financial support from his rightly skeptical wife—but little else.
“She had to learn to trust me, but it was painfully slow. She couldn’t trust me, and I understood why, but that realization was so painful. I began to feel as if I was going to crumble, feeling like I would never be the artist I wanted to be—feeling that I had failed. I lost hope in my ability. I lost my confidence. I began to cry. It was right there at a show, at my booth, surrounded by all the other vendors. I just started to cry, and I felt disgusted with myself.”
Lopez was all alone with his thoughts; all alone ... or so he thought.
“I don’t know why I said it, but I looked up, and I said, ‘God, if you told me the truth, that I was going to be an artist, I want to make $376 today.’ I still have no idea why I picked that number. It was crazy: the most I’d ever made at a show was 75 bucks. But I just sat there angry, disgusted—and crying.”
Enter angels numbers two and three. You see, in Rich Lopez’s world, angels look just like ordinary folks ... and two of them approached his booth that day.
“They were an ordinary-looking couple, but I knew when I saw them. I felt it. She said to me ‘Why are you crying?’ I looked up, aggravated, and said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ She said, ‘I’d like to buy that piece—it’s beautiful. And I’d like that piece.’ They were $40, $50, and $75 pieces! She said, ‘And I’d like that piece as well.’
When the woman was finished, the husband spoke up. “I was in shock,“ Lopez said. ”The husband said, ‘Honey if you’re done, I’d like to get one or two pieces.’ I couldn’t speak. As I was totaling everything up, she said, ‘Will you take a check?’ I just looked up, tears in my eyes, and said, ‘Are you two angels?’ They both smiled. I said, ‘You’re angels!’ She said ‘No, we’re not, but you’ll be fine.’ When I totaled it up, it came to $375. When she handed me the check, I was shaking and crying, and I just said, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ over and over again. They waved goodbye and kept walking.
“My wife came back to my booth and said, ‘Who are they?’ I said, ‘They were angels,’ My wife looked at me as if I was back on the stuff. Then she looked at the check and said, ‘They spent $376?’ I said, ‘What? What?’ I looked at the check: the woman had made a mistake and had written out the check for $376. Three hundred and seventy-six dollars!!”
“When I told my wife what had happened, we were both in shock. Every time we looked at the check, we just shook our heads. Neither of us wanted to cash the check. We finally cashed it after almost a year. My wife began to believe in me then,” Lopez said with a broad smile.
The Hummingbird
“I was feeling frustrated because my artistry seemed to be stalled; after such a rocket of a beginning, I felt blocked. My friend, mentor, and Chaffey College ceramics teacher Crispin Gonzalez said, ‘This is California. There are a thousand guys doing pretty bowls. Claremont is filled with people who have style. You have to find your own niche.’” Cue another important dream—and another angel.“I had this dream: I saw myself hovering over baskets and holding a unique tool. An angel showed it to me. It was a tool that’s not made for the trade. I knew it didn’t exist in real life. I immediately woke up, took a steak knife, ran to my grinding wheel, and fashioned the tool that I now use to make the striations in the clay that mimic a woven basket. It came to me in a dream. It works like no other ceramics tool ever invented. But it was the angel in the dream who showed it to me.”
Even when viewed up close, Lopez’s “baskets” of pottery look as finely woven as any handmade Native American basket on the market.
After his dream, things moved quickly for Lopez, a one-time student at Mount San Jacinto and Chaffey Colleges. Lopez had his work featured at many exciting venues, including the Western Science Center in Hemet and many homes and galleries around the country. His artwork now fetches as much as $3,000 for one of his signature ceramic “woven baskets.” Lopez even put in time at reservations to watch local artisans. “I am half Indian, and I spent over a year on the reservation learning the art of basket weaving. It’s those ceramic ‘woven’ baskets that were featured in my first major show at AMOCA,” he said.
AMOCA, The American Museum of Ceramic Arts in Pomona, is the premier ceramics gallery west of the Mississippi and home to some of the country’s most exceptional ceramics exhibits. Lopez may have been one of the first ceramicists to have a show of his own, but it was the second time he visited AMOCA that left him speechless. “When I walked in that second time, I began to cry. I realized that everything looked exactly as I remembered it in my first visit with the angel, when I almost died. I knew the walls, the floors, the steps, the furniture. I had been there before. I was too busy to realize it that first time, but suddenly I realized it. The angel and I had been there together. I began to shake and cry.”
But no story of success is without its final act of drama, and heavy-duty drama was waiting just around the corner for Rich Lopez.
Just as he was beginning to establish himself as a major regional artist who was on the verge of achieving national success, the comeback story of all comeback stories held one last ugly, dramatic hurdle to overcome.
“I hadn’t been feeling right, but I never told my wife or anyone else. My eyesight was giving me problems. And the minute Cheryl would leave for work, I’d collapse on the bed from fatigue. The only time I’d get up was to vomit. Then I’d crawl out of bed two minutes before she came home, so she would think everything was all right.”
“The Hummingbird,” unfinished, became the symbol of Rich Lopez’s comeback from almost dying—a third time.
Everything wasn’t all right.
“I hadn’t taken care of my diabetes, hadn’t taken the meds ... and hadn’t been drinking water as I should have. My liver and kidneys weren’t happy. Neither was Cheryl,” said Lopez. “But I realized I wasn’t out of the woods. After two days of keeping quiet, I could no longer hide the fact that my vision was damaged. They knew something was up when I tried to pour myself a glass of water, and I spilled it all over myself.”
Rich Lopez had endured a diabetic seizure and was blind in his left eye.
“I was pretty much devastated—and angry. I had already suffered from depression and anxiety on and off my whole life. I shut down. I stopped making art. I was miserable,“ he said. ”Somewhere in all that darkness of the soul, slowly, I realized that my entire life was like one of those Etch-a-sketch boards. Every time I had gotten too complacent, life came and scrambled the whole thing. Like shaking that board. And every time it did, I reimagined myself. I redreamt a new life, new art. I said to myself, if I’m going to be a one-eyed potter, I’d better damned well get started.”
And get started he did. Lopez sat at the wheel, initially intimidated. “At first I was almost scared of the clay, but as I worked it, felt it in my hands, my muscle memory took over. I began to smile,“ he said. ”Then I cried. I was back.”
Lopez said that in that moment, he felt inspired again, to give his life to his art.
“The first piece I tried was the hummingbird. I had read somewhere that, for as small as it is, no amount of turbulence can shake the hummingbird. A hummingbird is at peace in the eye of any storm.”
The first piece Rich Lopez created after coming to grips with his blindness was “The Hummingbird,” now a finished piece of art. “I chose to carve a hummingbird, because, even in the most turbulent winds, a hummingbird finds stability and peace. So do I.”
As Lopez worked the clay with a renewed feeling of love, peace, and centeredness, he remembered his early years.
“When I was a student, I felt blessed to have so many people sharing their knowledge with me. I had an overwhelming zeal to create art, and to create it in their honor. One of my fellow students once said, ‘Man, you have this power in you when you work the wheel. It’s like some—force.’ And that’s why I created [my work] Artforce, to bring artwork to children. It’s a lifelong passion. I need to feed my soul, and the souls of all those kids who might be hurting—and searching.”
Looking at the peaceful, vibrant, contemplative, artwork Rich Lopez has created in the almost 20 years since his epiphany, one would never realize the hurt, the pain, or the tragedy and triumph behind each piece.
And for Lopez, that’s just as well. “I sit at the wheel for hours on end. I tell the clay my story. It answers back, and I give thanks. When people see my work, they see a bit of me in every piece. I want them to see a part of themselves too—the best part. My world is now filled with art and, once again, with peace.”
And when you’re near Rich Lopez in his studio, you see the natural hues, the sun-baked umber, the call of something deeper and more timeless than the ageless act of a potter creating at his wheel; you feel the ancient peace of the calm after the storm. And in that calm, there’s redemption.
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