A heart for art

Mercy computer manager has passion for ceramic creations

Scott Mobley
Record Searchlight

February 23, 2003 — 2:17 a.m.
When Paul Rideout throws clay on his potter's wheel, he plugs three prongs into his soul.

He goes into a trance. The clay seems to shape itself.

"Art for some of us is a very compelling force," Rideout said. "It won't take no for an answer."

It's not like Rideout ever tried to say "no" to his creativity, which seems to come from some spiritual realm outside himself. But years passed before he could accept it.

Rideout is a university-trained zoologist who minored in chemistry. He grew up believing in a material world, convinced that subjects do things to objects.

As laboratory information systems manager at Mercy Medical Center in Redding, Rideout knows you can't program computers by manipulating their chi.

Now, at age 62, this longtime Redding-area resident revels in the tension between art and science that defines his life. He's found a way to blend the two in ceramics.

"I got so into clay I stayed up all night with it," Rideout said of his ceramic discovery, which he made shortly after moving to Redding in 1969, where he studied under clay master Mark Fleming.

"Ceramics is so full of scientific principles — the physics of the clay, the chemistry of the glazes," Rideout said. "It was the first time chemistry made sense. You could see what you got."

Rideout has transmitted this alchemy of art and science through a ceramics course he's taught since 1985 through the Shasta College Extension in Red Bluff.

Georgia Scott, who lives just west of Red Bluff, took Rideout's class in 1999. She enjoyed the course so much she kept dropping in as an auditor. She was a regular at the potluck meals and ceramics firings that went with the course. Finally, she re-enrolled this semester.

"I just love to watch him create," said Scott, 46. "He's the ultimate old hippie guy."

Rideout's class is loaded with talented people, aged 17 to 70, who are unlikely to enroll in a prestigious university art program, said Scott. Rideout will take the youngest under his wing, as master to apprentice.

"It's really very encouraging to see that there's still people around like that, old craftsmen," said Scott. "He's nurturing and it will make a big difference in that person's life."

Scott has been in Rideout's course long enough to appreciate how the ceramics master suffuses his art with his life experience.

In his 1960s youth, Rideout's creative soul drove him on picaresque treks from Boston to Hawaii to Los Angeles to Berkeley and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury.

Rideout grew up in northeastern Massachusetts at the edge of a swampy forest. He recalls spending so much time in those woods that birds alighted on his shoulders and head, taking him for part of the landscape.

He studied snakes, turtles and frogs. He created a hatchery in a brook behind his parent's house. Driven to learn more, the young Rideout dissected many a forest creature.

Rideout was the first in his family to attend college and earn a degree. He had dreamed of becoming a doctor, but had no plans for years of medical school. So Rideout did the next best thing — he found work in a hospital laboratory in Brockton, Mass.

Fresh out of college in 1962 and settling into a career, Rideout was restless by 1963. He wanted to see the world beyond New England. He loaded his car and arrived in San Francisco two days later, determined to visit his friend, stationed in the Air Force in Hawaii.

Rideout never found his friend. But he happened into a college track teammate and landed a job at a marine laboratory near Honolulu.

"I had a job and a place to stay my first day there," Rideout said. "This is how I thought life was."

Rideout rode a serendipitous wave through the 1960s, when he traveled alone through Mexico and was eyewitness to some of the decade's most symbolic moments.

He happened to catch Joan Baez at UC Berkeley's Greek Theater during the Free Speech Movement in late 1964. A few years later, he was in San Francisco just as the Summer of Love blossomed.

Rideout worked in various hospital labs in and around San Francisco while living with members of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. He met Janice Joplin, Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg at parties his housemates threw. He chanted with the Hare Krishna.

By decade's end, Rideout had met his first wife, Marcia. She was soon pregnant with their first child. It was a moment of truth — Rideout had to settle down.

He could not find work in the San Francisco Bay area or Sacramento. So he looked north, and interviewed at Redding Memorial Hospital (now Redding Medical Center). He had a job that day.

Rideout did not care for Redding when he arrived in the summer of 1969. The air scalded, the landscape was parched.

Yet he's stayed in the north state, living either in Redding or Montgomery Creek, where he and his friends built a house for his family.

Rideout adored that hand-built Montgomery Creek house. It overlooked a waterfall. It was also destined to burn to the ground in the Fountain Fire.

Rideout had sold the house long before the 1992 inferno and moved to another home nearby, full of dreams to build a ceramics studio.

Rideout's marriage collapsed before he could realize that dream. The divorce was his biggest setback in life. It capped a string of failed relationships, a seeming endless quest for a soul mate.

Over time, Rideout turned the heartbreak into a life lesson.

"I was able to recognize a pattern that was happening again and again," he said. "Recognizing and accepting the pattern gave me the strength to move forward."

Rideout has built several ceramics studios since those days. He pours his emotions into clay so "I don't carry painful feelings in my head."

These days, Rideout works in a studio he built in the Churn Creek Bottom home he shares with his wife, Allison, and their son, Dylan.

Rideout met Allison shortly after taking a job at Mercy Medical Center, where she worked as a phlebotomist. They married in 1986.

Scores of glazed pots, vases and figures pack the shelves lining Rideout's studio. It's a sliver of the art Rideout has shown in nearly two dozen exhibits around the north state since the mid-1980s.

Rideout's art aims for a spot in all of us.

"In a successful piece, the observer will find a part of himself in the art," Rideout writes in his artist's statement. "Something deep in his mind will say, 'I know that place. It feels right.' "

Reporter Scott Mobley can be reached at 225-8220 or at smobley@redding.com.

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Sunday, February 23, 2003