Her strength is in her curiosity

Esther Nowell's vibrance is fueled by her enthusiasm to try new things

THE FOUNTAIN of youth is an invisible thing, which you might not notice in the elderly lady sitting in a corner of the pottery studio, quietly tapping her porcelain egg into shape with a wooden spoon. Yet the women of middle age busy at work around her -- each of us fretting privately beneath the still-youthful vigor of regular workouts and carefully tended hair -- all feel the magnetic pull of this quality that is not so much youth as inner strength. We wonder, where does it come from? And so, without meaning to, Esther Nowell attracts a steady stream of women who sound her out for ceramic advice, invite her to lunch or to a workshop or, like her friend Alana Burrows -- her "guardian angel" -- become an inseparable companion and helper.

Nowell, 86, arrives almost daily and without fanfare at the Hawaii Potters Guild, a ceramic studio tucked beneath the University onramp, and makes her way to a table at the back. For the most part, she works in solitary absorption, neither seeking out nor turning away conversation or company.

If a kiln needs to be loaded, she climbs up on a footstool and lowers the fragile wares in. Depending on where she is in the multi-step creation of the porcelain figures she sells at the Academy of Art Shop, she will lay out her work and steadily measure, roll, pound, smooth, model or glaze.

What is most remarkable about Esther Nowell is this matter-of-fact, down-to-earth quality that neither wastes words nor jealously guards them, and never grandstands on her age or experience.

"Are you an optimist?" I ask her.

"I guess so," she says simply.

"Do you feel like you've gotten wiser?"

"Yeah," she says after a pause. "Lots of things that I did I wouldn't do now."

What about her own busy middle age, when she was raising four daughters while working and studying art, running a business -- how did she manage that?

"Well, I worked it in, you know," is all she has to say.

Touch on one of her hot-button topics, though, and you'll see her dander flare. Organized religion, for example.

"No. Uh-uh," she says, shaking her head. "Emphatically not."

Although she was sent to Sunday School by her mother and aunt, who raised her alone in 1930s Honolulu, and met her late husband singing in the Central Union Church choir, "when I go sit in church and this guy's up there talking," she says, "How do you know? What do you know about it?" is what she's firing back in her mind.

"I wish I knew what it was all about," she says of her spiritual orientation. "But I don't know anybody that knows any more about it than I do."

After several hours of modeling clay, on most days, Nowell puts on her straw hat, gathers her books and bags, gets back in her silver Ford Focus with the red Hawaiian-print seat covers and drives home to the two-bedroom bungalow in Kaimuki that she shares with no one.

"I just love this house," she says, gazing out the windows of the cool, light-filled home sparingly arranged with paintings, art books, ethnic fabrics and plants -- all clean colors and simple lines, a young woman's house, not a lace doily or fussy trinket in sight.

"I just feel so fortunate."

The feeling is clearly contagious. "We all want to be like her," says Etsuko Douglass, 50, one of the ceramic artists drawn by Nowell's steady enthusiasm for books, travel, Sudoku or Japanese pop culture. "She never looks to the past; she always looks at what she can do tomorrow -- she wants to take so-and-so's workshop, or learn something new or travel. This is the quality she has you don't see in other old ladies."

It takes some probing to get Nowell to wax on about these pursuits, however. To her, it's all in the course of things. She came to Hawaii as an infant, attended Aliiolani Elementary and Roosevelt High School, married at 20 and raised four girls. Her husband died in 1995.

Now "all I do is keep myself amused," she smiles wryly.

Art has been a lifelong amusement, since her mother sent her to the Academy Art Center's children's classes. She studied painting under Wilson Stamper after the war and in the 1960s her husband bought her the pricey Famous Artists School correspondence course featured on matchbooks. She worked briefly as art director of the Star-Bulletin.

At the same time, she has always loved crafts such as sewing, quilting, jewelry-making and textiles. Among her many ventures was a sewing factory on Keeaumoku Street that made Tahitian bikinis, employing eight seamstresses at its height. She's also an avid reader, active in a book club for the last 20 years.

And she travels abroad once or twice a year, most recently to Russia, China and Japan. Each time, she brings a fresh sketchbook that she fills with studies in ink of people, supplemented with ticket stubs, notes on menu items and the cost of things at the market. In her hotel room at night, she brings the scenes to life with subtle watercolor.

These sketchbooks, like everything else Nowell makes, exhibit a remarkably young hand and eye. Don't say so, though. Nothing will make her roll her eyes like the qualifier about her age.

Armed against the cliched query about her secret to long life, she offers the formula "yoga, yogurt and going barefoot as much as possible" -- which has clearly worked, as she doesn't have a single medical complaint.

Raised by an osteopath mother on whole foods and no soda or coffee, Nowell won't take so much as an aspirin or cold pill. She's practiced hatha yoga all her life, and puts some effort into staying active physically and mentally.

But what really seems to distinguish Esther Nowell from other people of any age is a long habit of embracing the new. At the ceramic studio, she amazes those who easily get stuck making one style of work because it took so long to figure out and is so satisfying to perfect.

After a trip this year to NCECA -- the annual clay artists' exhibition put on by the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts -- Nowell says she was stunned by the reaction of the other women she traveled with.

"They went, 'OK, that was fun' -- go back to doing the same thing.

"Why did they go?" she exclaims in disbelief. "They might as well go to the movies!"

Such an attitude finds Nowell frequently in the company of people much younger, who are paradoxically enlivened by her flexibility.

What interests her today, for example, is beads. She's been experimenting with clay bead making, which will be the topic of her upcoming class at the Hawaii Potters Guild, and she's been reading books, cutting wires, trying out colored stains. She warms instantly to the topic.

"Used to be you'd make these clay beads -- but you need more than that," she explains. "You need other beads to go with it. Now you go in even Ben Franklin, and they have all kinds of wonderful stuff! Beads have just taken over the world!" Today and tomorrow, it seems, beads have Esther Nowell rolling.