Kurt Weiser is just a guy who likes to draw in his notebook.

The ideas from the drawings find their way onto his expertly crafted vessels. And the results, well, they just make you want to look -- and look and look.

But don't expect Weiser to concede any brilliance. Ask him about the drawings and he'll tell you about a show he saw in Seattle recently, the work of illustrator R. Crumb.

Now, that guy can draw, he'll tell you.

"I walked out of there feeling like such a loser," he'll say, spitting out the word for emphasis.

Weiser isn't so bad himself. The former director of the Archie Bray Foundation who used to tool around town in a pink Cadillac is now a nationally revered ceramic artist, known for his off-kilter pots adorned with lush and strangely beautiful scenes.

An exhibition of Weiser's early and recent work, "Eden Revisited," is on display at the Holter Museum of Art through Aug. 23. The mid-career survey was curated by former museum director Peter Held.

At almost 60, the shaggy-haired Weiser is even more handsome than his younger, shaggy-haired self (In fact, Weiser's son has modeled for Christian Dior in Paris. "He looks like his mother," Weiser explains.).

While his temperament is lower than low-key, behind it lies a passionate energy and insatiable intellect.

Talking to Weiser about his work is fun because even as he tries to explain it, he seems to be checking it out as though it's someone else's entirely.

"See, this guy over here ... or maybe it's a woman. I don't know," he confesses.

Weiser likens to dreaming the way the images on his pots are created. He starts with one thing -- like a face -- and things just develop from there.

"I don't do it on purpose, really," he says. "It just sort of comes together."

On the other side of the gallery, Weiser's early pieces offer a study in the history of ceramics. The work is good, but not personal; Weiser can explain.

"In the beginning, you have no faith in your ideas, so you take on everyone else's ideas and try to improve on them," he says. "It's formal because I'm trying to make art on purpose."

Weiser fell in love with clay at a young age, digging up blue Michigan slip from the roads by his house to create his first pots. A natural talent, he studied first at Interlochen Arts Academy and then under Ted Fergueson at the Kansas City Arts Institute, where he was a cohort of Helena ceramist Richard Notkin.

He got the job at the Bray in 1977 and came out West to run the place when he was 26 years old. According to Weiser, his appointment followed in the Bray's tradition of hiring somebody "too young to know better."

"It was good because I had to learn a lot," says Weiser. "You have to pretend you know and learn at the same time."

Even before he found his voice, so to speak, Weiser had a knack for staying off the beaten path.

He turned down a chance to go to graduate school at Alfred University's highly regarded School of Ceramics because it just seemed too obvious.

And even though he was as in awe of Pete Voulkous as the next guy, Weiser made a conscious choice not to emulate the reknowned ceramic artist because, well, that's what everybody else was doing.

"I realized that that probably wasn't a good idea," says Weiser.

It wasn't until he left Helena in 1989 that Weiser stumbled upon the style he is known for today.

He had taken a job at Arizona State University, where he found himself with a new studio and way more time to make art than he'd ever had at the Bray.

He was bored out of his mind; he didn't know what to do.

Weiser turned to his notebooks.

"I thought, well, why don't you just do this?" says Weiser, who tentatively started using the same type of imagery on his pots. Sure he'd get made fun of for being so uncool. Only little old ladies paint pots, he thought.

It took some time, but Weiser eventually loosened up about doing his own thing.

"I realized nobody cares," says Weiser. "It's ceramics."

"It's not about the technique," he adds. "It's what you do with it."

And what Weiser does with it is mesmerizing.

Curator Held says many people would be surprised to know that all the paintings on Weiser's pots are done freehand.

Held calls Weiser "not only a genius artist, but a master craftsman."

"What stands out with Kurt's work is mastery of skill, a unique vision...and he's really sort of revived the art of China painting in a contemporary style," says Held. "His work is both beautiful and grotesque."

The "fun house effect" Weiser often uses has its roots in his early love of surrealism and later, of artists like Magritte, who knew how to employ more subtle forms of distortion.

In addition to glassy-eyed females, his images often include animals engaged in some kind of life-or-death struggle.

"They're all sort of predators," explains Weiser.

"That's something that always disappointed me about reality," he adds. "Even the animals can't get along, you know?"

Though his environments often invoke the Garden of Eden, Weiser sees them more as simply idyllic, with everything skewed just so, so that nothing is quite as it seems.

But all that is neither here nor there. Weiser just does what he does because it seems interesting at the time.

"It's just a pot, don't worry about it," he says.

On a recent afternoon, as Weiser gamely attempts to help this writer complete her reporterly duties, another member of the museum staff stops by, also to ask Weiser to explain his work.

"I keep describing it as allegorical," she says, asking the artist if he would agree to that assessment.

Weiser isn't sure; he tells her that his paintings are like a children's book without words, where you get to make up your own story.

He points out a few things on a particular pot and tries to help her figure out what's going on. He has some idea, but seems to be making things up as he goes along, too.

After some ado, she still wants to know if she can call it "allegorical."

"You know, I'd have to look it up," Weiser says finally -- and everybody laughs.

Click here for more information about the exhibit.