The Many Lives of a Potter Paula Greif has had a hand in several creative efforts over the years. Her latest work: ceramics that look like wiggly drawings. Paula Greif made some of the first music videos for MTV (on Super 8 film, no less) and designed album covers for Madonna, Debbie Harry and Paul Simon. Though she has been the art director of Mademoiselle and for Barneys New York, and worked with fashion photographers like Richard Avedon, Steven Meisel and Arthur Elgort, Ms. Greif was always a rocker at heart. When she was in the art department of Self magazine in the late "70s, she spent her nights at CBGB and the Mudd Club, and slept under her desk at lunch. Now 60, she is making ceramics, animated porcelain and terra-cotta pieces that look like wiggly line drawings (you can find them occasionally on her Web site - be warned, she is frequently sold out - and at Beautiful Dreamers, a store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn). Ms. Greif calls her pottery "garage band ceramics" because of its handmade funkiness and because her new career has unfolded in a typically ad hoc, no-frills manner. Q. Before we tackle your new chapter, can you describe why your résumé intersects with so many juicy moments in New York City's creative history? A. I was incredibly lucky. I dropped out of two colleges and ended up at the School of Visual Arts, the most miraculous thing that could have happened to me. Bea Feitler was my graphic design teacher. She was a living legend, who died very young, the co- art director with Ruth Ansel of Harper's Bazaar. They were taught by Marvin Israel, who had been taught by Alexey Brodovitch. I felt privileged to have her as a teacher, and she hired me at Harper's Bazaar as her assistant. For $90 a week and my rent was $90 a month. Q. A studio? A. Four rooms, lady, and with rats! It was on 25th Street between Third and Second. Q. When you were out most nights at CBGB and the Mudd Club, whom were you listening to? A. Arto Lindsay. John Lurie. Jean-Michel Basquiat, he was playing music then. Glenn O'Brien was and is a really close friend. When I went to work for Barneys much later, I said to Gene Pressman: "I know this crazy writer. I think he'd be a really good copywriter. Q. Were you in his movie, "Downtown 81"? A. I was in a different movie, with John Lurie. I can't even remember the name of it. The funny thing about me and all those people is that I was kind of a square cake. I had a job. Q. What videos did you direct, and how did you get into that world? A. I was designing 12-by-12 album covers. MTV had started. And I remember saying to Amy Levin, the editor of Mademoiselle, that I'd really like to direct a rock video. It was so open at that point. Jeff Ayeroff, the music executive, gave me $5,000 and told me to find some art students and make a video for the Smiths. We never even met them. We used found footage. Jeff's thing was, "Find some performance footage and put a girl in it." That was my first video. The thing about me is, I don't know how to use a camera. I barely know how to throw anything on a wheel. It's like, "Put a girl in it." I'm not a good potter, but I'm a decent designer. I draw everything I'm going to make. It was the same when I was making video and commercials. Q. You took a ceramics class because you wanted to fill your kitchen with your own dishes? A. I've always been committed to the domestic arts. I love entertaining. I love family life. We had a big house in Brooklyn and it was always filled with people and music, and I had all my beautiful dishes from Bloomingdale's and Tiffany's. I had my Ikea stuff. And at a certain point it all seemed so unoriginal. I thought, I'm just going to make all this myself. I'm going to get rid of everything. Also, the film work was kind of fading, I was more committed to my family. I didn't have the ... my mother would say the koyach ... the strength to really compete and be a mother and a wife. So I started with all the stuff in my house, copying the Wedgwood plates and the Ikea white bowls. I couldn't make a round bowl and I couldn't make a flat plate. I didn't care. Q. What does it feel like to work with your hands, and to work so three-dimensionally? A. To be honest, it's hard. The part I love is the design part. The physical making is pretty stressful on my body. The repetition, the lifting, the throwing stuff on the wheel. A box of clay is 50 pounds. Just to take it off the shelf is a lot, and I'm a pretty small person. Q. What's the next step? A. I just bought a 10-foot-wide town house in Hudson. There's room for a studio and a kiln. I don't know where it's all going, but I guess if I have enough stuff one weekend, I'll just open a store.