Mid-March Snapshot

February flashed by, and March seems well on its way to doing the same. 

Golly. 

30+ days since my last post, and a little over 30 days until showtime. I've had my last official review before the Big One (oral defense), spent a lovely Spring Break in California, and now just need to make a ton of work from now until Easter. 

I feel panicky often, but so far the feeling's not totally paralyzing. Thank God. 

My latest photos are up on facebook. Check it. 

I planted some seeds to try and start a vegetable garden, and now I think I'll be up to my ears in plants pretty soon. It's very nearly a jungle on the kitchen table. 

There's no more time to wax prosaic about what I'd like to think my work could be, but I know now what my work is: an exploration of what a bowl is. Period. 

The dictionary tells me that a bowl is "a rather deep, round dish or basin, used chiefly for holding liquids, foods, etc." 

"Rather deep" is important: the bowl is a form that strikes a balance between the flatness of a platter and the far more vertical cup (vase, jar, etc). It is neither too shallow nor too deep, but only "rather". Just enough to be what it is. 

Some teacups are just bowls with handles stuck to them. 

My exploration involves manipulating, changing the most basic components of the bowl form - rim and walls - to see how far they can be pushed before the form becomes something other than "bowl". 

I don't know what exactly comes after "bowl", but that's ok, since I'm not talking about it anyway.

Foot rings are integral to bowls only insofar as the bowls need to be stabilized. Their only function is to support and display the bowl - a built-in miniature pedestal, if you will.  

Being able to "hold liquid" is important. The integrity of the wall is therefore important. Walls that have collapsed, or are full of holes turn the bowl into something other  - a decorative object, meant for display(ing). The primary appeal of such an object is visual.

"Used" is the most important word for me. Bowls, for me, are meant to be used in the context of everyday life, caught up intimately in the most mundane human action: preparing and eating food. 

Decorative forms, meant to sit and display themselves (or their contents) on some surface, are emphatically not bowls -  no matter how much they assimilate the form of a bowl. Their emphasis on visual appeal, often at the expense of practical, functional considerations, renders them unable to fulfill one or more of the essential attributes of a bowl - 1) able to be used, 2) "rather deep", or 3) able to hold liquid. 

If a form is fully functional as a bowl, but is used for display purposes, it is the result of someone making use of a bowl's secondary function. 

Bowls don't have to be plain, but they do have to be bowls. 

Trying to Condense All You Want to Say Into a Short, Coherent Title? Sometimes Difficult.

Again, wrote this last night, and posted today since my internets are cracktastic. :)
***

Well, It's been a busy 18 days since I last posted. School's begun, for the last time in the foreseeable future. I don't quite know what I think about that. In fact, I'm trying not to think about it right now, because the present is just a *little* bit more pressing.

The studio has kept me plenty busy, as always. I've completed one "cycle" of work - meaning I've brought about two weeks' worth of pots through bisque and glaze firings - and am now the proud owner of some 30-40-odd finished pieces. Tomorrow I'm set to start my next cycle: I'll look to be throwing pots on the wheel for the next 12 days or so, and then start the week-long process of bisque-ing and glazing them. Soon after that, my mid-semester review with the faculty looms! Time will fly (as if it isn't going fast enough already)!

I spent most of today just being in the studio with my latest finished works - looking at them, arranging them, and reflecting on them. What's successful? What's absolutely awful? What needs just a little improvement to get it just right? I build my ideas for the next cycle off of the previous one, so this time spent reflecting is critical. I tried to use as many different ways of recording my thoughts as possible - sketches, lists, and photos. The photos I've posted on my facebook, and writing captions for them helped me to think again. Now I have to sleep on the whole thing and go to work again tomorrow.

A Coldish January Evening, some Tea, and Thoughts

(Wrote this yesterday evening, but couldn't post it because my ever-unreliable internets died. Here it is now!)

Well, here I am in Texas, already 8 days away from my time in California. Christmas break was lovely, if short; part of me wishes I had stayed for the rest of it. But guys? Having nothing to do all day but work in the studio? Best. Thing. Ever. 

I'm easing into my stride again, as far as my clay-art goes, and it feels so unbelievably great to be working. Right now, I'm just hammering out ideas: I have several concepts in mind, in various stages of clarity, and the only way I can think of to clarify them is to make tons of bowls, figure out what works, what doesn't, why it doesn't, and see where the why takes me.

The idea I'm wrestling with this week is that of a bowl with a spout - sometimes known as a "batter bowl" because that's the context in which it's most often used. If you looked at my last post, you might remember these guys on the right. I'm trying to figure out what exactly "bowls that can pour" means in the context of what I'm trying to do. (Have I talked about that yet? Probably not. I'll post about the overall thesis next time.) Unfortunately, I don't know quite yet, but I have made a lot of bowls in the past few days, and some of them are pretty! Even more exciting, I am slowly making progress, idea-wise.


I was sitting at a table in my studio space with my sketchbook in front of me, and I decided I should try writing down all the things that came to mind when I thought about my "pouring bowl" ideas - maybe I'd get somewhere! Turns out, I did, but not quite where I expected, though in a good way. Heh. So lemme 'splain:


I never think of a spouted bowl as standing alone by itself. Whenever I sketch out ideas about it, there's always at least two, if not more. For whatever reason, the *spout* of the bowl is very important to me - it seems to be directing something, which is, or could be, contained in bowl, out of it. (This ineffable something is purportedly the root of my thesis work...yeah, good luck with that.) Somehow, this imparts a relational quality to the bowl - ie visually it can relate to something else through the spout. Thus, the bowls pictured above can be said to be "talking" or "kissing" or whatever. Why? Because their spouts are facing each other. You (or at least I) intuit a relationship between them.

With these bowls, the image, or idea, or whatever-you-call-it that I keep coming back to is that of a line of about 5-7 of them, decreasing in size from one end to the other, and oriented so that the spout of each bowl appears to pour into the next. (A visual aid would be sort of useful here, no? I'll get back to you on that.)  I think this is a crazy awesome image, but I didn't know exactly what the concept behind it was until I started brainstorming this afternoon, and realized that what I'm intuiting about this image is that each bowl overflows into the next. And then I said, well, what's a word that I can think of to connect to this idea of "spilling over"?

And then, a moment later, I happened* upon it: "Abundance"

(*Side Note: Isn't it weird how inspiration just occurs? Just like that - one minute, you're banging your head against the wall, and the next, you're floating in the sea of calm that comes with that moment of "Oh, this is how it works.")

So, lemme try to 'splain about this "Abundance" word and why it is awesome. Essentially, it sums up much of what I intuit about the whole bowls-pouring-into-bowls-thing. It carries connotations of joy, life, and plenty, which are all part of what I "see" here. Each bowl carries that Ineffable Something (I'm going to call it that until I figure out what it is) which bubbles up and springs down to the next, and the next, and so on. If I were prone to using cliches, I might say that these bowls are "paying it forward" - but that seems too trite.

Now, that doesn't really get me too far in my goal of BEING ABLE TO EXPLAIN EVERYTHING EVER ABOUT MY ART, but that's ok. I'm glad to have gotten this far today, and can only hope that I'll go as far tomorrow.

Pictures of Pieces

Here are some recent works - by recent, I mean last semester. These are some of the highlights of about 3-4 cycles of work that I went through in the last 4 months as I hashed out the ideas surrounding my thesis. I'm pretty pleased overall, and I hope that what I've begun here will only develop further into far better things. We'll see!

If you're interested in seeing more of my work, I have a photo album on facebook here. (Caveat: you can only view it if you're a friend of mine.) 

I also have uploaded these photos, plus a couple of extras, onto DeviantART, which is a pretty fun and handy site for artists in this technological age. Some of those photos are available for sale as prints, so if you like them, definitely check that option out! 

Thanks for looking, one and all. I'll be back with another post soon, hopefully. Later!

Beginnings, or A Short Dialogue Followed by an Explanation

I tried to write a blog post, and my self-consciousness ate it.

It said to me, "Self, what are you doing?"

I replied, "I'm trying to write a blog post, because I want to share my thoughts with my friends and family, some of whom are far away, and this is easier than writing a letter to each and every one of them."

It said in reply, "But, Self, then they will be able to read what you are thinking! And then they might not agree! Or they might think it was silly, or stupid, and they would laugh. And then - they might not want to be friends with you anymore, and then you would be all alone."

And I said to It, "Shut up, I can't hear myself think," and wrote the post anyway.

~*~

Intuition is a funny thing. Coming to know, or to understand, something true in a way that transcends  words and logical argument is, for me, an experience both delightful and intimidating. Delightful, because intuition nearly always comes in exciting "Aha!" moments: pieces of whatever problem fall exactly into place, the world rights itself, and I suddenly know exactly what it is that I have been trying to figure out. The intimidating part comes afterwards, when I realize how difficult it will be to talk about what I've intuited. How do you translate everything that was concentrated in that single moment of "Oh, I get it!" into some sort of statement that makes sense? It's a darned difficult task.

Approaching the last semester of my senior year of college, the difficulty of this problem has never loomed quite so large as it does now. The art I'm working on for my thesis exhibition stems, as most art does, from my intuitions. It follows, from what I've written above, that talking to others about my art is a devilishly tricky business. And therein lies the problem: I need to be able to talk about this work in a coherent fashion, otherwise it becomes something that only I understand, something that I can't share with other people because I can't communicate what it is that I want to share.

Currently, I can kinda-sorta-maybe-sometimes articulate what I'm trying to achieve in my thesis, and that's promising. On the other hand, I need to be able to turn kinda-sorta-maybe-sometimes into "Yes, I can tell you what the concept is behind my work. I can tell  you why I did this. Here it is."

That's where this blog comes in: I hope that by making myself a space where I can write out my thoughts (and hopefully get feedback on them) will help me to become more articulate about my work. In writing out what I'm thinking, I have to give a more concrete structure to my (admittedly nebulous) perceptions, and by getting feedback from people who are not me, I find out whether what I'm thinking actually makes sense. Hurrah!

That's the plan, anyway, and God only knows how it'll turn out. I appreciate comments from any and all who have wandered here; you're always welcome in my little corner of the internet.