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.
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