Paying Attention

Paying attention is the single most important thing for any potter/artist/being to do. In clay work it is especially important because of the technical challenge of the media. It's easy though to get side-tracked on the road of technicality and neglect aesthetics. As a studio potter and what some might call a "production potter" (though I personally find that narrow definition misleading as it implies mass repetition and non-evolution which I don't find to be the case for me---each act is virgin, even the repeated one), paying attention is vital. It would be easy to fall into the trap of designing an item, finding it successful, "perfecting"(so-called) it and producing it time after time after time, ad infinitum, with it becoming wooden and mechanical. Once one has developed a "line" of such items, one is SET for the life of the studio (as in concrete), robotically turning out these same items under a routine schedule. My evolution as a potter and as a person requires something different.

For me, producing pots is more like shedding one's skin. One is continually creating, and as new pots are fully formed and percolate to the surface of one's mind, the old forms are shed so that the new may replace the previous. The pots in and of themselves are not so important, it is the WORK that is important, the continual creating and shedding process. Sometimes it is hard to renounce the hard-won territory of my dreams in favor of a new image and this is where paying attention is vital. One must be awake and aware. ["Even to be half awake (among sleepwalkers) can be frightening at first. Later one learns to dissimulate." --Lawrence Durrell].

Ultimately my hope is to continue creating vital and vibrant work. One's skin can become toughened and callused by many things: vanity, complacency, economic concerns, fear. Then the new forms can't come out. Sometimes one can get a little bit scared by the imaginary importance of what one is doing. Stop looking in the mirror and just enjoy the work. [The poet Richard Hugo writes, "Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease on the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work!"] [Also the Humphrey Bogart quote comes to mind: "Do everything. One thing may turn out right."]

When charting new ground, it is sometimes hard to renounce the hard-won territory of my dreams in favor of a new image just risen to the surface. There is safety and comfort in the familiar. [John Cage writes, "I am trying to become unfamiliar with what I am doing."] I, of course, enjoy the "good" pots immensely and savor the rare fine one---but I owe more to the failures. They challenge me to be more, to search further. One learns more from the pots that don't satisfy, the ones that goad us into action. The concept that in extremes (when confronted with one's failures), if one chooses life, action, then vitality results. Inaction, on the other hand, produces nothing. ["At the boundary, life blossoms."--James Gleick, 1987, Chaos]

First you have to understand intellectually what you want and then you have to feel your way to it, paying attention all the while. You have to know when it's time to abandon this goal and go on to the next.

More to come.


("Boundaries" platters)






The actual boundary between Mexico (left) and Texas (right),
separated by the Rio Grande River, in Big Bend National Park.




Life blossoms.....

Share