As today is a day off and laundry day, I am very much aware that my recent obsession with learning how to work a potter's wheel is getting all my paint jeans covered in mud. It's a messy business and that's what I like. I've been scanning some stuff from my sketchbooks today, too, and finding that my drawings are morphing into designs for clay stuff.

I don't really have enough control over the material to make anything custom order to my own particular specifications, mind you. But I find it pretty freeing to imagine translating a three dimensional object (a tree) to two dimensions (drawing) and then back agin (to a vase).



Thanks, too, to Mark and others who reminded me to stop worrying and keep making. It's working out pretty well. Some sorting needed to be done (I'm almost to the point Keri was at, ready to trim my supplies to a discrete portable pack) and I managed to do some of it. I am headed tonight to see Billy Collins talk and I'll try to give a report about that.

take good care,
Rachael

Oh and the Oxalis drawing below is for Lisa who I hope will call me back...I miss her...

I've been thinking about revision and revising my thoughts so many times this week that my pace of posting, my posting pace, has paused. I used to simply sit at the computer and type, link, think, blink and post. It might be that the days are longer, it's greener, I'm sitting and thinking more away from the computer than on it ... and I wonder if the art thoughts I have, the looking and making talk I talk, and the images (ah yes, the images!) might be better brewed longer? Maybe if I first drafted and second drafted and thought it all out ahead of time I'd say more profound things in a more concise way.

Oh maybe.
Maybe not.

And you know, I worry, will they like me if I don't write about art? Am I navel gazing again and getting plumb boring? Who the hell cares what a part time painter in a nowhere town says about art and culture and how she manages or doesn't manage to find time to create and share?

Oh you can't stop me that easily.
I'll stop that worrying right now and sing it. Stop worrying and post again like I usually do. I'll tell you about the fear I see in all the kids in all the drawing classes. They draw, they love to draw, they need to draw, it's a part of who they are. Then they look around. Everybody draws better. They stop drawing. And unless they snap out of it or somebody grabs 'em by the collar and says DRAW, we might be looking at a 30 year pause in their drawing process. I've always drawn and written in the same impulse. To observe, to connect, to articulate, to imagine, to play, and sometimes, yes, to be seen and heard.

Let other art and fart bloggers write about all the shows they go to, all the art books they read, and all the work they're making. That's not me right now. I'm just working and making, walking and wondering. Have been busy reading, working on a couple of carefully picked creative projects, practicing pottery, revising my orphaned paintings, making new friends, writing and drawing. It's the days I don't draw that are the problem days. Days that I don't write here aren't necessarily a problem, just real.

And well, because I do care about you, dear reader, I give you one of the best somethings I've found this past week. A watermelon salad.

Ok, then, take care,
Rachael

Not much new in my world except that I continue to explore the muddy mess that is a spinning potter's wheel. I've been throwing some cylinders and plenty of piles of wet muck that doesn't make it off the wheel. I simply like the way it feels to have my hands in the clay.
I recently took a good book out of my local library by Susan and Jan Peterson
. It's big and helpful and inspiring and I'm scared to bring it into the studio for fear of splattering it with clay.


My computer is plenty of paces away from the wheels, so I found theseteaching linksincluding this helpful listserve at potters org. When I went to art school a million moons ago, a bunch of kids I knew headed off to Alfred in search of more clay. I can understand that a bit more now...
So then, I'm turning this machine off.

take care,
Rachael

Witold's bear is a well traveled bear. I've got a bit of a fancy for that travelling bear and really adore the images. Little objects made magic.

I'm about to go draw and tomorrow to travel a little but in the here and now I want to enthuse about the warmer days, about the little magic things (like the patterns I've noticed on houses on my street), and the ease of, the joy of days that flow naturally past the mundane and into the magic.

so then, more soon and until then, go little bears...
take care,
Rachael

I spent more time this week wrapped up in the everyday rhythm of working and wondering, making a living and living to make what I want to make (clay today, colors tomorrow, some sort of magical object every day), and keeping on the lookout to help people all along. People call me with questions all day and even if I can't give them an easy answer (the easy answer would be that there is no money in the arts right now, these are foolish pursuits we take when we endeavor to train for vocations in art, and even as avocations this paint and clay and metal stuff is 'spensive and complicated), I try to give them an answer.

I'm working on a tattoo design for a good friend as a memorial. It's easily the trickiest and simplest thing I've done in a while and I find that even when I'm not thinking about the design, I will doodle something that connects. Here's the latest if only because I haven't shared much visually in a while.



My breakthrough on the potter's wheel on Tuesday turned into an off-center spinning mess on Wednesday, so I'll be back in the mud again soon. Clay pictures are a long way off.

And I'm still savoring the style and content of John Berger's latest novel. A thoughtful John Berger essay on appreciating Van Gogh .



John also talks with Michael Ondaatje and in that interview was this little bit:

BERGER: It seems to me that at a certain moment — when one’s writing a work that is taking months or years — but at a certain moment, when perhaps you’re very tired, life begins . . . well, normally life is absolutely opposed to the activity of painting or to the activity of writing or to all, all creative activity. I mean life has a total continual conspiracy against creativity. We know that and we have to fight for it all the time, but there are certain moments when life, just everyday life, comes and helps. And you never know when it’s going to happen and then it’s amazing, because you just do the same things that you do every day, you go out to do some shopping or you look at somebody on a train or whatever, and it speaks and it contributes an actual idea, an actual image, a colour or something, or a whole sequence of things, to the story. Does this happen to you?

ONDAATJE: Yeah, I think that happens a lot. I think that conspiracy against writing or painting does exist but for me it’s to find that kind of accidental occurrence in the real world that can enter the story in a way and kind of double its value.

BERGER: Yes. An accident is very important, isn’t it?

ONDAATJE: All my writing is hopefully based in an accident . . .But the art of drawing, the pleasure of drawing, which you do all the time, the pleasure of painting and all the different structures you find in painting that you don’t find in fiction, I would think would be important to you. I tend not to learn from fiction. Perhaps I do, but not consciously.

BERGER: But now, because you asked me what drawing was to me . . . when you are drawing, anyway when you are drawing something which is alive, you are drawing the traces of what has happened to it until that moment at which you are looking at it. I mean, the traces of how it has physically become itself.

That's all for now, but take care and keep up your fight against the conspiracy, your attempts to connect all the parts and pieces,
see ya,
Rachael