"Dancing with Failure"

Would you say yes? If failure walked up and asked you for this dance? Would you say yes? I'm not sure I would. 

Source

Chris Horne is a devil of a failure. He says so himself. In fact, he just spoke to a gaggle of creatives and community members in Akron, OH about his dance with failure. Now, just to clarify, he is the successful creator of The Devil Strip, an art, music, and culture magazine/ newspaper/ online news source covering everything hip and relevant in Akron. He also won the Knight Foundation grant to do something called Unbox Akron which is rolling out this fall. Unbox Akron is incredibly creative and the anticipation of its debut is killing me. But how did he get there? Through great failures, he says. 

Creative Cog Akron, an artsy speaker series put together by Katelyn Gainer, kicked off with Chris Horne's "Dancing with Failure." Horne took me by surprise. In his conversation about failure he directed us toward community rather than self-realization. He said that "we are wired for connectivity and being connected is what gives us confidence ... Being local is being human." 

He suggested that whether you will fail or succeed in your pursuit is not the question. The questions are, rather, whether you are taking action that makes us better, whether you are telling stories, and whether you are connecting people. We all seek a purpose, a drive, and a mastery. Can we help each other in these pursuits? Horne says yes. We know ourselves through our community, they help you find energy for your ideas and push you forward. But they can also catch you when you fail and help gather the pieces of failure to try again. 

Dancing is such a whimsical word to use with something as weighty as failure. Trying something potentially incredible could take off and soar or it could crash into a burning wreck. That burning wreckage is exactly why failure is weighed down with so much fear. But Horne said that to dance with failure isn't to try to lighten its reality. To dance with failure is to let it be a possibility. And in community, that isn't such a scary prospect. 

Live Local. Dare Greatly. 

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." - T. Roosevelt 

"Trivial Changes of Time..."

Don't merely jump on the waves of trend... Guest blog post from GK Chesterton. (ha!)


"It is from the old wrangles of Rads and Reformers and True Blue Tories that modern art has borrowed this queer notion of incessant Progress and each generation crowing over the last. When I read all this confident exposition about new methods that must now supersede old methods; of how Yeats and Swinburne must yield to Mr. Eliot and Mr. Pound, just as Tennyson and Browning had to yield to Yeats and Swinburne, I heave a sigh that is full of old and tender memories. ... Anyhow, I have now come to believe in a totally different theory about novelty, and even the necessity of novelty. What puzzles me about current culture is that it ignores the very truths which it exaggerates. ... novelty is not necessarily improvement. It does not necessarily give the man for whom the old things are stale any right to scorn the man for whom the old things are fresh. And there always are men for whom the old things are fresh. Such men, so far from being behind the times, are altogether above the times. They are too individual and original to be affected by the trivial changes of time."

- GK Chesterton

Use your hands.

"It is a tragedy of the first magnitude that millions of people have ceased to use their hands as hands. Nature has bestowed upon us this great gift which is our hands. If the craze for machinery methods continues, it is highly likely that a time will come when we shall be so incapacitated and weak that we shall begin to curse ourselves for having forgotten the use of the living machines given to us by God."


Mahathma Ghandi 

Nothingness is useful...

We throw clay to shape a pot,

But the utility of the clay pot is a function 
of the nothingness inside it.

- Tao Te Ching
(pot by me!)

“He’s a Good Fellow, and ’t will all be well.”

LIX

“Listen again. One Evening at the Close

Of Ramazan, ere the better Moon arose,

In that old Potter’s Shop I stood alone

With the clay Population round in Rows.

LX

And, strange to tell, among that Earthen Lot

Some could articulate, while others not:

And suddenly one more impatient cried—

“Who *is* the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?”

LXI

Then said another—“Surely not in vain

“My Substance from the common Earth was ta’en,

“That He who subtly wrought me into Shape

“Should stamp me back to common Earth again.”

LXII

Another said—“Why, ne’er a peevish Boy,

“Would break the Bowl from which he drank in Joy;

“Shall He that *made* the Vessel in pure Love

“And Fancy, in an after Rage destroy!”

LXIII

None answer’d this; but after Silence spake

A Vessel of a more ungainly Make:

“They sneer at me for learning all awry;

“What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?”

LXIV

Said one—“Folk of a surly Tapster tell

“And daub his Visage with the Smoke of Hell;

“They talk of some strict Testing of us—Pish!

“He’s a Good Fellow, and ’t will all be well.”

Omar Khayyam, tr. Edward Fitzgerald: “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” (1905)

found here

Truth?

"In matters of art our society has substituted taste for truth, which she finds more amusing and less of a responsibility, and changes her tastes as frequently as she changes her hats and shoes."

- Mark Rothko

Silence is Golden

"Silence is golden..." I think that quote came about because those who work (making the "gold") all the time are never heard from! My silence has been the product of long hard days full of starched shirts, hot plates, aching feet, hungry people, and beautiful annual flowers coming in by the truck load. Spring has brought a different sort of rain this year and work is flooding my days, whether at my garden center or at my restaurant or in my studio.

Because my passion and focus (art/pottery) is not a clear cut job to apply for and work in solely, I find that I often forget that I do have a passion. What do I mean? Well, as I rush to the kitchen on my first rounds, dropping off dirty dishes, entering the order in the computer, and picking up another server's drink order, I know that serving is not my passion. I'd like to have one job, a job where I can be paid to do what I know, want to learn and am passionate about.

My best friend is a chef. She is enthusiastic and beginning to focus in a particular direction with her culinary talents. She just got a job at an incredible restaurant with the ideals she holds and the passion she exudes. Good food, exceptional food cannot be replaced by microwave boxed meals. Because real cooking, fresh cooking, is still somewhat practiced in homes across America, people can recognize a good meal. People seek out a good meal, share in it, are willing to pay for it, and enjoy it. They have experienced it once and want more, hence the typical longing for "mom's cooking" or a "fine home cooked meal." What they've experienced is real substance, prepared by human hands.

Unfortunately, artistry and craftsmanship of America is lost amongst the mass manufactured. While fresh home cooking has dwindled in the 15 second meal in a box (hopefully being revived by movements like "Slow Food" or Farm to Table"), art education is dwindling even more. And I don't just mean education in the formal sense. Education, especially in something like art and craft, can come from experiencing them.

Bernard Leach writes about this in "The Potter's Challenge". While he, of course, is speaking of pottery primarily, this can be applied to a much broader picture of art and craft - cooking, textiles, painting, photography, etc.

"One has to live with fine pots in order to appreciate their character, for they are intimate expressions of peoples and their cultures. Human virtues such as nobility, generosity, breadth, simplicity, sincerity, and charity -- virtues common to both man and pot -- are there to be discovered in shape, texture, color, and pattern."

It is in the familiarity with these hand made pieces, in knowing the maker, getting comfortable with the various aspects of the meal, of the picture, of the pot, that we really do learn.

[images: 'Cafe des Amie' sketch and 'Chef' sketch by Sarah Coffin]

Touch

I grab the wooden handled wire tool, wrapping the thin wire twice around my fingers, and feel it press into my skin as I cut my wet pot from the wheel. I have dried clay cracking around my wrists and wet clay between my fingers. As I slap a new mound of clay on my wheel I can feel it give way and change shape. I throw the walls of my next bowl and my outside fingers mimic the opening motion they can feel of my inside fingers.

The sense of touch is a huge part of a potter's life. While everyone "feels" everyday, a potter's livelihood rests in a heightened sense of touch. A sensitive yet firm grasp of what is happening with your hands is essential.

This appreciation of touch was brought home to me when my sister, my niece and I sat together watching a documentary the other day. At one point in the film, a woman walked through a beautiful stone arched veranda in Paris. The camera panned over an immaculate garden full of trimmed hedges, brightly colored flowers, and rich green grass. The woman's hair, frizzy and red, made the colors of the flowers pop and both contrasted beautifully with the stone arches and gray, rainy sky. My 3 year old niece's immediate reaction to this gorgeous scene was, "Mom, can we go there for I can touch it?" And then added, "I want to touch it so I can feel it."

So human and so real! She wasn't just content to sit on the couch and see the scene before her, she wanted to envelope her senses in it, to truly experience it by touching the stone or wet grass or frizzy red hair. This desire is one that so many of us don't realize we are missing in our world of life on screen. TV and computers have made it possible to experience a vast amount of the world previously privy to the rich or well traveled. But this innocent sentiment of a 3 year old made me think. We should not be content with duo-sensory (did I just make up that term?!) experiences on screen, overdeveloping our hearing and seeing senses. We should seek out true full experiences for ourselves as well! We should be conscious of how each sense absorbs particular circumstances during the day. I believe that in developing and titillating all five, life will take on an extraordinarily satisfied feeling of fullness.

How have you fed all five of your senses today?

touch taste smell see hear

Speech?

I wrote previously concerning the difficulty many people have with modern art. People do not know what they can or can not say. Many are afraid to have opinions. Yes, some of the artwork is to blame for that. But a trend in today's communication style is the real problem here.

What has happened to speaking with conviction? Why is it "uncool" to know what you are talking about or believe what you are saying? Why does it make us squirm to share a clear opinion or shift uncomfortably when someone has something to say and comes right out and just says it?

Watch this video:

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.
And let it inspire you to pay attention to your speech, pay attention to your beliefs, pay attention to your opinions. Become a real person, one who is worth listening to, worth talking to. Get rid of the fluff that makes up the perpetual see-saw of so many conversations.

Think on these things: Plato

"Beauty of style

and harmony

and grace

and good rhythm

depend on simplicity -


I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and

nobly ordered mind and character,

not that other simplicity

which is only a euphemism for folly.

-- Plato's Republic (Book 3)

New York City

The combination of people in New York City really is incredible. I drove up to the Big Apple after Christmas this year and experienced NYC like never before. Every street, every neighborhood looked like Times Square; the city was packed. The streets were thick with bundled faces, some meandering, some purposefully pursuing. I tried to keep track of the number of languages, the number of nationalities or different states but after only two days, I lost count.

To see so many faces, various shapes, big noses, little noses, almond eyes, round eyes, wide mouths, big lips, no lips, huge hair, dyed hair... not to mention the fashion or styles people chose to cover or compliment or accentuate those features... I was as overstimulated as an artist could get! And to think that all of these features, natural or donned, stem from different backgrounds and cultures and experiences.

That combination of people brings out an amazing array of creative outlets that could not be showcased anywhere else the way it was here. Walking from Madison Square Gardens through Central Park to The Plaza, I experienced a trio of hilarious, energetic young men doing a stand up comedy routine with jokes said in unison and feats of gymnastics thrown in. We also saw a group of artists drawing people's portraits with charcoal in 2 minutes, a man selling Obama condoms, Statue of Liberty impersonators taking photos with tourists, Santa's looking lost, Toy soldiers enthusiastically managing and entertaining a line of frozen parents and crazy kids about a half a mile long for F.A.O. Schwarz, a ragged man playing beautiful saxophone holiday songs, a man in bare feet trotting through the crowds, a group of drummers and dancers celebrating Kwanzaa with ancestral beats, chants, and awesome shimmies and stomps, and a man in shorts and a tank top and gloves up to his armpits running 5 minute miles through the crowds. Through all of this, conversations, food smells, and faces around me were Russian, French, African, Spanish, Korean, Chinese...

If you've not had the opportunity to travel much, NYC (or London, I hear) is, you might say, a great bang for your buck. You get a HUGE variety of pretty authentic experiences from around the globe in one place. Aurthur Schopenhauer, an early 1900's philosopher wrote a number of essays now collected in a volume called "Studies in Pessimism." I read a quote from these essays where Schopenhauer says,
That is a strong encouragement to broaden one's own vision in order to better understand fellow man and the world in which we live. Reading, traveling, in conversation, art, fashion, food, work; all of these experiences

House Beautiful

"Believe me, if we want art to begin at home, as it must, we must clear our houses of troublesome superfluities that are ever in our way, conventional comforts that are no real comforts, and do but make work for servants and doctors. If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

-- William Morris, 19 February 1880 --

Beauty

Roger Scruton is a British philosopher with a tall mess of strawberry blond hair and an English fashion sense. His patterned suit coat, patterned shirt, and patterned tie played wonderfully into the British stereotype. That being said, his lecture did anything but.

This past week I went into DC to a beautiful club for Scruton's lecture on Beauty. Scruton is boldly breaking from modern aesthetic philosophy on beauty to say that it is absolutely necessary, that it is about redeeming human life and making this world livable. I found the lecture very encouraging and thought provoking. I will try to give a coherent picture of his lecture (I'm going to quote him periodically. He was free with his language so I'm sorry if it is offensive to anyone):

He started by noting that beauty is not paid attention to much these days, saying that there is "nothing which to raise your eyes." In the world of art, he went on, beauty has been neglected; we are stuck in a moment in which art is not the pursuit of beauty but the desecration of it. He called this the tragedy of modern life and by neglecting beauty we produce ultimately useless things. We can see this in the buildings built and torn down without thought in contrast to the buildings that we want to save. Why? Because pure function "resigns things to oblivion."

One of my favorite points of the lecture came after this introduction. He clarified beauty to be beyond just "art". Scruton thinks of beauty and its place in the lives of real people; where does beauty fit in the lives of ordinary people? He envisioned a table set for dinner, an easy image to conjure at this time of year! The arranging of the items, the making of the food, the inviting people to participate ... its not just a matter of food in the belly. With that image in mind, contrast it to much of art today: not inviting others in; "its ME on display and f*** you if you don't like it." In the Q&A time afterwards a gentleman in the back asked Scruton to define beauty. Scruton gave a wry smile and said that that is like trying to define "red". Beauty is defining "a state of mind in the objects, the arragnging of the world so that you are at home in it."

So why is it, Scruton asked, that our tastes in ordinary things like food are not argued about but accepted as part of a person but with beauty we want to discuss what we like and why. He claimed that it is because these are things that actually can demean the human condition which matters incredibly to you, being part of humanity. The desecration of beauty is oppressive and being oppressed, there ought to be some discussion about this!

At this point I connected this to why there is a noticeable lack of interest in/engagement with art today: not only because the artist is not inviting the viewer in but because this needed "discussion" mentioned above is a difficult and blurry path to go down.

Scruton gave some interesting thoughts on education, saying that there should be some education in producing the things that entertain us, giving us a foundation of knowledge upon which to base an opinion of what we listen to, look at, enjoy, etc. And that way, he claimed, there might be some agreement in community of what entertains us.

Well, where does the desecration of beauty/humanity start? Scruton had what I thought was a great point, that it starts with the ruling thought that "I am alone." That is the downfall.

Well, I am not alone! And I hope that provoked you to some thoughts on beauty and humanity as well.

A.S. Byatt

My sister posted a great quote from A.S. Byatt, a contemporary British author. I thought I'd share it too:
On Ceramics

"Early humans shaped and scraped clay to make vessels, cooked in them and realised they hardened, learned to make them impervious to water, and also to decorate them, with incisions and with glazes made from salts and metals. All pots are different, and all resemble each other (except for some defiant modern monsters). They are made elementally, using earth, air, fire and water. They represent the arts of peace, domestication, and elegance, whether of pure simplicity of form or of bravura demonstration of difficult mastery of techniques and images. They are where art meets craft, the useful meets the beautiful."

-- AS Byatt, "The Wonders of Porcelain", The Guardian. October 10, 2009.

Inspiration

I love finding artists that are doing something very different but still beautiful and inspired by tradition. A friend of mine alerted me to this site: Ashes and Milk. The site itself is pretty rockin and the artwork is simple and organic. They feature a few different artists and a few different mediums. I love a lot of what they have* and after reading their "About" paragraph I think I understand why. Here is an excerpt:

"Ashes & Milk is an online gallery space founded on the principle that a lot can be created from very little. We are driven by modern ideas with a reverence for traditional methods and believe that the things we bring into our homes should have a soul and a sense of history. Our collection is a boutique of texture, organic materials, and nuances of white, brown, and gray."

Also, many of the potters are Japanese .. and I'm particularly drawn to the Japanese pottery traditions. I hope you are inspired by it as well.


*some may be offensive if looked at too closely.

Oh the choices!

Life is grand when you are aware of the simple pleasures of every day! I stumble down the stairs to the kitchen each morning for my breakfast. I assemble the various parts of the meal, picking my cereal, getting out the soy milk, spoon, berries or raisins. I always take a simple pleasure in one particular choice: my dish. It is never a calculated choice, a potter choosing with a critical eye. No, it is much more simple, much more organic. I open the cupboard to an array of bowls from our own basement and from the studio of many other potters. Not one is alike. They all have different weights, decorations, shapes. They all have different personalities. One bowl can catch my eye and there is just something about it, that morning, that I can't get away from. The shape of the bowl, how small or wide the inside seems to me that morning, how open and hospitable or closed and cozy. I am rarely conscious of these details as I choose but as I look, as I touch, I just know that one bowl will suit and another simply will not.

Our mug cupboard is the same way. Friends who come over to our house know this well. The choices when it comes to beverages don't only consist of whether to have coffee or tea or what kind of tea but which mug will you choose? Its a very personal choice and I hate to have to choose for another person! It is always fun to see which mug a person chooses too. Something in the aesthetic of a particular mug drew that person in enough to choose it over another. Most often it is one that I haven't used for a while and their choice draws my attention to it once again.

Some may think that they just don't have that kind of time, the time it takes to choose one pot over another, its just another thing to think about ... but they are so mistaken! It is a very different kind of thought process, unrelated to the list of to do's in the morning. Imagine you are back in elementary school... if you had a good art teacher, art class was not just another class. It fed a different thought process, it was engaging, bit of a break from the norm. The simple pleasure of choosing your mug in the morning can be that little break all over again.

In "The Potter's Challenge", Bernard Leach discusses the value in hand made work vs. machine made and the inexplicable joy and element of humanity that makes all the difference between the two. Read here as he writes about making handles for a pitcher, making it over and over, perfecting the form:

"[The handle] must be comfortable to hold. It can covey beauty, and provide use and pleasure in combination. Now a young potter may say that as a machine can turn out repeated things item for item what is the purpose of trying to do the same thing by hand? The answer is that aside from the rhythm and method of work that develop within the potter, there are a surprising number of people who want to enjoy a pitcher when they use it, and they cannot get that kind of joy when the man who produced it did not really make it, did not have any joy in making it. How is the joy to get into factory-made work? We need that joy. It serves a starved heart both in the maker and the user. We need to find a way for all people in this world to get this extra bonus. There must be an element of choice and the play of imagination." (pg. 18-19)

And more:

"Even under favorable conditions the absence of overall personal responsibility at every stage of execution, combined with standardization of raw material, and absolute uniformity of exact repetition inherent in the process of mass reproduction, reduce the possibility of expression to a cool hard abstraction far removed from the warmth and character and spontaneity of direct hand-craftsmanship. [Here Leach makes allowances for a new sort of beauty to emerge from factory made things but goes on to say:] It is about time that we realized that the real contribution of the machine is mass-production of the basic necessities which a swelling population requires, not the make-believe application of false art. ... Factory-made pots are not produced by the whole man." (pg. 46-47)

So, raise your mugs, brimming with life and imagination and joy: Here's to personality, here's to simple pleasures, here's to the whole man!

Origins

Do you ever look at objects or eat something and think, "ok, who was the first person to try this?!" or "how in the world did they figure this out?!" (Like mussels, for example... mmm, I think I'll break open this shell and eat the gray slimy mass inside!). I've never thought about that with pottery, maybe because I grew up with it and it feels natural, but my reading recently brought up just that! How did this whole crazy thing start? Who squished some clay, "burned" it, and called it usable?! Here is a quote from the introduction to Robin Hopper's book, Functional Pottery:

"...the earliest pottery probably developed by accident. There are two basic theories of development. It may have come from observations of the way the earth became baked around firepits, with the subsequent experimentation of making and firing pinched clay pots. On the other hand, it may have come from the accidental burning of clay-lined baskets. Baskets were the original storage containers. They were made from grasses, reeds, or soft, pliable tree branches, primarily for carrying and storing grain and seed, the major part of the diet at that time. Baskets are anything but impervious to the loss of small seeds, which easily find their way through the basket weave. After a while inner coatings of clay were probably smeared into the baskets to prevent loss. Some mud-lined baskets were possibly accidentally burnt, leaving a fired clay lining. Pottery could even have developed from the process of wrapping foods in a skin of clay and placing them in the embers of a fire, or on heated rocks, to cook. This method was common among the Indians of North America, and may also have been the precursor to the common cooking pot. From these simple beginnings has developed an art form which has served mankind for thousands of years, for his daily needs from birth to the grave, and beyond. Throughout man's pottery-making history he has devloped a huge repertoire of shapes and surfaces to fill his many needs..."

And in Chapter One:
"Looking at pottery in museums, or as illustrations in books, one can't help but be amazed by the huge and subtle diversity of forms that man has molded clay into, for a wide variety of possible uses. Beyond the natural instincts of enjoying the purely manipulative quality of the material, and the function which is required of the formed objects, ceramic form has been influenced and altered by many factors and forces.
Pottery developed as a response to the needs of mankind. Pots became containers and dispensers: pots of purpose. The form that they took developed for a variety of reasons: the use required; religious associations; as a substitute emulating other, more precious, materials; geographical and climatic considerations; and the many variations in cultural customs. Once the basic needs became evident, forms developed and made to serve them."

I think it a wonderful testament to the innate lover of beauty in all of mankind that even a plain, purely functional thing can be a work of art. You can argue about where that comes from or why that is but regardless, I think it is clear that art is an essential part of what makes us human. When the arts are forgotten or shoved aside, the qulaity of life declines.

Bernard Leach on Composition

Leach's book, as I've mentioned, is wonderful. I reached a section on composition and would like to share it. I cut a few parts out as indicated by the ellipses. It speaks to any number of disciplines and I hope you enjoy:

"[My diagrams of a pot] are analytical intellectualizations and cannot be more than signposts to intuition I am well aware ... If they are used as shortcuts to an oversimplified system of judging pots I shall have failed in my purpose ... Analysis should follow and support intuition; the inner preceding the outer.

The basic process of composition in pottery, as in other forms of art, appears to depend upon an intuitive perception of the way in which similar and dissimilar elements can be coordinated in a new whole. The actual coordinating or creative faculty defies analysis; it exists -- it knows that this speaks to that in such and such a way. It employs catalysis , thereby relating the seemingly unrelatable. Repetition and contrast, symmetry and asymmetry, major and minor, dark against light, convex and concave -- these and many other dualisms have to be resolved in every pot by the catalytic effect of neutrals.

By a neutral I mean a line, shape, or color in which opposites have already come to an equilibrium. The difference is that between primaries and secondaries in color. For example, in a painting, or a woven fabric, there may be a grey, made up of red and blue primaries, in which the red speaks to a red area, and the blue to a blue, producing a sudden harmony where the was discord before. Or in a pot a tenuous neutral area may be the link which successfully relates two otherwise ambiguous statements of form. Or in a pattern one slowly discovers that the unpainted part is, so to speak, of an acoustical importance better understood in the Far East. In pattern, as in melody, proverb or dance, irreducible components are united in a relationship of complete rhythmic simplicity.

Some pots are enhanced by decoration, others are not ... Generally speaking, decoration should be subordinate to form but not at the price of dull uniformity ... But no matter what one writes about the complex relationships of shape, pattern, and color-texture, ultimately it is the manner in which such abstract ideas are applied which will determine the vitality of the work, for the pot is indeed the projection of the man who makes it and of the culture, or cultures, upon which he draws."
-- Bernard Leach "The Potters Challenge" (pg. 38-39)

While some of that required reading and re-reading, I really love the way he defines composition. While I was teaching art I emphasized composition to the students and was constantly coming up with new ways to communicate the idea of "composition". Leach describes it well and verbalizes what I quickly realized: there is only so much you can say. It is intuition that needs to fill out the picture.