“You made a space where you could explore where you want to go as an artist.” – Marc Maron
There’s this one pot from today’s kiln; the last one of the cycle. It’s not in this photo, and I’m not going to show it to you now. That would probably kind of kill what I want to tell you about it, or at least distract and reduce clarity.
I always save the best pots for the last firing, when everything is as worked out and dialed in as it’s ever going to get. So the odds of a special one coming out are improved. But still… I mean — this pot. Holy shit it’s good. I guess I could say it’s such and such clay, and glaze X, and this surface treatment and that place in the kiln, yadda yadda, but that’s not the crucial thing. The crucial thing is this one pot makes it all worthwhile, the entire cycle going back to those first hesitant ramblings the week after my last sale in December. All the struggle with changing the kiln, fighting the burner, five loadings under threatening clouds and middle of the night candlings and early risings and long, focused attention.
It’s, right now, the best I can throw, in the hardest material. It was the best of a new run of a completely different thing, which felt exciting and risky and kind of bonkers to even be trying, let alone a complete rejection of the idea of scarce time and looming deadlines. Some of the last month was so nuts precisely because I allowed myself to risk and linger on those back in January. I gave it the most dynamic, variable glaze, and it fired perfectly, interacting with that new idea/technique/method in a way I hadn’t even imagined it could do. I mean, it’s just… Forgive the hyperbole, but right now it’s everything. I fall in love with my newest pots and their value to me, while they’re new, is insanely more than it would be to anyone else. This little pot, which will eventually go for maybe fifty bucks, right now I wouldn’t take $500 for it. No way, no hay.
Anyways, I just want to tell you that while it was fresh. Now I’ve got to go brick the door up before the last of the light fades. So it goes.
p.s. As I was literally sliding the last bricks in place, a rumble of thunder and the first hard patter of rain on the metal roofs. A poetic, fitting ending to six weeks of chasing the good holes in the weather, running from the rain, obsessing about the wind and freaking about keeping my kiln shelves and raw glazes dry. The weather gods and the kiln gods get together and write good jokes about potters.