May 12th, 2013

"Take this silver lining, keep it in your own sweet head." - David Gray

Keep it where? Oh no, I could never do that. How would everyone know what I'm thinking and feeling in intricate detail?

So there's a silver lining to be found in my spring sale's mediocre turnout, if I squint a bit and wrinkle my mouth just so. Yep... there it is. Faint, but distinct.

As you know, optimism isn't normally my thing -- water bugs, trout below -- but even so, it seems that having these pots left over might be a good thing. With 200+ pots in the showroom, this is the largest "standing inventory" I've had at this time of year in any of the past 13 years of studio sales, and probably going all the way back to my start in clay.

As I've said before, my persistent problem is getting enough pots made before each sale to meet the usual demand. (That is, as opposed to having a lot of pots and needing to work hard to sell them, which seems to be the more common problem.) Which is not to say that I ever sell out; not even close. That's a degree of success that I don't even let myself daydream about anymore. Instead, I mean "enough pots" in the sense of filling my showroom so that it's worth the expenses and effort of hosting the event and worth my customers' time to come to it. In my average sale weekend, including a handful of online orders, I usually sell about half the pots that I start with. Most of those 26 times, the more pots I have at the start, the more I sell.

That's somewhat counterintuitive. My best explanation is that it's because more pots creates more choices, and therefore better odds that if someone wants a stack of porcelain plates or a Teadust planter, I have them available. (Especially since I make a rather wide range of forms, glazes and decorative styles. Once the inventory dips below 100 pots, it can be a real mixed bag of odds and ends left.) But also, a full display seems to encourage more purchases by the same number of people -- say, buying a mug for yourself, too, when the goal was to just get a wedding present. A sparse display, with limited choices and a feeling of having been picked over, doesn't.

In any case, whether it's the seven month stretch between May and December or the five month turnaround from December back to May, I almost always struggle to hit my target number of pots on the shelves. There are many reasons for this: my half-time dayjob is the biggest factor, of course, but there are others that I've detailed at length previously, like my slow pace in the studio. In any case, while it's always nice to be making pots with the sense that there is an existing demand for them -- that people value what I am doing -- always being a little behind the curve is also a lot of pressure. It forces me into compromises or procedural approaches that I dislike and that are far from the ideal way to make good pots, like firing kilns in bad weather, or working through illnesses, or letting the demands of the studio through the other parts of my life too far out of balance. And if there's one thing I learned in my 30's, it's that plodding along with things out of balance for too long eventually comes back to haunt you.

So: for almost every sale, it's a race to the finish line. I usually starting with around 100 finished pots and aim for something over 300. (Last weekend, it was 330.)

So for this cycle I'm just beginning, I'm already more than half way to that goal. And on the long side of the cycle (with that extra month until my Holiday sale). And with a pretty good pile of bisqueware already waiting in the studio -- because I cancelled two salt firings last month when I got bronchitis and all hell subsequently broke loose.

Seven and a half months to get (at least) 75 pots through the kiln. Heck, Phillips and Kline can do that in a week. That should leave some time for other things; heck, if I get lucky, plenty of time.

OK. Back to the silver lining. The other lesson that I seem to learn, over and over again, is that time is all we have. The rest of it -- bills to pay, obligations to meet, people to greet, food to eat, a million random little activities that try to it all seem worthwhile -- all depend on that primary constraint of time. It is the greatest common divisor.

From that perspective, there's nothing more valuable than time... unplanned, uncommitted, unspoken-for time. And "found" time -- hours and days that are discovered just lying there on the ground, waiting to be put to use -- is better than money or joy or respect, because it can become any of those things. It's treasure, silvery treasure: full of infinite promise and potential freedom. Or... anything.

What will I do with it?

May 5th, 2013

"I like to write about certain things that if they are not written about
are not going to exist." - James Salter

Here in the sixth year of tw@se, I occasionally find myself writing a post which is essentially the same as one I've written previously. This week, I was two paragraphs into trying to summarize studio sale #26 when and the little Pattern Recognition light in some dim part of my brain switched on: "Wait a minute... I've been here before."

This life of mine tends to loop back on itself, as I've mentioned before many times.
<loop>
The surprising thing is how often it still surprises me when it does.

So after some random scrolling (through these ridiculously long archived pages) I found this, my reaction to last December's sale. I had forgotten not only the results of the previous sale -- whether it had been good, bad or something in between -- but also the fact that I even wrote this. That's strange-bordering-on-worrisome, but I suppose not all that shocking considering the circa 1971 RAM in this computer that I call a brain.

Forgotten or not, from my perspective today that seems like one of the best things I've ever written. Really. And also, it's probably as good a summary of the experience of trying to sell pots as I'm likely to ever achieve.

Given my propensity for forgetting, reading what I wrote then and being instantly transported back to those facts and that exact set of thoughts and feelings is a strong justification for why I blog in the first place. Sure, I could have written that down in a private notebook somewhere, but if I hadn't planned to share it publicly -- if it had lacked the goal of communication -- would I have even made the effort to write it? And if I had only written it privately, would I have stumbled across it again, to read it and remember all that just when I needed to? Unlikely.

I've joked with my friend Carter about tw@se being written for an audience of one, where, presumably, he is that ideal target reader. But if it's true that all of this is aimed at only one person, then, really, that person has to be me. My Past Self makes my Now Self laugh, and nod appreciatively, and mutter, "No way...", and arrive at the end of a post like that one and think about how perfectly it hit the center of the target. No one else, I'm afraid, writes about the intersection of life and making pots in a way that does it for me quite like... me.

Which is, of course, both goofy and nuts. And also a degree of solipsism that would probably bring joy to the most jaded of therapists. (Aha, from whence this unfillable void in the ego?) And it completely ignores the fact that, more often, I often read my old posts and groan at how horribly inept they are. But pushing all those caveats aside, I accept the usefulness of that function. I like the fact that what I wrote in the now-forgotten past can speak to me today as if it were composed by my secret twin, my unknown brother, my Dark Half. Sadly, few other things have that effect. Maybe the best of Ze Frank. Or that handful of songs that I only listen to on purpose, and never on shuffle.

Anyways, I can't imagine what else I can say about this sale -- from the insanely compressed, woefully haphazard path I trod to get ready for it to the weary blend of disappointment at the tangible results and relief that it was again done for another half year -- that isn't somehow already expressed in that post from last December.

So I guess I'll shut up for now.

April 28th, 2013

"There is one great taboo that still exists,
which is that art should not take part in life." - Pete Pinnell

Sale time! This weekend, 10am - 4pm both days. Here's all the relevant info: St. Earth Spring Sale.

Meanwhile... behind the scenes, chaos reigns. I haven't been this far behind the curve in getting ready for a sale in a long time -- not since Fall 2008, right after Maggie was born. I've just barely begun to get things set up around the yard, house and studio. I squeaked out each of the various promotional efforts at the last possible minute, and dialed them all back considerably. And I have over 200 pots -- from my month at Penland and two spring firings -- left to process: sorting, cleaning, pricing, arranging.

For the first time in 12 years (this is bi-annual sale #26, I think), I won't get good photos of new pots shot in time, which means no new inventory in my site gallery and so, most likely, no online sales. I hate to give up on what's been a standard part of the event all those years, but something's gotta go.

It's going to be one heck of a slog to get ready this year. There have been so many wildcards, setbacks, exceptions and crazy delays since we returned from North Carolina that I've been spending idle moments the last few days wondering which parts of the customary setup -- the standard that I've aimed for in terms of polish and finesse -- could stand to be minimized without drastic consequences. Which details have the most impact for my customers? Do any of them really matter? To what extent am I just indulging my perfectionist instincts, in carefully dusting every pot, attempting park-like order outdoors, laying out a spread of snacks and refreshements?

I'll probably do it all as per the usual, and grumble about it the entire way, but still manage to make it. I mean... at this point, what choice do I have? Chances are, most people won't notice. Chances are, the results will be in the usual, historical range. Chances are, by 4pm on Sunday I'm going to be a comatose pile of pottery-hocking fodder.

Ah... what a life. Wish me luck!

April 21st, 2013

"Holding a gem is such a joy, and the feeling I have as I familiarize myself with new work is very much like the feeling I've come to cherish as a father.
Work is like critters, I enjoy the mechanics of make'n em, but I'm not sure I'm fully understanding the true miracle of making things real just by accident… " - FetishGhost

April 14th, 2013

"… like some millennial demon from the digital unconscious." - Emily Nussbaum

This seems particularly relevant this week, for several reasons. Also: it's awesome. If you want a passing grade in tw@se studies this semester, it's required viewing.

April 7th, 2013

"In another life you might have been a star." - Living Colour

Continuing on with the story of my month at Penland:
(Here are parts one and two.)

During the month or so that we were in North Carolina, I didn't spend nearly as much socializing or visiting local potters' studios as I'd planned to and, aside from random bits of conversation while working in the studio, virtually none the first few weeks. Once I'd seen the firing calendar on the whiteboard and settled in to making pots in the new space, the rush to keep the pots flowing towards the kilns took precidence. Heck, I barely even set foot in most of the other studio buildings on campus! Given the option, I'll almost always go into hermit mode to jam in more clay time than get out in the world to socialize; often, I'm sure, to my own detriment.

We had planed to tour the local circuit on Sundays -- Potters of the Roan, Crimson Laurel Gallery, etc. -- but the few first attempts were foiled by snow and ice. Despite the bonus of escaping an Indiana February, it was still winter in the mountains.

But near the tail end of the trip, I got to spend an evening with this group of potters, thanks to a lucky bit of timing and -- once again -- the fortuitous connections created by the Internet. (Thanks, Internet!) It was great fun; definitely something I wish I could do (e.g. should make an effort to do) more often.

"Why do some many potters look like bums?"

More seriously, does it get any better than standing around shooting the shit with a bunch of other potters you like and admire? I suppose that's a commonplace event for many, but for me it's so rare that it's a mind-blowing highlight.

And there's something about getting to hang out in another potter's studio -- compared to just stopping in -- that really does it for me. There's time to notice subtle details of the space; to casually pick up a random tool; to idly scrape dried clay off a canvas tabletop with a fingernail. It let's me imagine myself working in that person's environment, standing at that wheel, perhaps even making those pots. I see things I'd like to copy in my space back home; things I have a little better, things I have a little worse. Good for proper perspective.

(Here's a post I wrote about an earlier visit to MK's studio; probably my best bit of writing from that blogging sabbatical project.)

Anyways, suffice it to say that that evening was one of the most memorable parts of the month, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

One of the stranger aspects of the time away -- a minor but radical break with my normal routines, and so one of the things that made it feel like a brief stint in an alternate life -- was the lack of a TV at the house we rented. Or, more precisely, the lack of a cable subscription (and DVR) for the TV. This was a little jarring at first, because it's been my habit for decades to end almost every day with an hour or two of near-comatose screen staring prior to hauling myself up to bed.

Of course, I could have easily substituted the iPad -- streamed something from Netflix or YouTube or Amazon or HBOGo -- or even brought my half dozen moldy old DVDs along. (Now I'm imagining that anyone under 30 reading this finds it hilarious that steraming to a handheld device isn't the default. Kids these days.)

But even though it would have been easy to just switch over to an online source, I took that new constraint as an opportunity to try a different pattern. I wanted to see what else would change if I temporarily broke that strongly-engrained habit which so often seems like a rather unfulfilling waste of time.

This ended up being just one of several disruptions to the tidal cycles to my day to day life; changes I hadn't fully anticipated, but that I was suddenly interested in playing around with and acquiescing to. In fact, the first couple weeks there ended up being largely about that -- about doing largely the same things in different ways. Which was unexpected, because I'd planned more on doing different things in the same ways; say, trying out different pots using the same techniques.

I guess being away from my normal environments -- home, office, studio -- as I so rarely am, especially for any extended period of time, seemed like an ideal chance to tweak some of those things that have long settled into being constants. To treat them as variables for a change. Not watching TV/movies/video of any kind for a month -- while admittedly a rather mundane thing -- was an interesting exercise in self-determination and willpower, and revealed some things that had been hiding behind that habit all along.

For example, I spent a surprising amount of that time writing for my sabbatical blog. Normally, I don't dare try to compose even monosyllabic sentences after 8pm, but I found this to be really enjoyable, and the results were noticeably different than my usual writing. Maybe a little more conversational; a little more free-form, without as many compositional tricks and attempts at cleverness layered in.

I also read more books and magazines (on actual paper); wrote dangerously unhinged emails to friends; conversed with my spouse (imagine that!); and, something new, drawing.

(Which is not to say that I didn't still spend a lot of that time looking at a screen. The iPad is a pretty intoxicating replacement for a flat panel TV, even sans video. But unlike just watching, that device is still enough of a computer that it encourages more interaction and more activity, like the writing I mentioned above, or trolling through the day's "news" on Facebook, or playing iOS games. (I practically burned a Triple Town-shaped hole in my reptile brain.)

Anyways -- drawing. Thanks to a handy, stunningly full-featured app called ProCreate, the iPad is now almost exactly the digital sketchpad I've been imagining since the early days of tablet input devices and vector graphics -- things I first played around with, attached to a desktop computer, over a decade ago, and wished that I could hold in my lap or take out to the studio.

The funny thing about the ongoing digital revolution -- and make no mistake: we're still in the early stages or it; the stuff that's yet to come is going to make today's iPads look like barrels and buggywhips. The funny thing is that the stuff you dream about when some new feature first becomes conceivable -- like digital drawing with your fingers -- seems to take forever to arrive as a fully mass-market, off the shelf, no-brainer product. But when it does… holy cow, it's like magic. And then it's hard to imagine, how we ever got by without such things in the past, let alone remember all the terribly inefficient, frustratingly limited prior formats and methods.

Like photography. It's now so ridiculously easy to shoot digital photographs and instantly share them online, it seems like we've all been doing it forever. The days of too quickly filling up clunky memory cards, downloading the files to a computer, manually editing them to web specs, wrapping them in HTML for display, FTPing files to a server -- all that is practically a relic of a prior era. I mean, I still do that here, out of habit and stubborness, but for most of the people most of the time, that's a dead methodology; one that our kids will likely never even know existed, just like I never punched holes in cards to feed data into the machine.

Another, equally mind-bogglingly improved example is recording multi-track audio. Today it's pretty simple to do it at full quality and in real time, with very little custom equipment or expertise. Or even something like having a spontaneous video chat with someone thousands of miles away, and you can both be walking down the street or sitting in a cafe. In 1993, the year I graduated from college, that would have seemed like something in a sci-fi show. These capabilities are ~~truly revolutionary, seen from the 10 or 30 year perspectives. And yet we almost instantly assimilate them into our habits and expectations and move forward as if they'd always existed. Wonderful.

Anyways, so in place of TV, I used the magic of the iPad to do some digital sketching, like these ideas for tumblrs. It's really fun to push pixels around with my fingertips and end up with something worth looking at! I suppose it's still no match for physical paper and ink and paint, for for a very poorly trained 2D person like me, it's pretty damn amazing. Also, to the point of these amazing technical advances above: share, post, done. No drying time, copy stands (remember those?), slide film, printing labels, sending precious individual copies out to a few select shows or viewers. We're so much closer now to think it, make it, share it than we've ever been, it's a little staggering to consider.

So let's see: I made it out to Kline's studio twice; also John Britt earlier in the month, and Gess and Michael Hunt/Naomi Dalglish on the very last day. And, sorry to say, that's about it! Oh yes, also squeezed in the NC Pottery Center in Seagrove, on a day trip through the Piedmont. But given that I started with a list of at least two dozen potters and places I wanted to see, that's a pretty meagre tally. Ah well; I suppose there's always a next time, and I don't regret the pots that I made and kilns that I fired instead.

Gess wasn't home that day -- my attempts to call ahead to various potters in hopes of seeing their studios, buying pots and getting to meet all failed miserably. I suspect the locals have been trained to not wait by the phone in February. But his showroom was open and his wife gave us a quick tour of the studio and kiln, all of which was great. I've admired his pots for years -- since I discovered that he'd preceeded me at SIU Edwardsville -- and it was great to see a range of them in person.

This also made me think that a cool part of a potters' tour would be scheduling time for visitors to come hang out in the studio while the potter was absent; maybe with the intent of letting people do some of that "absorbing the environment" I talked about earlier. As good and important as it is to make a connection with the potter, there's something intriguing and subtle about experiencing their space and the context their pots come from without the (good) distraction of conversation, or the awkwardness of feeling too intrusive. All of which is to say, I guess, that if anyone wants to come snoop around in my showroom or hang out in the studio while I'm gone, just ask!

Well, that's more than enough for now. Still a few more installments to go, rehashing the trip, I think. I'm chipping away at it as fast as I can, while enjoying the chance to reflect on that time with a little different perspective, and to see where else those memories can ramble to. It's like that one month seeded a year's worth of blog posts, if I were to give them time to grow.

March 31st, 2013

"The stars are laughing at us..." - XTC

I failed my save against bronchitis this week, so the rest of the Penland review will have to wait a while. I managed to fire a kiln and get my sale card off to the printer -- just barely -- so with my sale a month away there's still a chance that I can pull it off. As is almost always the case, it feels like I need two months.

That weird background noise you're hearing is the sound of my mental gears clanging away; a symphony of cognitive dissonance, generated by crushed plans and the dawning awareness that resistance is, once again, futile. Canceling planned firings, scaling back aspirations to the bare minimum, and preparing to enter four weeks of fight or flight mode. Dive! Dive!

"All of my daydreams are disasters," sang Uncle Tupelo. I couldn't agree more.

Ah, pottery -- so romantic.

March 24th, 2013

"Anyone who hosts a podcast, or writes a blog for that matter, does so with a healthy dose of self-importance. Wanting to be heard, telling others that your voice is the one worth listening to, is inherently narcissistic, at least on some level." - Jonathan Poritsky

It's hard to see here, but as I said they were uniformly too dark and not salted enough, with some funky glaze and underglaze results mixed in, too. Much of that came from the clay body, which ended up being what I think of as a rather iron-heavy clay, but which I was imagining as much lighter in tone. My decade-plus of working almost exclusively with white stoneware and porcelain skewed that perception, as did some test pots that were fired in the soda kiln before this load, in what must have been a very oxidized firing.

This was really disappointing at the time, both because I'd been really happy with that first week's pots at the bisque stage, and because the information I gained after the firing could have so easily improved the whole load if I'd somehow been able to gain it beforehand. I could have easily reduced the kiln less, or crash cooled it at the end to lighten the body color, and these pots (and rather salt-resistant clay) could have easily taken two or even three times the salt I put in. Ah well; live and learn.

The day afterwards, I realized I had to just get over it, commit to filling a good portion of another kiln before the month ended. Which, in a way, was probably really aided by the circumstances. At home, my tendency would be to linger over a bad firing for days, if not weeks, dwelling on the losses instead of highlighting the few bright spots, asking new questions and getting on with it. So, happily, I now have a bit of a template for not doing that the next time it all goes to hell.

So I rebounded and started throwing more pots. Those are them on the left side of the table -- I blasted through the rest of that dark Hestia clay and then switched to a stash of B-mix Woodfire left over from a previous class session, which came out much closer to my initial aims. And, by the end, somehow I squeezed in almost as many pots after the halfway mark as I did at the beginning, despite wearyness, cracking fingertips, all the chores of drying, bisque firing, cleaning up, etc., and a thousand beckoning distractions (see potters! walk in the woods! drive to Seagrove! relax and enjoy the ambience!).

That process of getting back in the saddle was helped mightily by a couple days working next to Michael Kline in the studio. He came up to make mugs for the Penland auction, and we (or at least, I) had a grand time spinning clay, talking about blogs and podcasts, and getting to know each other in person, after several years of revolving in similar orbits online.

The original idea for this trip started, at least in part, with provisional plans for a group of potter/blogger friends, who mostly know each other in the virtual sense, to all do the winter studio rental together. As ambitious ideas often do, that one fell apart once the realities (time, money) asserted themselves, so I had to make a big adjustment to my expectations for the month when I realized I was pretty much going it alone. But, although two days and two potters was a lot less than we'd originally imagined, that time with MK was a really nice compensation, and proof (as if I'd needed any) of how great it will be when we finally manage to pull it off someday.

Also, that plan not working out probably made room to get to know the other people who were there better, and I'm grateful for that opportunity, too. It also let me explore different things (or the same things differently) than I would have as part of that group, which might still pay off in ways I haven't entirely sussed out yet.

Also: nice Ron Philbeck rat shirt!

Other than that, it was game on. She absolutely loved getting to pelt me with snowballs, as her absolute maniacal laughter every time she connected proved. (Photo credit, with bonus points for catching that shot in the air right before impact: Mom.)

I also got to visit MK's studio a couple times, which was grand. He was a very generous host, and a lot of fun to hang out with. It was so rewarding to see his place in person, after years of consuming every bit of his blog, seeing it in photos, etc. We had some really interesting conversations, which happens so rarely for me in my normal life -- sitting with another potter over lunch is a less-than-annual event -- that it was almost mind-blowing.

And the pots! Good grief… so much good stuff to see, from the pots for sale in the showroom (more on that later), to the stuff around his studio, to the shelves piled high with beauties and gems in the kitchen. Too much information to absorb. Cindy and I almost talked ourselves into taking home this big jar -- almost! We got several smaller pieces instead; all of them great. But in retrospect I wish we had, even though I'd have had to ship it home, with all the pots of my own I made and needed to lug back. Someday we'll get one. Someday.

(Dang. Should've got that one, too.)

Here's the crossdraft soda kiln (SODA ONLY!), which I split a load in with two other people right at the end of the month. I got another 50 or so pots through it, and the experience of firing a type of kiln that I'd never done before was great. Interesting contrast from the Julia kiln I showed last week. Lots to think about in the kiln building department.

Most of these pots turned out pretty well -- the usual range of 'absolute winners', 'par for the course-ers', disappointments, and 'damn, I really wish I had that decision to do over again-s'.

In some ways, it renewed my interest in straight soda firing, as opposed to mostly salt and minimal soda like I do in my kiln. But in others, it reminded me of the drudgery goes into doing all that spraying near the end of a long firing day. There's a cost for the sweetness that it adds, and I'm still not sure it's one I want to pay with every kiln load. Which seems kind of dumb, relative to the amount of time that goes into the pots themselves before they ever hit the kiln, but still. I'm staring middle age in the face, and none of this is going to get any easier going forwards. To put it in IT terminology, I'm not sure that process scales well enough for me, whereas tossing in a few salt burritos is easy as pie. We'll see. Plenty of time to think about that more before I commit to my new kiln.

This jug (and yunomi in the background) are from Lucille; not my firing but another one before it (again, fired by someone else). Dark stoneware clay, flashing slip, really blasted by the soda vapor. Pretty great! I had another jug like it, a sibling pot, that came out of my firing even better…

But it'll have to wait for the next batch of photos here. Or the next. Yes, I'm drawing this out for a few more weeks, it seems. Time is not on my side these days, I'm afraid, and tw@se is paying the price.

And/but: I'm also enjoying the slow burn of revisiting these images -- and my ideas and feelings about the Adventure -- over a longer span of time. My instinct was to just blast them all up here at once, but I think there are benefits to this constraint, too. Perhaps you agree.

March 17th, 2013

"The swans are ghosts on the jet black water." - David Gray

Even as the memories fade, and the tyranny of the Here and Now reasserts itself, here are some photos of my great Adventure:

I started out with a lot more -- some of my clay, bats, a couple small batches of dry mixed glaze and some bisqueware -- then decided to leave them all behind and take my chances on the tools and materials I would find at Penland; mostly for fear of overpacking the car on the way there, knowing that I'd need space to bring back pots. But also from a bit too adventurous an assumption that I could go there, start with completely unfamiliar materials, and get enough new pots made to be firing kilns before the halfway mark. In retrospect -- or if I ever get to do something like this again -- I should have taken a little of my clay, at least a batch of a familiar liner glaze and a few dozen biqued pots. Those would have made me less dependant on the qualities of the clay there; with less risk in the first salt firing with liner glazes (eg. not so many eggs in one basket); and added the option to get into the firing phase earlier, and to see my home clays in other kilns and firing cycles.

Also, one of the few disappointments with the studio gear there was the bats. Mine are nice, chunky ones that don't flex, and I loathe throwing on plastic. Especially plastic with the thousand little cavities underneath, which inevitably store some of the clay used by the previous potter. (Which in this case was earthenware; ugh.)

Cindy shot this photo looking out the front window of the house we rented. She shot so many great ones from this vantage point that it's hard to pick just one to share, but I love the color here; the overcast sky behind the trees; the ghostly silouhettes of the lamp inside and the deck chair outside. It *feels like what being there felt like.

That's the first light coming over the mountain behind the house, setting the mountain out front on golden fire. The views there were spectacular, not the least because they were such a contrast to our views of flatness back home. I got to see the sun rise and set on that mountainside of trees most of the days we were there (fewer risings, as I often cruised up to the studio before dawn to get an early start, but I made it home for almost every dinner and evening, in time to watch the daylight fade back in the other direction across that infinity of winter trees.

It was about a five minute walk up a short stretch of mountain road, around the curve of the amazing meadow-like swale the slopes downhill from the school. You can't see it for the fog in this photo, but from the front porch of our house I could practically see the window next to my wheel in the clay studio: a straight-line shot of about a half mile. Most mornings, I could tell if I was going to be the first person there (or if I'd lapped the last person to leave) by which lights were on in the buildings up ahead. There were several days of mist, light snow, or a little ice on the road, but I never got rained on once. How's that for luck?

Not as appealing in this night shot; during the day having those banks of windows in both directions was glorious. This treadle wheel -- I assume, based on its copper splash pan -- was made by Doug Gates; probably many years ago. It was a little worse for wear, and the wheelhead wasn't exactly on center (which, I suppose, was good antidote for my perfectionism instincts, but took some getting used to) -- but it was great to be able to work on my preferred wheel type, rather than getting stuck on an electric. Also: who knows which other potters have turned on this wheel? Possibly -- probably -- some of my heros!

(I have it on good authority that this is about where Mark Shapiro sat during that fateful/semi-legendary (at least to me) workshop with Michael Simon in the late 80's. And yes, learning this fact made me do a long, thoughtful pause...)

For most of the month, there were 6-8 of us sharing the upper clay studio, which has 2-3 times as many people in it during regular class sessions. So it was nice to be able to spread out some, with extra carts, tables and shelving. (But, at the same time, odd to have so much *less space than I'm used to in my studio.) This was about midway through the first week; just starting to fill up that warecart.

Here's my girl, playing with some of my trimmings. Unlike at home, where I've still never quite gotten around to making a space in the studio for her to work/play in, we did this many times at Penland, which was really great. She loves getting her hands into the clay, adding water, using my tools (the sharper the better). It was great to give her space at the table and a ball of clay and just see where she went with it. Sometimes we made stuff together, a few of which I kept and fired, most of the time she just moved the material around and seemed content with that; we might have a "process artist" on our hands, at least until I get in there and mess it up with expectations and the idea of producing product.

The other people working in the studio were really generous about letting her come in and do this, even to the point of loaning her tools to use or letting her watch them work. So it was really cool to have her see other potters working, and to just kind of take in the atmosphere of the place. From the parenting angle, it doesn't get a lot better than that.

Also: so cute!

Cautious beginning: small bowls, yunomis, test tiles. A new, untested batch of white slip on a new, untested clay. (Ends up it worked great -- no flaking! But I didn't know that then, so I was more cautious with it than I wanted to be.)

Kiln loaded; first salt firing of mostly my stuff. This is my best "what could go wrong?" pose, although I was far from certain about any of it. Photo by my new friend Janice.

Ends up I had good reason to be. The firing went really well -- almost flawlessly, which really improved my sense of what kind of kiln I want to build at home (eg. probably a lot like this one). But the results were pretty disappointing: really dark, over-reduced clay; not nearly enough salt on the ware; shop glazes that didn't resemble their test tiles very much; the old problem of my black underglaze bubbling in too much reduction. More on that next time.

My walk home most evenings was along this wooded path, which parallelled the road pictured above, running behind the houses. Quiet, drop-dead beautiful, filtered sunlight… that walk each day, even though most of the time I was bone tired, was like my reward for having put in a solid 8 or 10 (or 12) hours in the studio, and a nice transition from that to home life, and dinner, and bath time, etc. I got into a rhythm of going back up to the studio most nights, after Maggie was asleep, for another hour or so; tucking wet pots in for the night, or trimming a few stragglers, or just cleaning up the chaos to allow a fresh start the next morning. I almost never do that at home -- go back to work at night -- except to just go throw plastic over pots that I've let dry through the evening.

But it's something I'd like to try to take away from the "sabbatical" experience, even if just in miniature. That's complicated in my studio, during the winter months, by not running the heat 24/7, like in the luxury of the Penland studio. But the rest of the year I have little excuse not to, beyond lack of willpower. I'm hoping memories of this walk through the woods, or the stealthy nighttime drive back, or how wonderful it is to walk back into the studio first thing the next morning to a clean, ready-to-rock workspace, will help motivate me to do it.

Well, that's about half the trip. It's been fun so far, right? The second half is coming up next week. Thanks for reading.

March 10th, 2013

"...its maker has something to say and these needle drops are how he says it." - Alex Pappademas

Well, that was fun.

So I was pretty mysterious about my "potting sabbatical" here, back in January; not so much because I didn't want to advertise that we were going away and for exactly how long and to where (don't be creepy), but more because I had signed myself up for an adventure, of sorts, and had willingly kept myself in the dark about as many of its potential details as possible. I didn't want to know where I was going and what might happen, both for fear of my tendency to inflate expectations beyond all reasonableness, and because it seemed like a lot more fun to just venture out into the wild for a change. It really was.

If you happened to follow my sabbatical blog, or if we're friendly on The Facebook, you already know where I went and much of what I did there. But if you didn't, to spare you the ~13,000 words I wrote trying to explain it along the way, many of them about Hobbits, I'll try to summarize it here.

The family and I spent a month in the mountains of western North Carolina, where I rented space in the clay studio at the Penland School of Crafts. It was my first chance to go 100% in the studio since my ill-fated, short-lived attempt at being a full-time potter five years ago, and it was almost uniformly glorious.

In four weeks, I made over a hundred pots -- that's a lot, for me. I fired two good sized salt/soda kilns and had pots in several other firings. I met and got to hang out with some great potters and other fine people, visited studios and showrooms, explored the mountain roads a bit. It was a great break from all the routines and obligations of home; a chance to pretend to be someone else for a while. And, somewhat unexpectedly, I worked myself to the bone, one amazing and amazingly gratifying day after another.

It was kind of a surreal, fairytale experience: the seclusion, the ability to focus, the intense motivation to make the most of the time and to hit that next firing deadline. The perceived freedom to try new things in the studio -- even if just for the hell of it -- or to do the same old things but to go about them in entirely new ways. The forced perspective was intense: getting to see my "normal" life from a vantage point outside itself, and therefore getting to see myself differently. Perhaps even to see who and what I am (or could be) with all the trappings of "normal" temporarily removed (or potentially changed). Maybe we go away like this to see and do things we can't see or do at home, and also to be people we can't really be there.

And while I don't mean to say that the month away was revelatory -- it's not like I came back feeling transformed, or with a brand new identity, or even with a restocked arsenal of pottery tricks -- in total it was so enjoyably different that in many ways I didn't want to come back. If there was a simple reboot button on many of the bigger choices one can make in life -- where to live, how to work, what to do, how much risk to absorb -- I would have been sorely tempted to push it.

Of course, there isn't, and I didn't.

But... Huh. On second thought, maybe it was more revelatory that I'm giving it credit for. Near the end of our time there, a friend asked what my takeaways from the experience were and I struggled to come up with much of an answer. Sure, I'd learned a lot about those kilns, and about working in a completely different environment, and about certain parts of my studio habits and working process that I'd taken for granted or forgotten to pay attention to, but I couldn't really point at one grand thing and say, "There. I learned that."

But then after we got back, another friend reminded me that these kinds of experiences don't necessarily have a linear impact on us; much of what happened probably happened in ways that are more subtle that is initially obvious. Some of it -- maybe even the really good parts -- will probably take more time to recognize and understand.

Oh, and hey: thanks for indulging my absence here in the meantime. It's nice to be back.

January 27th, 2013

"Bye, I'm on standby. Out of order or sort of unaligned,
powered down for redesign." - Grandaddy

I'm putting tw@se to rest for a while; settling the machine into dark wake mode, letting this field go fallow for a season in hopes of producing better crops later. But that doesn't mean I'm stopping -- indeed not! I've decided to change things up during my "sabbatical" by stirring up trouble over here instead.

I will probably post there a little more often for the duration of this experiment and, I hope, a little differently. Consequently, it will probably also be a little less useful (and/or intelligible) than usual. It might... well, it might turn into just about damn near anything, for all I know now.

So -- here goes nothin'.

January 20th, 2013

"Thinking about... leaving." - American Football

Yep. Another post about blogging. Please contain your excitement.

So... where to begin? Next week, I'm starting a potting sabbatical. Or, at least, that's how I'm thinking of it. I'll leave out the details of what exactly that means for now, both because I'm not entirely sure yet and because it'll be a more fun as a slow reveal. (Won't it?)

In any case, it should be really different and very interesting; I'm trying to keep my expectations in check, but even so, it's hard to imagine how it won't be pretty great. I'm excited.

After giving it a lot of consideration, I've decided that the perfect companion to that will be to take a blogging sabbatical, too. Naturally, I'm not sure quite what that means yet, either, but it certainly means that some of the constants here will become variables for a while. I'm fairly certain it will be not at St. Earth for a change. As with my potting adventure, the possibilities seem wide open.

I might try a different duration between posts -- anything from multiple times per day to -- I don't know... perhaps even not at all? Or I might try something stylistic, like writing more thematically, or adapting a clever new gimmick. I might lean more heavily on photos -- maybe just a running Tumblr-style list with captions; then again, I might omit them entirely for a while and see what I can do with only words for a change.

It might be an opportunity to see how most other bloggers live, posting through a system like Wordpress or Blogger, instead of my wildly anachronistic, manually-intensive homegrown system here. I still doubt that I'll ever be content working within a system I can't completely customize, but trying one on seems like a good way to find out. Maybe the benefits (auto-generated RSS! drag-and-drop images! updates from any browser!) are worth the compromises (prebuilt templates, excess chrome and wingnuts, the ever-present temptation to turn on comments).

And so... so. I don't know much, I guess. It might be super cool, it might be nothing. But I guess what's inherent in the idea of a sabbatical -- as opposed to a mere vacation -- is that I intend to proceed with working, and probably even more intensively than usual. On the blogging side, that might mean a temporary retreat to regroup in private. After six-plus years of going at it weekly, I'm starting to feel the need to rethink what I'm doing here and why, and if the things it has been are really what I want it to be in the future.

I might spend a lot of time on just a few things -- aiming for quality instead of quantity for a change -- and if that's the case, the visible output will probably be rather sparse. Of course, I'm more likely to do just the opposite. It'd be a hell of a lot of fun to temporarily embargo my self-imposed rule about writing drafts and letting things simmer on the back burner of my brain overnight before serving them up for public consumption. (I suspect that the much more popular practice of hitting "Publish" before there's time for any second thoughts to get in the way triggers some heavy-duty neurochemical reactions.) (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

In any case, I thought I should give you, my tens of regular readers, a polite heads up. In case next week (or weeks) there's nothing new here; or in case tomorrow this spontaneously morphs into something wildly different.

January 13th, 2013

"The sign of a perpetually restless and unsatisfiable artist chafing against
a lifetime's worth of impossible expectations." - Alex Pappademas

I was hoping to squeeze another meaty post in before next week, but alas, it's not to be. Instead, here's the thin gruel of another top-of-mind ramble; what I've come to think of as my alternative

<loop>

style.

As I think about change, about leaving, about doing the same things in a different place or different things in a different place, I come back to this idea of the loop; that it's all been said before, that I'll likely say it all again in different ways, that sometimes I have to write an awful lot to eventually write anything good. "We are not the apes of a particular prejudice."

Find different ways to make the same mistakes again.

And that loops are OK; they are nature, they are human nature. [Including human imperfection and frailty, of course.] Loops: wrapped up in a tidy, graphically overloaded bit of symbolism -- that sideways eight that mocks us with its immortality, as we age and wheeze and watch hopes and deadlines go flying by like geese headed to different weather.

Then again, I've probably already overplayed the whole <loop> thing. While going further behind the scenes into what it was like writing that short piece for CM might not be a big improvement, let's try that instead.

For one thing, it really got me thinking about venue and context. If writing were like sports, with Home and Away games, that was a big Away game, with the season on the line, after an unbroken five year string of comfy Home matches.

It was quite strange; disconcertingly hard but strangely fun, too. In some ways very similar to my normal process and experience, wildly different in others. It's still mostly thinking things out, trying to get at the kernel of an idea or the truth behind the reportable facts, and then put that into words that, hopefully, have some flow and energy to them. But the venue was obviously different; I couldn't escape the awareness that these words were going to end up in a new place, and therefore had more weight or importance to them. I had to imagine a different audience, to form a view of who they were, in aggregate, that I could aim the writing at. And, beyond that, most likely a much, much larger audience, which is frightening and humbling in its own way.

Here, with the words I put on screen week after week, there's so little concern for length or final format. I feel free to get things wrong; to think of everything that goes onto the server as a polished but still first draft. As "seriously" as I take it at times, my general approach is that it's a word playground. Few rules, limited consequences. But suddenly needing to fit a chunk of words into a box yay big on a glossy piece of paper, and knowing that paper will then be duplicated many, many times (I hope) was daunting.

The toughest part was writing to a word count. At 750 words, it was fairly restrictive. Heck, in a typical week here is about the point where I've just finished warming up and started the turn into the crux of the idea. [You just made it through 562 of them.]

I got to a draft that I was happy with, after having two very helpful editorial reads by Cindy and OKG, only to discover that it was still over 900 words. (In the editing, I kept adding back as much as I cut... Duh.) I eventually pared it down to 777 -- almost there! -- but was stuck for anything else to cut without sacrificing too much meaning. As usual, I stumbled into trying to tell too big a version of the story to fit the resources allowed.

In any other week, that limitation is only time and attention -- how much I can say before the timer in my head goes off and I have to move on to other things. But I guess that's the luxury of blogging: unlimited word count, unlimited pixels, and as much time as you can stand to throw at it.

It was hard to write about that particular topic, one I'd agreed to months in advance, whether I really felt compelled to just then or not. I suppose a good thing about assignments is they can help push through self-imposed restrictions or weaknesses: procrastination, laziness. How many weeks do I start out thinking that I'll finally tackle Big Idea X, only to give up mid-draft and veer into easier, safer territory? Lots of them. How many ideas do I have sitting as half-drafts in a text file somewhere, with little motivation to go back and make something of them? Dozens.

Anyways. Now that the writing's done, it's also strange that I have no idea when it might be published -- if it ever is -- or to what extent it will be edited or cut. I've lived in blogging space for so long and, aside from term papers in college, have really only ever written here, that things like controlling the levers that make a particular chunk of text public and having final say over every last detail are just assumed; like gravitational forces, or natural rights rather than assigned privileges.

Signing over those rights -- both in the sense of editorial final cut and the rights to publication -- means I can't repeat what I wrote here, which really nags at my desire for archival completeness. Assuming they ever see the light of day on the glossy page -- and, hopefully, on the magazine's site -- I'll give a heads up here.

Lastly, it seemed a bit odd to be writing for a publication that, while still certainly influential, I've all but given up on paying attention to. (Sorry, CM. I genuinely mean no offense. But I've got to go with both-barrels honesty here, as usual.) As I've written before, my days as a subscriber to that magazine (and most ceramics magazines) are long gone. A recent resampling didn't do much to change my desire to read it, despite some notable improvements to the product in the intervening years.

Unfortunately, to my tastes and for my needs, it's still too heavy on sculpture. And I can't escape the conclusion that it features a fair amount of rather weak writing (I don't except my future self from that judgement, either). And it is frequently, probably unavoidably overwhelmed by its advertising. The content would have to be pretty damn spectacular to make me face down another of those full page ads of a kiln load of Vegas Red; luxurious, can't-miss, premixed Cone 6 glazes; classified ads for fully stocked "potteries" in some resort town for only a few million dollars, give or take; and back pages littered with studio gadgets like self-centering clay or yet another variation on a Giffin Grip.

(Surely there are even worse contemporary examples than those. I'm relishing the fact that I have to really dig into my memory to recall what sort of horrors used to lie outside the content boxes of the typical issue.)

All of which, perhaps, screams the question: Why did I take the assignment?

Answer: I don't know.

Certainly not for the money -- it's unpaid work. I'd be happy for a free t-shirt out of the deal, and will likely have to settle a copy of the issue.

The chance to blah my words at a larger audience? Perhaps. But what audience do I imagine that being? Potential future tw@se readers? Hardly! Students and potting beginners, their minds susceptible to my skewed, corrupting views of the ceramic universe? Maybe. If there's a rabble out there, I'm probably guilty of wanting to rouse it, at least a little bit. Fellow Dreamers, future or past, successful or failed, who might somehow benefit from hearing my heavily-condensed, cringe-worthy story? Yes. Probably, mostly, that one. I felt more obligated to say yes than interested, like I was being asked to contribute my little bit to the larger picture, and that it would be selfish to withhold it.

Without a doubt, I have debts to pay to the community of potters that raised me in clay. I was given so many five gallon buckets full of free advice, encouragement, technical knowledge, inspiration, you name it, that I feel a duty, an obligation, to repay it with whatever I can contribute to the potters' hive mind. Despite the hubris required to believe that my experience in the realm of KTD is unique enough, or considered enough, or well-stated enough to be valuable to someone else, I guess I believe it is. I hope so.

<loop>

January 6th, 2013

"The river to the ocean flows, a fortune for the undertow.
I've got to leave to find my way." - R.E.M.