January 29th, 2012

"It's like I'm perched on the handlebars of a blind man's bike." - The Shins

I did a firing this week, and am currently in the no man's land between expending all that effort and receiving the results. I bottle the kiln up tight at peak temperature, then let it fall back to ambience without interference or peeking. Good for the pots; hard on the potter.

(As I tease this sensation out into words, it occurs to me that writing is as close as I'll ever get to meditation. Like an overly-hard puzzle, solving it requires the kind of concentration I can only muster in brief bursts.)

So a full 40 hours or more goes by from the time I turn off the gas to the time I get to see fluxed glazes. The kiln door is a relentlessly stubborn keeper of secrets. I hope to live long enough for the materials science guys to develop a transparent refractory; some matrix of carbon nanotubes and space-shuttle-grade porcelain that allows for a little window into that most arcane of chambers. Imagine watching your glazes sinter and boil, go fluid until they glow like the heart of the sun, and then, ever so gradually, cool back to normative reality; frozen in place until just about forever. Hard to say just how much I would pay for that view.

Waiting out that span, I'm usually pretty worn out -- it's a tremendous amount of work: mixing glazes, waxing, glazing, cleaning, preparing the kiln, loading pots and shelves and then carefully monitoring the firing. (Here I think of my woodfiring predecessors (and contemporaries), whose path to fired pots was a hundred times more rigorous. Simply turning a gas valve is a luxury of modernity.)

But even more tiring is the emotional toll of not-knowing, having made all the investment with virtually no hint of what it will return. Like a pagan numerologist, peering into systems far beyond his comprehension in the futile hope of deriving their formulae, all I can do is compare numbers and times in my firing logs, looking backwards for consistency and patterns in data I generated previously. Any that I find are likely compromised and biased; at best a sketchy outline of what the results in fired clay will be.

And so I wait.

January 22nd, 2012

"Writing and reading allow one consciousness to find and
take shelter in another." - Tom Bissel

It's nice when my meta blogging echoes back across the network. I take that to mean that my experience is overlapping with what's happening in other minds. Like evidence of negentropy; it all coalesces. Or seems to, anyways.

For example, Michael Kline -- who's just back from a blogging sabbatical, and the man I think of as the Godfather of potter bloggers -- has been writing about the whys and wherefores of his endeavor over at Sawdust & Dirt.

His description of how using a camera in the studio helps him see his pots from a new perspective really resonates for me. Reading that, I realized that the same thing has gradually become true for me since I started tw@se. (I just didn't know it until he articulated it.) That habit has subtle yet profound consequences for how I look at, think about, and make my pots now.

That regular process of recording pots and studio activities in photos is another excellent example of the real, unplanned and unexpected rewards to blogging. It's hard to remember a time before the ease and fluidity of digital cameras now, or what it used to be like to finish a run of pots and just... let them dry out, unarchived into pixels. (Despite being married to a photographer well before the digital era, I'd never have bothered back before there were LCD previews and immediate gratification, let alone the required cost and hassle of developing and printing film.) Now, in addition to all the shots that make it here, I have this sprawling iPhoto history of the last four and a half years in the studio. That's the kind of archive that grows in value over time.

I also really like how he compared blogging to a firing log. Seems like a near-perfect analogy. Almost to the point that I'd say any potter who does the second would benefit, in some way, from also doing some form of the first. Even just a tumblr. A quote a day. One photo per week. Anything.

At least think about it.

Elsewhere, my friend Carter's beard waxed philosophically on the theme, extending off of both Michael's post and mine from last week. Carter's post is the exact kind of thing that I've come to depend on him for: an extrapolation of my simple observations into some deeper wisdom and broader perspective. It's like he takes the concept around the track three more times than I'm willing or able to, and comes back with this entirely different, higher-order result. I only wish I could think like that on demand.

Well, I suppose that might seem like a lot of reflexive back slapping and mutual admiration, but it's all completely sincere. Michael's blog has inspired and refined mine over the years in more ways than I can count, and Carter's often feels like the next generation of what pottery blogging could become. I'm happy to share space with both of them.

In not-very-related news, I just saw that Jeff Oestrich is the next show up at AKAR, opening this Friday. He's one of my potter heroes. Can't wait.  

January 15th, 2012

"I walked a thousand miles just to slip this skin." - Bruce Springsteen

The real reward to blogging isn't in sharing, grandstanding or even in the hard fun of composition. It's in the ability (and the quiet obligation) to push first drafts out into public space on a regular basis; to get some ideas beyond the walls of the mind. Their tendency to constrain and obscure often prevents me from knowing what I actually think until after I've written it out and uploaded it to the hive mind.

While it's tempting to undercut my last post with qualifiers or to hedge against it with caveats, I'll try not to. For all its flaws -- the strained analogies, mixed metaphors and overwrought pathos -- I'm glad I finally got it out there. Any further editing or filtering and I'd probably have chickened out and held it back, waiting for a more perfect approach or a less embarrassing means of expression.

But I will say this: getting to see that blob of text as a thing outside of myself has already allowed for a refreshing dose of perspective on it. For example, this week I was listening to an older episode of the excellent Back to Work podcast * while finishing lids in the studio, and heard this quote by Merlin Mann:

"We get to sit around and have first world problems, and that's a blessing."

That's it exactly. File Killing The Dream under First World Problems. I knew that before hearing him say it, of course, but with the distance gained from writing that post I can appreciate it differently now. However crucial this issue is for me, in any sort of larger context it hardly qualifies as a problem at all. Compared to the serious things that most people on earth wake up to each day, it's nothing.

Heck, in addition to the first world designation, it's also an upper middle class-, financially stable-, and relatively healthy-problem. I have friends, acquaintances and neighbors who'd be quite happy if not getting to be a full time artist was their biggest concern. Seen from that reversal of perspective, I'm lucky to even have the time and resources to think about it.

So, there you go.

I've been working pretty steadily in the studio the last few weeks, making pots in porcelain and thinking about another firing here soon. The throwing is going well, but my love/hate relationship with this otherworldly white stuff is intensifying. There are so many more ways it goes wrong than my standard white stoneware. I'm developing a whole new vocabulary related to cracking: rim cracks, base cracks, handle attachment cracks, carving cracks, stamping cracks, too dry cracks, too thick cracks, too uneven cracks. So many otherwise-good pots back into the scraps.

I've always been really impatient with losses stemming from technical problems, so this porcelain will either train me to a new level of tolerance for them or drive me crazy fighting it. If the potential rewards weren't so high, I'd give it up tomorrow. But they are, so I won't.

January 8th, 2012

"Be still my broken dream, shattered like a fallen glass.
It's not ready to be broken just yet.
Lesson once learned so hard to forget." - Sting

Speaking of resolutions, here was mine for last year: give up on the dream of being a full time potter.

Walk away, let it go. Abandon it, disavow it -- kill it if you have to. Bury it, mourn it and move on. Simple in concept, brutally complex in practice.

It started badly, the first several months like a forced march through enemy territory. While in the midst of it, I could never quite bring myself to say so here, at least not explictly. It was too fresh and intense, and the eventual outcome too murky.

I made that resolution without knowing what effect the process might have on my desire to continue making pots, post-dream. I hoped it wouldn't change much. Or that, if it did, it would free me to explore and experiment more, feeling less tied to deadlines and business-related pressures.

But I suspected it might do irrepairable damage to that desire. Because the dream was a key foundational structure in why I committed to making pots in the first place, there was a chance, however small, that after carefully dismantling and disposing of that part the rest might come crashing down around the void. What if the promise of a life spent purely as a potter was the only thing driving me through the hardest parts of making pots?

So I was more than a little afraid of what my life on the other side of Killing The Dream might become. It was a potentially paralyzing threat to my identity, hence the long delay in doing it, despite piles of evidence that it was time. That's where the decision to resolve it on a deadline came from.

Once begun, there were so many open questions, some expected, others discovered en route. I committed to finding real answers, suffering along the path to greater self-knowledge. To digging deep and questioning hallowed assumptions; not settling for shallow changes or merely inserting a new fairytale placeholder to hold open the gaps left by the dead one.

Along the way, I tried to contain it to introspection, private conversations, and manic scribbling in my studio journal. But that's the catch (or perhaps the grace) with writing a weekly blog: the truth will out. It would take a better storyteller than I am to stir up enough filler to hide those cracks, especially while absorbing one sequence of emotional stomach punches after another.

So looking back I see remnants of that battle here, places where I either allowed myself to hint at the truth or where it broke free against my better wishes. My ongoing angst revealed itself in dozens of little ways, which, come to think of it, would be an interesting filter though which to review the last year of tw@se. Maybe I'll do that here soon.

For example, some of those photos in February got downright weird, didn't they? A swampy, occluded glow. A gnarled, rusty old chain. A wispy tree, bent over by the weight of crushing, twice-in-a-lifetime ice.

And the lead-off quotes through the end of winter had a consistent edge to them, an undercurrent of despair and frustration that surpassed my normal reaction to the deep freeze and mere seasonal affect. I rediscovered why song lyrics are such excellent fodder for quotes; suggesting without necessarily revealing, speaking to emotions as much as to reason. Especially if you know the song in question. ("A list of things I could lay the blame on might give me a way out." Damn, I love The Shins.)

But as it almost always does, spring brought about a renewal of sorts. A reframing of the problem, aided by allowing myself to break some self-imposed rules, and by the enforced discipline of a stubborn deadline like my spring sale.

By mid-year -- which, not coincidentally to my plan, marked my 40th birthday -- I'd made significant progress. It gradually began to feel more like a difficult fact to manuever around than a gaping wound in constant need of accomodation and re-bandaging.

The whole perfectionism issue was, I now think, a method of working on the Killing The Dream problem by writing about something else; a sibling issue. Working towards a better stance on my perfectionism was a public stand-in for the private dismantling of the dream. They were/are tied to similar sources and motivated by similar needs.

And by year's end -- albeit still with the occasional pang of remorse, loss of navigational certainty, and hint of wistful promise -- it seemed like I'd gone through the steps and made it through to the other side, intact. Even considering the possibility that I was merely fooled by a clever, subconscious tactic -- like breaking the dangerous parts into smaller, concealable bits -- it appeared that what remained had at the least been carefully reframed, and those bits compartmentalized into more manageable, future-proofed containers. Come to think of it, I remember building those containers: sturdy, triple-sealed, and carefully set off from the core, where their contents will do less damage if still armed. Time will tell.

So, for better and for worse, I'm left with a working life in perpetual equinox; balanced between opposite poles, both always in view, without anticipation of ever fully arriving at either. The strengths and weaknesses of a predictible day job and a creative studio job braided together, reinforcing and compromising one another on a weekly basis. Ho hum.

I suspect this post prompts more questions that it provides answers, and I'll try to anticipate some of them in the coming weeks. For now, I'll say that the resolution plan succeeded. I just may have seen a trip wire to the mid-life crisis early enough to route around it rather than stumble through it at full speed. (Then again, I am not so smart, so maybe this was all prelude to more I simply can't see yet. Even so, you've got to take them as they come.)

Either way, I'm marking my 2011 resolution complete, or at least complete enough to dare making another for 2012. And the fact that my new one is a big committment to physical infrastructure, and requires long-term planning for making pots, says a lot about the result. If last year's problem was still unresolved, I'd most likely continue stalling on this year's.

Kiln shed, kiln shed, kiln shed.

January 1st, 2012

"Start again..." - Ian McCollouch

Despite the turn of the calendar, I'm not feeling the retrospective impulse about last year. At least, not yet. And so far, the new one feels like just a series of lived moments in search of a narrative structure; perhaps that's a failure of my usual, obsessive attempts at pattern construction. I am not so smart.

So my customary overview of the year just gone by will have to wait, if I do one at all. (My therapist, Dr. Gillies, tells me not to fear change so much; to feel free to break with my old patterns and expectations.)

Here's the freshly-archived page of my blogged life in 2011.* I suppose making that transition is looking backwards and taking stock in its own way, minus the summarizing and highlighting.

In any case, I like putting away that long, slow, accumulated bulk of a year's writing and images in favor of the short, speedy blankness of a new page. That feels like a much more significant demarcation of time than flipping over the calendar on the fridge. And it surely beats the comparatively effortless and, therefore, virtually meaningless observation of the iCal robots pasting some new text into my monitors' view.

Making pots again reminds me of the benefits of tangibility, and of the relationship between effort and value.

My resolution for 2012 is simple: build a kiln shed. That's it. There are a dozen others I'd like to achieve, too, but that one is currently bottlenecking my ambitions more than any other. If that's the one new thing I get done this year, the rest will be gravy.

There was an anecdote in the Steve Jobs biography** about how once a year he'd take his 100 best employees on a working retreat. They'd collectively make a list of the top ten projects for the upcoming year, all the exciting products and emerging technologies that they wanted to work on. Once the list was settled, he'd say, "Great. Now we have to pick three and cut the rest." That probably made a lot of those people angry or disappointed. For the dozen other new things I'd like to commit to this year, parts of me are angry and disappointed. But I think the focus and commitment to the highest priority stuff is worth those trade-offs. (Jobs was relentless about staying focused and his ability to eliminate distractions was uncanny. Perhaps even to his own detriment).

So this year is for doing that one new thing as best I can, even if that's mercilessly sacrificing breadth for depth. We'll see.