There are things that one does not think about until asked.  What do you want for Christmas?  Who is the best rock’n'roll singer of all time?   How do you make a great martini?  You gather your own experiences and knowledge together and try to come up with an answer.  I have had that experience twice in the past few weeks.

First, I participated in a portfolio review at RISD, talking with junior and senior students about their work and their artistic futures.  Second, I was one of three speakers at Maine College of Art, discussing what it is to be an artist and the relationships that support one’s practice.  In both cases, I felt wise…and old.  Every time I would come up with something to say, I would couch it (in my own mind, at least) with, “Well, times have changed, but…”  or “I’m not sure if this is still true…”  But I realized that a lot of what I had to say about the last 35 years was still relevant today.  We were asked to have some sort of take-away handout and so I tried to come up with a succinct reduction of what I intended to say.  Here is a list of ten things to consider.

1.  Make good work.

2.  Pay attention and make notes.

3.  Be respectful to everyone you work with, sell to, teach or learn from.

4.  Make commitments and keep them.

5.  Consider your representatives (galleries, collectors, institutions) as your partners and treat them as important parts of your career because they are.

6.  Have fabulous images of your work but make sure that the work looks better in reality than the images do.  Otherwise you’re lying.

7.  Find some way to teach, mentor or serve in your field.  You are giving back, developing your audience and opening yourself up to all sorts of possibilities by doing this.

8.  Every way you interact with the marketplace is a game.  Choose a game you feel comfortable playing and play it with intelligence and honor.

9.  Commit totally to your work and career.  You wouldn’t want to go to a dentist who only practices when he or she can find the time.  You must be at least as professional as a dentist.

10.  Make good work.

There were many other points that came out in my talk and the others’, as well.  Nothing terribly new or counter-intuitive.  I’ll touch on some of them in future posts, if you are interested.  What I came away with was the sense that it’s all connected and it’s all a process.  I also wondered if the same aspects of a career in art for the past thirty-five years will be important for the next thirty-five years.  I have a feeling that commitment, respect and making good work will be.  I sure hope so.

The image above is of some work that just came out of the kiln.  I am delighted.  It looks the way I thought it should, even after giving it up twice to the kiln gods.  Not finished yet, but close.

Meet Duckie.  He is a classic bathtub duck and has been with us for more than thirty years.  Being an extrovert and rather proud of his boyish (duckish?) good looks, he was happy to serve as model for this post.  Even if you have never had a Duckie in your life, you probably are familiar with the sense of play that he represents.  He, like Mick Jagger and Donald (the other) Duck, is an icon of good times.  But what if you put him in another context?

For those of us who make objects, context requires our attention.  What we make is always seen in a context while we are making it, when we show it to others and when it goes out into the world.  Context is the reason we prefer an uncluttered work area, white gallery walls and a multi-million dollar collector’s home.  We like to see our work in the best of all possible situations.  We see it more clearly, with more focus and less distraction.

But what if we use the context to tell a story?  I admit that this is why I moved from making one-of-a-kind, free-standing baskets to groupings on shelves and in boxes back in the late 1990s.  I wanted to create a context for the baskets, to expand the story I could tell.  This led to making objects other than baskets as part of the work, painting on the boxes and shelves, and in general doing what was necessary to enhance the idea I was attempting to portray in a larger, more narrative manner.  The elements of context added to the possibilities.

So here is Duckie, telling different stories because of his surroundings.  At home by the bathtub, he is in his element.  He is where he is “supposed to be”.  His surroundings reinforce his known and expected persona.

Afloat on the Back Cove, he is unexpected, but still in his element.  If the wild ducks on the water this morning had cooperated, you would have seen him in a slightly off-kilter scenario.  Water, yes.  Ducks, yes.  But different water and altogether different ducks.  His similarity to the other ducks would have been easy to accept, though his differences would have been apparent as well.

Here we have Duckie the spokesduck, making a political pitch for cleaning up our environment.  He is a socially responsible duck!  Visually, I like the similarity of the forms of the can and his body.  They could both be floating on the Back Cove, one right, if a little odd, one totally not.

But now he has gotten himself into trouble.  Humorous, yes, but with a tinge of drama, not least of which would be the smell if someone turned on the burner.  Danger lurks.  His expression even seems to have changed to one of apprehension.  Don’t worry.  He is now back on the bathtub, in safe, familiar surroundings.

Using the idea of context can give more meaning to your work or, at least, the opportunity for guiding the perception of the meaning.  The viewer will still bring his or her own experiences, creating his or her own story.  But you can set the stage.

On Monday this week my husband and I were at Lime Rock Park in Lakeville, Connecticut.  I think I mentioned once that he is a motorhead.  This was the first track day of the season, eighty or so men and women in small, fast cars going around a hilly, curvy track in the beautiful hills of western Connecticut.  I went along as traveling companion and, besides,  I adore staying in motels, even for just one night.

Because I had no role to play other than dispensing moral support, which usually amounted to “Good luck and have fun!” each time he went out on the track, my mind wandered in my off moments.  The notion of good luck kept coming around in my mental vision, probably because I felt that it was something tangible that I could add to the proceedings.  What is luck, after all?  How much could I count on it to protect my husband as he zipped around the track at 150 mph?  After some consideration, I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t count on it at all.

There is no luck.  When something happens to us that is outside of our control and we like the results, we call it good luck.  If we don’t like it, we call it bad luck.  You’re walking down the street and a passing car hits a puddle and splashes you.  Bad luck.  Your friend who is walking to your left on the inside of the sidewalk does not get splashed.  Good luck?  Not really.  Something happens and we are either affected by the event or we are not.

Luck is something we use to try to explain the unexplainable.  We try to understand why things happen the way they do and we have these odd bits left over that have nothing to do with the choices we make or categories we devise in order to comprehend life.  Those odd bits go into the good luck pile or the bad luck pile.  A friend has an accident and we say, “Oh, he was lucky.  He broke only one leg!”  In order to minimize the horrific possibilities of the experience, we invoke good luck.  But there is nothing lucky about the event, only what might have been.

This mind-wandering has nothing to do with anything, I suppose, but I am much more careful about saying that I’m lucky or unlucky.  The truth is, I just am.  It puts things, even incomprehensible things, in their right category.  Not good luck or bad luck, just Life.  On our way home late in the evening, we heard the horrific news of the bombings in Boston.  The victims were neither lucky nor unlucky.  They just were.  They were where they had every right to be and the actions of others, of evil, twisted others, harmed them.  Luck had nothing to do with it.

It’s maple syrup time in Maine.  Actually it’s almost past.  The period of time in early spring of warm days and cold nights, relatively speaking, varies from year to year.  This year, we have had a good season.  Around six weeks ago, the daytime temperature consistently exceeded freezing and at night settled into the 20s.  Perfect for the sap to flow.  And sap is what it is all about.

We went to the sugar house of a friend on Maple Syrup Sunday.  It is in his back yard and is used, as far as I can tell, only for these weeks of gathering the sap and boiling it down for syrup.  It is a simple but arduous set of tasks.  Start with finding appropriate maple trees, tapping them (that is, inserting a gizmo that finds the sap and delivers it via a small spout to a bucket or flexible pipe), gathering and storing the sap, boiling it down, filtering it, bottling it and then dealing with the cosmic reality that all of that effort is sitting in a mere few dozen bottles of golden delight.  It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.

The boiling is all done in stainless steel pans in this operation and the sap is gathered with hundreds of yards of flexible pipe the runs from many trees to several collection points.  It is collected and taken to a holding tank and then is run into the pans which are heated by a wood stove.  The operation runs 24 hours in some facilities, but because this is a couple of guys kind of operation, it runs for 12 to 15 hours at a time.  There is a lot of cooperation, inter-generational exchange, engineering and history involved.

The next time you see the price of maple syrup and think that Aunt Jemima’s is just fine, thank you very much, remember that it takes forces of nature, human commitment and a lot of time to make this magical stuff.  Sort of like art, don’t you think?  (Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.  The analogy is just too compelling.)  The timing has to be right.  We tap our own experiences and skills and distill the idea to its essence.  We are a part of our own history.

So many people have said to me that I was brave to leave a tenured teaching position all those years ago in order to pursue artwork full-time that I like to think it’s true.  But I wasn’t brave, I was ignorant.  I had no clue what I was leaving, nor did I know where I was going.  Ignorance, while not exactly bliss, did lead me to make a big change and not look back.  As it happens, it was a brilliant decision.  All of the good things of my adult life came from that ignorant decision.

Usually I don’t recommend ignorance in any situation.  The bumper sticker is right, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”  But there are times when we don’t know what will happen if we make a particular choice.  We think we have a gut feeling which we laud if it all turns out fine but call indigestion if it doesn’t.  Gut feelings are probably bits of knowledge that haven’t coagulated into a proper idea so they shouldn’t be accorded any psychic importance, but if they lead us to unknown territory and give us a nudge to cross over, they are welcome.

And that is how I find myself making a body of work with drawing and clay.  I don’t know where it will go.  I don’t know if it is good.  I don’t know anything about it.  This is totally ignorant or crazy.  Or maybe brave.  But I’m feeling the sense of investigation and progress and gratification that comes with the best of work.  These images are of mock-ups, sketches and work in progress.  This is the part of the process I like most.  Anything is possible.

And If you happen to know of a museum, gallery or other venue that wants a nifty small show, let me know.  I would love to be able to show this work.  Gut feeling + deadline?  Now there’s a winning combination!

I owe you an apology.  I started to write here last week, attempting to stay with the once-a-week commitment I had made when beginning this blog, but I found myself writing the equivalent of What I Had for Breakfast again.  I wrote a little bit and then walked away and then came back and wrote a little more and then walked away and, well, it looked like blah blah blah.  I felt as if I were back in high school and had been assigned to write a 500 word essay.  Thinking I was finished, I would count the words and find that I had 374 and so would go back and make every statement even more emphatic, not just, “A year passed” but “A very, very long and terribly arduous year, three hundred and sixty-five days, passed”.  Add eleven words.  Of course, the meaning, if there had been one, was completely lost in a sea of adjectives, adverbs and hyperbolic redundancy.  Sometimes one really doesn’t have anything to say and should just stay quiet.

The problem then becomes coming up with something of interest to say after having given in to the feeling that you don’t.  Everything sounds like blah blah blah.  It’s difficult to find a subject when there are no outside cues to follow, no major advances in the work, no travels or events, no breakdowns or breakthroughs.  When traveling, everything is interesting.  When there is a deadline for a show, everything feels important.  When The Big Storm is coming, everything seems dangerous and dramatic.  Well, none of these things is true.  No deadline, no travel, no big storm.

Actually, this brings me to what I started to write about last week.  It was called “The Trouble with Normal”.  I had nothing to say because everything was normal, even, expected.  We spend a lot of time, or I do anyway, trying to create a day-to-day life devoid of surprises.  We try to make our lives normal.  There will be milk for the morning coffee.  The car will start.  There is something at the studio that interests me to begin the day.  Normal in this sense means easy, predictable, facilitative.  But there is a problem lurking in normal.  It can blind us to the possibilities of the abnormal, the surprise, the choice outside of ourselves.  It takes some watchfulness to be sure that maintaining the ease of normal doesn’t preclude the wonder of abnormal.

So while I may have nothing interesting to say, I can share the wonder of the abnormal with you.  These images were taken out my back door the other evening.  The everyday ordinariness of sunset was transformed by the snow and the light.  Now that’s what I’m talking about.

Last fall, I made fifteen tumblers, all the same size, all porcelain.  I wanted to see how well I could make a particular form, no matter how simple, in repetition.  With each one, my hands learned something new.  New information.  The third was better and more easily made than the first.  The eighth, even more so than the third.  Somewhere around number ten, the learning curve flattened considerably.  I was “getting it.”  The information learned from making was installed in me in a way that it could never have been by reading, looking or dithering.

Last week, I decided to get them into a glaze firing and so had to glaze them all at once and in somewhat of a hurry.  I put clear glaze on the insides of all of them, to allow the porcelain to shine.  And then, settling on a palette of black and white with a bit of brown thrown in, I proceeded to use black and brown underglazes and black and white glazes.  It was pure play, with a bit of anxiety thrown in.  I wanted them to be successful, but more than anything, I wanted them to tell me something.  Information, please.

While I love them all…so real, so tactile, so functional…some suggest more and lead me to thinking beyond these small tumblers.  One cracked, I don’t know why.  One had too thick an application of a black glaze over a wax resist.  Note taken.  But many gave me more than I could have imagined.  Waxy white over matte black gives a creamy, lively surface.  Trailing black glaze over waxy white with a squeeze bottle gives a strongly graphic line.  Using yarn or fabric as a resist or applicator gives a controlled yet fluid pattern, much like the textiles themselves.  The simplest of applications, wax resist dots followed by a coating of waxy white glaze yielded an elegant surface, perhaps my favorite.

An interesting bit of information that came out of this exercise is a clearer understanding of the differences in decorative and expressive capabilities.  Because the goal at this point is to be able to draw on clay, the processes that were the most hand-controlled, the least accidental and dependent on the quality of the glazes, gave me the most information that will be applicable to actual artwork.  But it is the accidental ones that came out of a more abstract approach, allowing the glaze to do what it wants, applying it in straightforward and simple ways, that please me more.  I realized that I have always been envious of potters and metalsmiths and woodworkers who could make objects that people could use in their daily lives.  Now I just have to decide whether these are juice or whiskey glasses…

What do you do with leftover rice from Thai takeout?  Why, make rice pudding, of course.  I made some the other day and it was really good.  The lowly white rice that had started to crust over in the two-thirds-filled little white carton in the fridge had become a custardy delight.  The addition of rum-soaked raisins and lemon zest helped, of course.

I tell you this, not to brag about my culinary talents, but to suggest a metaphor for some work I did this week.  I had a drawing that had served its purpose but really didn’t have all that much to recommend it.  It was one that developed as a series of rescue operations, trying to make something or perhaps to discover something in the process of avoiding the trash bin.  It was successful enough to have been put in the flat file, but would not be pulled out to show anyone.

I was about to experiment with a drawing on a clay piece I had made.  I kind of knew what I wanted to do…black underglaze on greenware, scraped away to leave a black drawing behind…but I didn’t have a subject matter in mind.  Rather than trying to generate a new idea with untried materials and techniques, I searched the flat file and found the drawing.  It was perfect for what I had in mind because a good deal of it was made with parallel marks similar to those that would be created by the serrated metal rib I was intending to use for the scraping.

Two lessons confirmed.  Don’t throw anything away if it has any virtues at all and eliminate as many variables as possible when trying something new.  The piece has not been bisque fired yet and I intend to do some more work on it before glaze firing.  But so far, I love it.  Not the object itself so much as the possibilities I see and the confidence I feel from seeing it develop before my rather unbelieving eyes.

This week has been the first time that I actually see how the wanderings of the past year might join together into a meaningful journey to the next body of work.  That’s just between you and me, by the way.  I don’t like to jinx what feels like a new process forward by talking about it.

If you have some leftover rice, here is a good recipe.

1 C cooked rice, 2 1/2 C milk, 3 large eggs, 1/2 C sugar, 1/2 C raisins (rum-soaked or not), 1 T vanilla extract, 1/4 t salt, 1 T lemon zest.  Mix all together and put in buttered casserole dish.  Place dish in water bath in 325 degree oven and bake for 1 1/2 hours, stirring after 30 minutes to redistribute rice.  It is done when knife inserted in the middle comes out clean.  The top should be lightly browned.  Serve with cinnamon or maple syrup drizzle or lemon curd or whatever you fancy.  Maybe just a spoon.

I don’t know about you, but I feel as if I’m always juggling.  I’m not even in the same league as someone with children or elderly parents or a day job, so I know that I’m lucky.  All the same, I have a difficult time making choices among the opportunities and requirements of being an artist, a wife, a homeowner, a friend, a teacher, a consumer, a reader, a gardener, and all of the rest.  I find the discipline of prioritizing difficult to execute.

For the past two weeks I have been trying an approach that allows me to put studio time at the top of the list in a consistent way.  I have been at a residency.  From the outside, things look pretty much the same but inside, it’s different.  I had noticed that at the residencies I have experienced, the most important element has been the ability to focus because outside demands are limited.  Being away from home helps.  (What?  The kitchen faucet broke?  Sorry, guess you’ll have to call the plumber and stay home when he comes to the house.)  Limiting contact with friends helps.  (I would love to have coffee with you.  Call me when I get back, OK?)  Not thinking about what’s for dinner each day helps.  (Pick up Thai food on the way home, will you, dear?)

So two weeks ago, I said to my husband, “This is art time.  I will be here but I won’t be here as normally I would be.”  Being a swell guy (and probably not understanding what I was saying), he said that he was fine with that.  He loves what I do and does everything he can to support it.  And for two weeks, I haven’t paid bills.  I have stayed at the studio until  seven or later every night.  I have gone to the studio on the weekends.  I have had my hands in clay every single day.  You may have noticed that I didn’t write a blog entry last week.  I was “away”.

I don’t know whether this is a good idea or not.  But it has helped me to establish a rhythm of working that I think will hold up even when I “return” to real life.  Today I paid bills.  I made a couple of dates with friends for the next week.  And tomorrow I will call the plumber to set up a time for him to come to the house to fix the kitchen faucet.  I’m just hoping that the energy and discipline developed during my mini-residency will carry on when the realities of real life are allowed to intrude.  It will have to hold me until there is a looming deadline for an exhibition, a sure reason for focus.

A friend of mine is a very fine painter who from time to time puts words in his paintings.  Normally the words are for political purposes, giving counterpoint to the apparent subject matter of the work.  You see, he paints beauty.  He works against it but he can’t help it.  We have discussed the validity of using written words in visual art and he knows that I am not a fan of the practice.  He, on the other hand, finds it useful in his visual vocabulary.

I’m afraid I take it as an artistic mandate to make clear the statement of the work in the visual imagery.  But that doesn’t mean that I don’t use words in my work.  I do.  They help clarify an idea, to give it shape and borders.  Sometimes just a single word will begin a visual path that ends up in a single work or an entire body of work.  The word, disappear, led to a body of fifteen pieces in 2004.  When I felt myself traveling too far from the original thought in the development of ideas, I would come back to the single word that started the journey.  “How does this idea relate to the original impetus for the work, to disappear?”, I would ask myself.

The other day, when thinking about writing about words here, I wondered how the idea might be turned around.  Might I learn more about a piece I have already made by applying a word after the fact of its making?  What if the original idea has been surpassed in the process of making the piece and it really is about something else?  It happens all the time in the curious process between beginning and finishing.  And in my novice investigation of materials and techniques in drawing and clay, the ideas are vague.  Looking at the work afterwards, endeavoring to identify the one word that comes to (my) mind, helps to clarify that particular work and gives form to where I might go from there.

So here is the assignment.  Choose one or two pieces you have made, perhaps one recent and one from the past.  Try to look at it with a fresh eye.  What word or words come to mind?  Be strict.  Don’t worry if they are the right words.  (They will be the “right” words because they are yours.)  Does the final choice of a word for each piece release other possibilities for the next piece?  I was stunned when the word, dance, came to mind for this drawing I had started.  It suggests all sorts of possibilities, not for drawing dancers, per se, but for allowing the plants to do the tango or the cha cha or the waltz.  They would be very different drawings, don’t you think?  And, no, I will not be putting words in the actual pieces.