Do you ever get tired of hearing that you learn more from your failures than from your successes? I suppose it’s true but I think I’ve learned enough. I just want to have some success with what I’ve learned from all those failures! Five pieces came out of the kiln this week and they are all teaching me something…I’m not sure what, though.
I’ve narrowed it down to two overarching issues. One, as teacher Megan Walsh said with fine diplomacy, my aesthetic skills 
outstrip my technical skills. In other words, I know what I want it to look like but I don’t know how to make it happen. Fair enough. Second, the qualities that I have enjoyed in drawing with charcoal, I have tried to apply to porcelain with iron oxides. But the firing changes everything. Materials and processes have their own demands and their own gifts. It will take time, if not 10,000 hours, at least more than I have given to the process of working with clay.
Meanwhile, here are two pieces I rather liked, both simple in construction and decoration. And it wouldn’t be fair not to show you one of the “teachers”, i.e., the failures.
I leave on Sunday, June 10, for Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, where I’ll be teaching for nearly two weeks. I’m looking forward to it as I do to most teaching experiences but with an extra bit of joy. Haystack is an extraordinary place. It is beautiful and beautifully run to allow for the best possible learning and teaching experience. I will try to write more often from there, though the island does not have very good internet connection so posts may come through in bunches. We’ll see.