From December 7th

Yesterday in class, our ceramics professor showed us slides from his 20+ year career. He’s been making lovely pots for a long time. (Until recently. He switched from using paper-made patterns to using a Mac computer program to create shapes and cut-out patterns for his pots. While I’m not morally opposed to this idea, he switched his glazing techniques from these lush, subtle, homey colors and patterns to these sloppy, garish, abstract, clashing colors and designs that I find confusing and quite ugly. I know an artist has to evolve, but it’s a pity, since his earlier work made me swoon and now I wouldn’t want any of his new stuff.)
Anyway, when he was 25 or 26, he bought a farm up by LaCrosse, WI, and built his own kiln, raised pigs and chickens, worked at home, had two kids and taught at a bunch of different schools while working as an artist. His two kids would spend a lot of time in his studio, drawing and using clay. He started to explore the notion of pots. How much do we understand about form, composition, shape and function of pots, even when we’re little kids? His son would draw this teapots with crazy long handles and spouts, and even with a minimal amount of information---a roundish body, a snake tube, a squiggle—a 6-year old, or even an adult, can understand that this is a teapot. Where does this teaching come from? How is it that we can feel that something works or doesn’t work—the spout is too wide, the foot is too small, the lid doesn’t fit—even if we can’t articulate it in words? How do we know this? No one sits us down as children and says, this is a cup. This is a bowl. This is a teapot. This part of the pot has a relationship to this other part of the pot.
(As an aside, this angle of thinking is common in our critiques. Mark constantly mentions the subtle understanding we all have about pots. During the cups with handles assignment particularly, but also notably with pitchers and bowls, it was so interesting to hear people choose an aesthetically pleasing piece, and then dissect what exactly they would use it for. “Well, this would be perfect for a hot drink, but not for a cold one.” Or “the lip is too wide, so I wouldn’t really want to drink out of it.” Or “Because the bowl has a rippled lip and a smaller foot, I would never use it for food. I would use it as decoration instead, or for holding something like beads.” 99% of the time, when someone explained this about a piece, everyone else would nod. How is it that we all know these things? Or feel the same way about a single pot, even coming from different backgrounds? That because of the size of the foot/lip/spout or the relationship between the parts of the pot, it completely changes the nature of its function? It’s all very interesting.)
Also, his children were avid readers, and he started noticing the illustrations in children’s books with ceramics in them. He started making a game out of it for himself, multi-tasking as he read the book, and critiquing/searching for pots (especially teapots, because he was making a lot of these at the time) among the pages. Like the notions of Warren Mackenzie, a well-known potter from here, (who believed that pots are really important to people’s lives. We have an intimate relationship to pots---we choose them to use, we hold them in our hands, we put them in our mouths, we wash them, we store them in our cupboards, and repeat the cycle a hundred, a thousand times. Pots bring people together—like food brings people together—and we can become attached to dishes like friends), Mark started thinking about the relationship of the pots to the characters in the storybooks. He showed one drawing of a gathering of animals. Surrounding a teapot and cups were a horse, a goose, and a pig, holding a teacup. Take away the pottery, and the picture doesn’t make sense. But give everyone a teacup and we completely understand why the animals are there. He found a drawing of a teapot as a framed artwork on the wall, which in itself is another fun thing to think about—how ceramics always seems relegated to the craft world instead of the art world, and how an illustrator could straddle that idea by creating a way to shift a teapot to high art.
Lastly, he also found drawings in the children’s books of forms of teapots that he loathed. He decided to explore these shapes to figure out what specifically he hated, what made him react so strongly to the drawings. It’s such an interesting way to think about things that I totally got a kick out of it.
It was really the first time that he really explained his philosophy on pottery, and how his thinking evolved over two decades of making pots. I really enjoyed it. This is what I want from a ceramics class---I want to be engaged with the theories of making pots, of function versus abstraction, of using glazes not just as colors but as indicators of density or weight. Mark will hint at these things during critiques, say a few things, but he doesn’t really engage us—or say enough for us to understand where he’s coming from instead of confusing us—until now, the 2nd to the last week of class. During critique, we stand around and one at a time we discuss the issues we had while completing the assignment while he asks questions of the individual. We don’t discuss. We don’t offer constructive criticism or much praise. (I do sometimes, because I hate standing there saying nothing.) I think I want interaction on a graduate level, but I don’t have a life that would allow me to go to grad school for art. At least not now. You can’t work full time as an art grad student. You can’t have young children or have too many social obligations. You live at the studio, every day, T.A.ing, running the kilns, doing your own work, helping with classes. It’s like having two full times jobs in itself, and I can’t do that right now. That’s what I missed about taking classes—was the peer group. It’s hard to get without being in school. At a studio, everyone is doing their own thing, and trying to make a living. No one really has time to discuss the philosophy, or theories behind the pots.
Sigh.