I see it in all three of the areas of creativity in which I'm active: writing, music, and now pottery (from poetry to pottery).
Without technique, one's creativity is limited.
True, children are endlessly creative and boldly imaginative, but the limits of what a child can do are evident.
However: the effort to acquire technique often stifles creativity.
The young writer becomes aware of the need to write correctly and stifles her imagination.
The young musician strives to control her instrument and stifles her expressivity.
The young potter concentrates so hard on producing centered, symmetrical, and light pieces that she loses the drive for originality and spontaneity.
For the mature artist, technique and creativity feed into one another. One enhances one's technique in order to create things that were beyond one, and one's enhanced technique spurs one's imagination for further creativity.
When I took up music again after more or less giving up on it while I was in college, I studied for two or three years with Stephen Horenstein, a brilliant composer and virtuoso saxophone player - who became and has remained a good friend. At the time, Steve said that if someone were just playing his instrument without being creative at it, there was no point to it. That was the first time I'd heard that from a music teacher. Up till then the challenge had been to play the notes correctly.
I wasn't ready for Steve's message then and, while I kept on playing saxophone, never really extended myself creatively at it.
About fifteen years down the line I acquired a musical guru of sorts: Arnie Lawrence. Perhaps because I was ready for it, I let Arnie push me hard in the creative direction.
Have I become a creative musician? A creative person?
These are the wrong questions.
I am more creative than I was and more appreciative of creativity when I encounter it.
That's already a lot.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Getting into Pottery
I am ordinarily slow to come to decisions, but the decision to start taking pottery lessons was quick and virtually instinctive.
When I was a child of ten or so, my mother enrolled me in a pottery class at Greenwich House, near our home in Greenwich Village, New York City. I was too young to walk to Greenwich House on my own, because I would have had to cross Sixth Avenue by myself, so she took me there. We walked downtown along Washington Square West, where we lived, then to the west on Fourth Street, probably a ten minute walk. It would have taken too much of her time for my mother to leave me, go home, and then come back to get me, so she enrolled in an adult class.
I enjoyed pottery, but after a year or two, all the other boys in the class dropped out, and, I being too young to see the advantage of being alone with a room full of girls, dropped out, too. Meanwhile, my mother remained an avid amateur ceramicist throughout most of the following years.
The idea of taking up the craft as an adult never occurred to me until a few months ago.
I looked up pottery classes on the Internet and spotted one that seemed appropriate from every point of view - it was within walking distance from my house in Jerusalem, the price was not too high, and the hours were extremely flexible. I called up the teacher right away, arranged to go to see her setup, and within a day or two I was sitting at one of her wheels, struggling to center a rapidly turning lump of clay.
Hadas, my teacher is a tall, thin young woman, and her studio is in two front rooms of a small rented apartment in an extremely expensive neighborhood. She has four wheels, a kiln in a shed outside her door, and the clay, firing, and glazes are included in the price of the class. The downside of the flexibility she offers us in scheduling our sessions is that she constantly has to juggle us from one slot to another. Because my time is pretty much in my own control, I have attended classes on various days, at various hours, and so met many of her students. They are mainly women, but now I don't mind that.
Hadas' teaching method is low key and unintrusive. She lets us work on our own and waits for us to ask her how to do things. That suits me perfectly.
I think I would have been happy as a potter. If I'd stuck at it as an adolescent, I'm sure I would have gotten more and more deeply involved in it, maybe gone on into it. But who knows? There were so many external pressures on me at the time, pressure to excel academically, pressure to get into a fine university and qualify for some prestigious kind of work, that I wasn't ever in touch with what I wanted. I can't imagine that I would have considered going to art school and majoring in ceramics in the face of all that pressure, for I had completely internalized the values it came from. I thought that art school was for people who weren't good at other, more important things.
Now, however, as I approach my mid-sixties, having done all the things I was supposed to do, more or less -- received a BA from a prestigious university, earned a doctorate at another prestigious university, worked for decades as a translator (in other words, I put my intellectual gifts to some kind of use), raised a family, and so on -- I feel as if pottery is the artistic medium I have been searching for all my life.
I always wanted to be some kind of artist, but never got it together to become one. Since I'm very verbal, I thought I ought to be a writer, that if I had an artistic medium, it would be words. Indeed, I have had some modest success as a writer and translator, but I never felt delight in what I wrote. I also have some visual skills, and I was seriously involved in photography for a few years, but there, too, I didn't find that I was taking pictures that anyone else couldn't have taken. When I was doing photography, it was more a way of running away from my disaffection with graduate work than involvement in the thing itself.
I am also a serious amateur musician. I play saxophone and clarinet and even went back to university to study musicology half time for three years. I love hearing and playing music, but I'll never be seriously good at it. Not that I mind. I'm not ambitious as a musician. I'm glad to have opportunities to play, and I enjoy it. It's refreshing to do something without being ambitious about it. Perhaps ambition is what took the pleasure out of writing for me - but let's not go into that for the moment.
When I was a child of ten or so, my mother enrolled me in a pottery class at Greenwich House, near our home in Greenwich Village, New York City. I was too young to walk to Greenwich House on my own, because I would have had to cross Sixth Avenue by myself, so she took me there. We walked downtown along Washington Square West, where we lived, then to the west on Fourth Street, probably a ten minute walk. It would have taken too much of her time for my mother to leave me, go home, and then come back to get me, so she enrolled in an adult class.
I enjoyed pottery, but after a year or two, all the other boys in the class dropped out, and, I being too young to see the advantage of being alone with a room full of girls, dropped out, too. Meanwhile, my mother remained an avid amateur ceramicist throughout most of the following years.
The idea of taking up the craft as an adult never occurred to me until a few months ago.
I looked up pottery classes on the Internet and spotted one that seemed appropriate from every point of view - it was within walking distance from my house in Jerusalem, the price was not too high, and the hours were extremely flexible. I called up the teacher right away, arranged to go to see her setup, and within a day or two I was sitting at one of her wheels, struggling to center a rapidly turning lump of clay.
Hadas, my teacher is a tall, thin young woman, and her studio is in two front rooms of a small rented apartment in an extremely expensive neighborhood. She has four wheels, a kiln in a shed outside her door, and the clay, firing, and glazes are included in the price of the class. The downside of the flexibility she offers us in scheduling our sessions is that she constantly has to juggle us from one slot to another. Because my time is pretty much in my own control, I have attended classes on various days, at various hours, and so met many of her students. They are mainly women, but now I don't mind that.
Hadas' teaching method is low key and unintrusive. She lets us work on our own and waits for us to ask her how to do things. That suits me perfectly.
I think I would have been happy as a potter. If I'd stuck at it as an adolescent, I'm sure I would have gotten more and more deeply involved in it, maybe gone on into it. But who knows? There were so many external pressures on me at the time, pressure to excel academically, pressure to get into a fine university and qualify for some prestigious kind of work, that I wasn't ever in touch with what I wanted. I can't imagine that I would have considered going to art school and majoring in ceramics in the face of all that pressure, for I had completely internalized the values it came from. I thought that art school was for people who weren't good at other, more important things.
Now, however, as I approach my mid-sixties, having done all the things I was supposed to do, more or less -- received a BA from a prestigious university, earned a doctorate at another prestigious university, worked for decades as a translator (in other words, I put my intellectual gifts to some kind of use), raised a family, and so on -- I feel as if pottery is the artistic medium I have been searching for all my life.
I always wanted to be some kind of artist, but never got it together to become one. Since I'm very verbal, I thought I ought to be a writer, that if I had an artistic medium, it would be words. Indeed, I have had some modest success as a writer and translator, but I never felt delight in what I wrote. I also have some visual skills, and I was seriously involved in photography for a few years, but there, too, I didn't find that I was taking pictures that anyone else couldn't have taken. When I was doing photography, it was more a way of running away from my disaffection with graduate work than involvement in the thing itself.
I am also a serious amateur musician. I play saxophone and clarinet and even went back to university to study musicology half time for three years. I love hearing and playing music, but I'll never be seriously good at it. Not that I mind. I'm not ambitious as a musician. I'm glad to have opportunities to play, and I enjoy it. It's refreshing to do something without being ambitious about it. Perhaps ambition is what took the pleasure out of writing for me - but let's not go into that for the moment.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Smashing all my Pots
As I may have mentioned, a supremely generous woman has been allowing me to use her pottery studio a few times a week for the past three months or so, and I produced thirty or forty vessels on her wheel. I was planning to ask her to fire them. Then I was planning to bring them to the studio where I take lessons to glaze them and fire them again.
When I asked Hadas, my teacher, whether that would be possible, she told me that I had made an irreparable error: I mixed different kinds of clay that have to be fired at different temperatures. So she can't fire them for me.
It is true that if I had my own kiln and my own glazes, I could have glazed and fired them all at a low temperature, but I'm far from there. So the only thing I could do was smash them all and soak them in water to reclaim the clay - which remains clay that I won't be able to glaze, though I can fire it.
Early this morning I went down to the studio and broke up almost all the vessels I had thrown over the past three months. I put them in a tub of water to turn them back into raw clay, which I've decided to use for projects that don't need glazing. Maybe I'll make a bunch of flower pots, for example, and some sculptures. This morning I started in that direction. But I'm prepared to smash all that in a month or two.
Oddly enough, I have absolutely no regrets about any of the pots that I destroyed. My standards have been going up as my skill has increased, and I didn't see much point in firing and glazing a bunch of heavy, lopsided, clumsy pieces.
Many teachers of pottery impose stringent discipline on beginners, making them smash every pot that isn't centered. Hadas, the teacher I've been going to, is more laissez faire, and she's right. Sometimes clumsy pots have a charm of their own. Why discourage people when they're doing pottery for the fun of it?
When I asked Hadas, my teacher, whether that would be possible, she told me that I had made an irreparable error: I mixed different kinds of clay that have to be fired at different temperatures. So she can't fire them for me.
It is true that if I had my own kiln and my own glazes, I could have glazed and fired them all at a low temperature, but I'm far from there. So the only thing I could do was smash them all and soak them in water to reclaim the clay - which remains clay that I won't be able to glaze, though I can fire it.
Early this morning I went down to the studio and broke up almost all the vessels I had thrown over the past three months. I put them in a tub of water to turn them back into raw clay, which I've decided to use for projects that don't need glazing. Maybe I'll make a bunch of flower pots, for example, and some sculptures. This morning I started in that direction. But I'm prepared to smash all that in a month or two.
Oddly enough, I have absolutely no regrets about any of the pots that I destroyed. My standards have been going up as my skill has increased, and I didn't see much point in firing and glazing a bunch of heavy, lopsided, clumsy pieces.
Many teachers of pottery impose stringent discipline on beginners, making them smash every pot that isn't centered. Hadas, the teacher I've been going to, is more laissez faire, and she's right. Sometimes clumsy pots have a charm of their own. Why discourage people when they're doing pottery for the fun of it?
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