A Challenge

My cousin N. H. an accomplished, professional printmaker with an international reputation, a woman who has devoted her life to art, as an artist and as a teacher of art, challenged me in a phone call, in response to the blog entry about the Jerusalem Craft Fair. What exactly did I mean when I put down the man who was trying to make a living as a potter? (I didn't mean to put him down. I have a lot of respect for his skill. I know how hard it is to do the kind of work that he does. It's just that if I did have his high level of skill, I don't think I would use it to make 100 mugs all the same, etc.).

I respect N.'s responses enormously, because she's thought about these things, taught about them, and also lived them. She's a fine artist, not a craftswoman. But printmaking has a lot of craft to it, a lot of technique, a lot of process. As she pointed out to me in the phone call, my profession - I am a translator - is also a kind of craft, and I have spent years and years trying to get better at it - even when the task at hand is a routine, even boring, I try to do the best job I can, to use all my skills. So how is that different from the potter who applies all his skill and experience to producing a series of mugs, jugs, bowls, and so on?

I guess it has to do with the level of creativity involved in the task. If I'm translating a carefully written work of literature, a work that embodies creativity, then I need creativity, too. The same goes for making pots.

There were 3 other ceramicists showing their wares at the fair, whose work I respected more than that of the man I mentioned. All three were prolific - they had a lot of ware for sale - but they were also more creative, more experimental, and they made fewer examples of each type of their work. It's very challenging not only to start off every day, making things, but also to make new things and new types of things every day, to master new processes. I'm still at the beginning stage in pottery, where the basic techniques are challenging: centering a pot, building it up, getting it thin and light, controlling the shape. But I can already see that meeting the early challenges only brings you face to face with new ones.

This planter is pretty big. I made it last summer, so when I say that I like it, I'm not being blinded by partiality. If I still like it after a year, then maybe I'm right.
I like the size of it. When my skills enable me, I intend to do a lot of big pieces. I like the presence of a large piece. With handbuilding, I can actually make things quite large, but on the wheel, I can't control the clay yet.
I like the surface. I purposely left the coils visible. I could have rubbed the surface with a damp sponge until it was completely smooth - I've done that - but I wanted it to have a crude, organic feeling, as if it had grown, not been made. I never intended to glaze or decorate the surface.
I also like the usefulness of the vessel. Strictly speaking, it's not useful. It's decorative. But when you make a planter, you're making something in the service of the plant.
I'm not ready emotionally to produce something that I would point at and say: this is a Sculpture. Just as it's hard for me to put some lines of my writing in front of someone and proclaim that they're a Poem. Perhaps if I didn't use capital letters, I'd be more comfortable with the idea. But I believe that Art deserves capital letters.
When you make things like flowerpots or bowls, even vases intended for flowers, you're making something that should be decorative, pretty, but not something that makes a statement, like a self-proclaimed work of art. Though of course it does make a statement - under its breath.
Notoriously, the question, "What is art?" has been answered in many ways during the history of Western culture since the Renaissance. Indeed, the existence of the category, "Art," is far from a cultural universal, and the notion that a painting, a poem, a sonata, and a play are all works of art, and, in that sense, have something in common, is rather odd, when you think of the extreme differences among the things that we regard as art.
So if I sat down in front of a lump of clay and said to myself, "I intend to create a Work of Art out of this lump of clay," I would probably inhibit myself so severely, that I would never touch the clay. But I do intend to produce works that partake of art.

One of a Kind (two of them)

Yesterday evening my wife and I went to the annual summer craft fair in Jerusalem. It is held in the Sultan's Pool, an ancient reservoir in the valley beneath the Turkish walls of the Old City, a setting of the kind not too many cities can offer. I'm very familiar with the place. When I had two active dogs, I used to bring them down there frequently, because they could run about freely without being hit by cars. Now I have only one, elderly dog, who's too arthritic for long walks, so I don't walk about the Sultan's Pool anymore.
As familiar with the place as I am, I found it hard to orient myself, because it was dark, and because of the booths that had been put up all over the place, and because it was packed with people.
The fair always attracts thousands of visitors, because in addition to booths selling crafts from all over the world (Korea, Uzbekistan, Morocco, India - you name it), the work of Israeli craftspeople, and a nice selection of fast foods, there are performances every night by major local pop stars.
After sharing some food - a spicy chorizo wrapped in dough, and a container of Chinese style chicken and mushrooms on white rice - we looked for the Israeli crafts booths. We went the wrong way first and walked past all the international displays, which were generally attractive, but there was nothing new for us there. Three Andean musicians (I don't know whether they were from Peru or Ecuador) were performing on a stage as roamed about - the full tones of pan pipes. The Israeli crafts turned out to be on the far side of the food court, so we had to shove our way through the gathering crowd. First there were some displays by store owners from the Old City, Palestinian merchants selling the kind of thing you can buy there: Hebron glass, embroidery and jewelry, brass trays. Then we finally got to the booths displaying things that the people selling them had actually made by themslves. Most of it had no appeal at all for us, but there were four or five ceramicists whose work was on a high level. If our house weren't entirely flooded with my own work, we would have been tempted to buy.
I was interested in comparing my workmanship to that of professionals (I have a long way to go), in getting ideas, and also in imagining what it would be like to be a professional potter. If you can afford it, it's probably better to be an amateur (the same goes for music, photography, and writing). One tall, slightly aloof man had a large stock of well-made, useful objects, ranging in size from small custard dishes to imposing bowls and tall pitchers and vases. But how interesting could it be for him to make a hundred mugs, all more or less the same? To make a living at pottery, even if you're bohemian and settle for a low income, you need to take in a couple of thousand dollars a month. That's a lot of mugs!
I can see trying that, for the discipline, to demonstrate and develop control - but I'd much rather produce unique things, like the two clumsy animal forms I've posted here. They're meant to look as if they'd been dug up from some chalcolithic site, Canaanite pagan cult objects. I've made three more of them, but I haven't fired them yet. I don't have to sell them or to try to make the kind of things people will buy. I'm free to have fun with forms that appeal to me.
Yes, I aspire to acquire more skill and improve my work (in pottery as in music), and I wouldn't be satisfied if I didn't think I was improving, but I have to careful to trim my aspirations so that my creative work will serve me, and not the opposite.
I don't mean to sound egotistical here. There's a difference between serving oneself by buying expensive things for oneself or indulging oneself in other ways, and serving oneself by meditating, hiking, playing music with friends, or engaging in a craft or art.

Two Planters

I made the foot on the right last summer. An elderly ceramacist who wasn't using her studio during the summer graciously allowed me to work there. For a month or so I used her wheel, practicing. But I made an error that prevented me from firing and glazing all the pots that I made: I mixed together different kinds of clay, so that it wasn't possible to know what temperature the pieces should be fired at when it came time to glaze them.
To glaze pots, you have to fire them twice. The first firing is at a relatively low temperature, but the second one is generally at a higher one, and clay that is meant to be fired at a low temperature will melt if it's fired at too high a temperature, and that will ruin the kiln it's fired in. So I had a few dozen bowls and cups that I couldn't fire and glaze.
I recycled all of the clay, smashing the pots, throwing the shards into a bucket of water, and dissolving the clay. There was something spiritually useful in that act, a reminder not to be too fond of what I'd made.
So I had a lot of clay that couldn't be glazed. I decided to use it to make things that don't have to be glazed: planters. I made three of them in the form of feet, and that was fun.
I made the flower pot on the right more recently. I bought a book about alternative firing methods - I'm not ready to invest in a sophisticated, electric kiln - and had an iron worker make me a barrel-kiln (which is generally not used for first firings, but rather for second firings, to give pieces special surfaces and colors).
I cleared a space for myself in a spare room of our house and started hand-building. A lot of the pots that I made and fired in the barrel-kiln collapsed and exploded during the firing, and some of them were extremely fragile - they hadn't been at a high enough heat long enough. But some of them came out interesting, and I planted a succulent in one of them.

An Earlier Effort

This bowl is one of the first I took home.
The excitement of taking work home from my pottery class brought me back to elementary school days.
Technically, this bowl is a mess. It's lopsided and extremely heavy.
But everybody loves it.
There's something happy and playful about it.
Ruth, our artist friend, said that you could see how involved I was in the joy of making something, and she was right about that joy.
Handling the wet clay, manipulating it on the wheel so that suddenly and miraculously a vessel emerges from a lump - if you haven't experienced it, you're missing something.
By now I've progressed, technically. The bowls that I make are generally lighter and thinner, more symmetrical. I have more control over what I'm doing. This bowl was more or less what happened to emerge from efforts to keep the clay centered and pull it up. Today I'm still somewhat of a victim of chance, or, rather, of my own lack of skill, and I can't consistently produce the shape that I want to produce. The clay often rebels and refuses to go where I want it to. But I'm a lot closer to controlling the process. And that means that I'll probably never produce a jolly, clumsy piece like this again.
As I gain in skill, I'll have to find a way to retain the spontaneity and joy that I found in my first months of struggling with the wheel.
The form of bowls fascinates me - perhaps because I am a male working on such a female form. I like to make things that are useful, and you can't have too many bowls in your china cabinet. But I also like the pure shape of bowls, their sculptural quality.

Making Forms

It's not quite round, and it's a bit heavier than it ought to be, but it's a nice size - a small cup with no handle - and the color came out well (I use the glazes supplied by my teacher in her studio; I haven't begun getting involved in the art and science of glazing).
During the first year, after I started to get the hang of centering lumps of clay on the wheel, I tried to make large pots, and they came out heavy and clumsy - but expressive. My teacher didn't discourage me. She let me make my own mistakes.
After a while I told her how frustrated I was feeling, and she advised me to keep working on smaller pieces of clay until I was centering them easily and building them up without making them lurch out of shape in the process.
I decided to take her advice, and since then I've been working on relatively modest projects: cups and small bowls. I've been trying to make them thinner and lighter, more symmetrical. I want to master this craft, and I realize that, doing it only once a week for a couple of hours, it'll take me much longer to do it than I initially expected.
Still, I'm not aiming for technical perfection. That aim would just frustrate me and take the fun out of pottery. Factories turn out thousands and thousands of perfect pieces of pottery. I don't want what I do to look as if it was produced by a factory. Handmade things should look and feel handmade - skillful, but not perfect. I want to produce mainly things that are more than decorative - pieces that people can eat and drink out of - but I do want what I do to be expressive.
It would be easy to regret that I can so late to pottery, since I enjoy it so much. If only I'd begun at the age of 23 instead of the age of 63, I would be a master now (possibly - or I would have burned out and gone on to something else). But I hope that the maturity I've gained doing a lot of other things over the years, and my general aesthetic background, can give a depth to my work. Because I do take it seriously. There's no point doing something that you don't take seriously.