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.