A bit of discipline

When you're learning to throw you want to keep every pot that makes it off the wheel because you are so pleased that it has.

The trouble is that a potter, like any artist, is always learning.  You have never finished learning or you would probably stop.  You may be able to guarantee getting a pot off the wheel, but now you are learning to make a different shape, or now you are aiming at 12 near-identical mugs, or now you are trying to free up your style of ...

So you continue wanting to keep everything.  What is needed is a bit of discipline.

I'm quite good at self-discipline generally.  I know people who are astonished that I can keep chocolate or biscuits or liqueurs or other tasty things in the house for months or even years without eating them all up.  On the other hand, I am, as you know, overweight, partly because of my metabolism no doubt but combined with the fact that I do like to eat more than I need, so 'quite good' at self-discipline is probably about as good as I'll get.

In the pottery I am also 'quite good'.  I am moderately strict about what is let through, but not rigorous.  One thing I have always done is to follow the advice of the person who taught me most of what I know about being a good potter*, Douglas Phillips of Ridge Pottery in Somerset, and occasionally cut a pot in half to look at the thickness of the walls and base.  Are they even?  Are they the thickness you thought they were and is it a good thickness?

Here's one I cut up yesterday.  It's a one-person teapot, one of four I made the day before.  As I was rolling the base to tidy it, the centre of the base curved in.  This is usually because the pot is not really firm enough for rolling the base yet and doesn't really matter in a finished pot apart from aesthetically.  It can sometimes be, though, because the base is too thin.  I was feeling a bit more rigorous, so I decided to cut it in half.  Base not too thin, though slightly thinnner than the rest of the teapot.  The walls of the rest pretty even too, and it was a nice shape, so I was pleased with what I saw.  To be really self-disciplined, I think you have to not mind finding you have a cut a good pot in half.  I didn't.  So that was good.



* On the matter of how not to be a good potter, I am entirely self-taught.

Work in progress

There is work in progress.  You will have seen that I have made earrings and new textiles work.  I have also done some work in the pottery.

I don't tend to write about or show pictures of the pottery work I do until it's finished.  This is partly because there's not often anything different to see until it's decorated and fired and it also has a lot to do with the fact that I can't be sure it will exist as a finished pot until I open the kiln after firing.

I haven't been writing about the work I've been doing lately for a different reason, though, which is that until now I wasn't sure what to write.  A few weeks ago I was at the stage of saying that I was pretty sure I would return to the pottery but that I couldn't be entirely certain.  Of the few people I spoke to, some were cool with this and thought it was a fairly healthy place to be while others were clearly taken aback.  Well, having gone back, I think I can say it's likely I'll continue.  I'm probably still a potter.  Probably.

I don't know what sort of potter I am, though.  I don't know what I'll be making.  Oh yes, there is a long list of things that are needed because I am running out of them, starting with a few hundred mugs and cereal bowls.  I am not sure if I shall be making them, though.  The things I have made so far have mostly not been things I normally make.  It has felt ok.  I did make 15 mugs last week, but that wasn't great and the idea of going in there this morning to make mugs - well, I won't be. 

Obviously this is part of the bereavement thing.  But how?  Why?  Where does it fit?  When I returned to the pottery a few weeks after M died I found that the glazing and firing was ok but the making part was the hardest thing I've had to do.  The first time I tried, the grief was overwhelming and I had to give up. 

I was astonished by this.  It was the last thing I expected.  My creative work is so much an integral part of me, my self, and time spent in the pottery was always something separate from M (or indeed anyone else) that I really expected it to be the one place I would feel ok. 

I think I know what's going on now, though, and the explanation has been crystallised by reading someone else's blog.  L is also a creative person.  She's currently going through treatment for breast cancer and has just written that she has not felt able to continue her usual work.  She has been creative, though, writing, painting, making wonderful headgear for herself.  Just not her normal things.
 
I have come to the conclusion that with life-changing events (bereavement, serious illness) it is because one is never again going to be in the 'before' state that things that totally belong there are the difficult ones. One is now in a new state and things that have a new element belong in the now, so they fit and feel ok.  Things that belong so much in the then, the 'before', are the hard ones to return to because there is a mis-match between the activity and the time.  They're not new, so rather than being part of this new life, they are a sharp reminder of the permanently lost old one.

With creative work this is particularly a problem if you make your living at it.  It's scary to think what might happen if I never return to making the things that people buy.  Will they buy other things?  What will happen if they don't?  If it takes me months to return to production, will outlets wait for me or will they ask me to leave?  Will my business lose so much momentum this time that I won't get it back? 

If a hard thing presents itself, I try to tackle it head on.  The bigger the emotional challenge, the more likely I am to go for it, once I have recognised its existence.  Acknowledging these questions and accepting that I don't know the answers has been a pretty huge challenge, exactly because they are so scary to contemplate, but I think I've met it.  Waiting to find out what happens next is easy in comparison.

Why don't I apply the same principle to making a hundred mugs, you ask.  Well, it's a good question to which I have some answers but I think they are for another time.  This post is already long enough.  And, to be honest, writing it, re-exploring the ideas and feelings that have been milling around for the past few weeks, has taken enough out of me for one morning.  The heating is on in the pottery so I after a comforting hot drink I'll go and turn three small bowls which are ready, because not to do so would be a waste of them.  After that ...  I don't know.  

It's a work in progress.

The time is now

I try to avoid being too arty farty or making precious statements about being an artist.  I hate the phrase 'in the zone'; it sounds pretentious and I think can be easily misused.  "The time is now", however, goes some way to pinpoint that same area of an artist's experience.

Creative work has a place in time not only when it is finished, but in the making.  If it isn't the right time, the work won't happen.

Plenty of obvious things affect whether it's the right time.  You have to be in the right place mentally.  For some, stress is a boost to their creativity and they can channel anger into their best work.  For others, the mind needs to be completely clear of other distractions.  I'm probably somewhere in between but definitely towards the calm and stress-free end.  You also need to have the right physical conditions.  I don't function well if I'm not really warm, nor can I do close-up work or choose colours without at least a little daylight of the real kind rather than a daylight bulb. 

There is a more important side to 'the time is now', though, which is what I'm conscious of at the moment: every piece of work has its own right time to be made.  There are external factors; the zeitgeist must surely inform our work at least unconsciously if not consciously and for those of us who make our living from our art, market forces have to be a consideration. But these are minor considerations.  The most important thing is about sitting here making this exact piece of work at this exact moment in time because it's the right time to be doing it.

You have an idea.  You have the necessary the resources.  You put them together...  and create ... often without having to think anything through because everything just falls into place.  At the end,  something arrives which has worked and which may even be good.  It wouldn't have been last year, or ten years ago or possibly not a year or two in the future. 

So, many years after having the original idea, I have made some work using photographs, printing on silk and paper, and stitching.

The time was right.  The time is now.

The clues are there

I know I'm lucky to have a large workspace but there are times when I really need it.  There is another table behind the ironing board with spray mount, waterproofing spray, random paper and fabric and you can see in this photo and the one below that there are many different types of things out on the two big tables and the ironing board.  All of them are being used in developing my newest work. 

The work is progressing much slower than I'd like because of the weather.  By about 3 in the afternoon there just isn't enough natural light to work effectively and I keep making mistakes in measuring and cutting.  I'm learning to walk away but it's frustrating and up till now I have wasted more time than I have used profitably because it has happened that my mornings have been taken up with other things. 

Eventually I will have enough to show you, although I am already anticipating that this work is going to be very difficult to show in a photograph.  Till then, as I say, the clues are there.

"How are you doing?" "What are you doing?"

These seem to be the questions everyone is thinking when they talk to me, though they're rarely the questions they ask me.  Yesterday I had tea with L and she asked directly how I was coping with missing Mike.  I like those sorts of questions and am good at answering them.  Most people don't like to be so direct, though. The question I am being asked most often at the moment is how I'm getting on with building up my stocks of pottery.  This is a question I am not so good at answering because the real answer is "I wouldn't start from here."

I'm not doing any pottery at the moment and although one reason is definitely my current cartilage injury, I'd guess I wouldn't be doing any pottery even if I didn't have an injury to take care of.  There are so many reasons for this that I hardly know where to start.  And, most unusually for me, I'm not finding what it takes to get round the difficulties and communicate to people what they really want to know.

Bereavement has very subtle effects and I'm not sure how well this is known.  It can affect your memory, your concentration, your attention span, your temper, your energy and just how much you have to give to anything.  Don't think these are all negative values, either; you can end up with more patience than usual, or concentrating on a boring task very well.  You can take to one task but not another.  Bereavement is not a constant state.  It is currently affecting how well (or badly) I explain things on the hoof, though I can probably make a better fist of it here.

Bereavement, too, is a sudden one-off event after which everything is different exactly because it is now "after".  This means that you should not expect a person to be 'getting back to normal' because nobody will be getting back anywhere.  Rather, you might wonder if they are establishing what normal now is.  I am on that road but like many important roads in life, the journey is probably more significant than the destination.

So where should the solicitous enquirer start, if not from here?  I suggest you start with "what are you doing at the moment?"  This is a question I can always answer and it will probably tell you how I am doing at the same time.

One week can be different from another but at the same time I am aware of engaging in a continuing process of finding the new normal.  Last week, for instance, I was mostly busy doing executor things (for the friend who died last March) while at the same time trying to make some new earrings.  This week I have been making some new earrings, planning some new textiles work, working on the makers' pages of Arcade Artisans (as part of my contribution to working in/for the shop which we all undertake), photographing my new earrings and processing the images so I have good images for later publicity, updating parts of my website and working on the website and newsletter for Crafts In Gloucestershire, which I run.  These are all part of my work as an artist.  I've also been to Ikea and been out to tea. 


In amongst all these things that are part of what will be normal from now on there is also stuff which is finite.  Stuff which I am doing little by little but eventually one day will be done, the things that are there to be done when someone has died.  To begin with this is mostly admin but now the tasks are more practical.  Belongings to go through, give to others, keep, re-home, sell, throw out.  Mike was not a tidy person.  So every fortnight I fill two boxes with paper for recycling.  (I estimate this will be ongoing for some months, such are the many, many boxes of paper stacked in various parts of the house.)  From time to time I sort out a section of his wardrobe.  And I do some of the tasks that were part of his 'domain', even though he didn't do them often, such as tidying up outside.

Today I transferred five or six bucketfuls of dead leaves, soil, detritus from firewood collections, etc to the compost bin and half filled a bin bag with rubbish from the same part of the yard.  It's not exciting, but it's enjoyable and I'm pleased with the result.  And it's part of the answer to "what are you doing?" and should also help you with "how are you doing?"  If you do, thank you for wanting to know.

 

Promising

Yesterday I found one of the coloured hellebores fully open.  The white ones, usually earliest, haven't opened their buds yet.  I love the hellebore season as they are the first things of the year to flourish in my garden and even in wind, rain (today) and snow they are a promise of seasons to come.

Writing

From time to time I write.  Here are two very recent poems:

“I wasn’t sure if you would want this”

tentative gift of a book

of poems ‘of grief and healing’.

“I seem to remember you like poetry.”

I do, and I like poems about hard things

so eventually I read the book

and start to write my own poems again.

‘Not how are you but who are you?’

you asked, that first pub Sunday

after my husband,

and with this prescient question

a lifelong friendship was born.

I wrote, oh how I wrote,

a poem, triumphant,

heralding the future.

declaring myself.

Now after another husband,

and you, and she, all gone

we two remaining friends

see to your estate and sell your flat.

Inside the empty room for the last time

the tears flow and we hug,

two widows, I suppose, and yet

that isn’t who we are.

She and I must answer

‘Who are you?’ afresh,

no you, or her or him

to bounce ideas and love.

Floundering about in a pond

grown too big with too few

friendly fish

it’s not so easy.