Making Mistakes Right: The Artist’s Talk, T Minus 5 Days

I was invited to give a three-hour Artist’s Talk/Demo at Cabrillo College Ceramics and it’s coming up this Friday.

While I gladly said yes about a month ago, I am now wondering just who volunteered me behind my back, because the scaredy-catted introverted hide-in-her-studio artist has got the dithers. My Inner Critic, Scylla,  is quite sure I will suck in the most boringly didactic way possible. That the crowd will politely suffer my foolishness and drift off at the first break and it will be The Worst Talk Ever.

Fortunately I have a built-in fail-safe topic: “Mistakes and How to Make Them Right.” (And my Inner Hero, Maya, is energized and happy about that.)

Even The Worst Talk Ever will be a self-referencing success.

So there, I am off the hook!

And I am prepping for an Off the Hook Talk instead.

One of the ways I know I work best on projects like this is by Gathering Everything I want to cover, ideas to physical examples,  and by generating plenty of sticky notes with itty bitty bits of Do Not Forgets scribbled on them.

Not everyone works this way, I have come to understand, but I do. Next I will edit the hell out of those piles and somehow find the volume and weighting that seems right.

One more facet of prepping I am now including is this (daily?) studio journal of my getting it all dialed-in.

Today’s photo shows the tables where I am physically placing objects, books and those sticky notes. This is really probably about the third day of this process, but it is the first day of it seeming cohesive.

Follow along as we countdown to launch.

–Liz Crain, who has a lot to share on the near and dear topics of ceramics and mistakes, but finds it MUCH easier to write than speak.