Creativity

Mumble and Schmuck

 

MumbleandSchmuck_ GO115_2013

 

Let’s take Schmuck first. It’s not what you think. That’s Yiddish for fool, jackass, prick or worse.

In German the word means “jewels or ornamentation.”  And in graphic design it relates to layout, sometimes with letters, sometimes with geometric lines and circles.

It had its heyday in the  Modernist and Constructivist eras of the early 20th century, but it’s a delightful new term to me.

And, yes, schmuck is part of the etymology for the term “family jewels.”

As for Mumble, that’s my own graphic design term, as far as I know. One I developed to describe what I actually do when I am applying lettered ornamentation.

Both terms have a useful place in decorating my ceramic faux metal cans, pitchers, fillers, pails and whatever’s-to-come-from-this-creative-experiment.

Up until now, I have generally been mashing-up the layout, colors and script of old product brands onto my ceramic surfaces. It isn’t gospel copy, but rather the impressionist essence, I seek. Therefore, plenty of times I find myself “suggesting” a product’s features and benefits.

When I am “Greeking it in” – another highly technical phrase for suggesting content or layout, but not actually producing it – I am hearing in my mind the essence of what it must be saying. My brush moves along with my thoughts, mentally “selling it'”to the consumer.

At times I suspect I feel this with as much conviction as the original copywriter might have experienced; I’m just not making it readable. I’m mumbling, and it looks like Greek to all who cannot read it, but it contains real thoughts and real words. Hence: Mumble Script.

Of late, my product-defining brush is finding its own brands to sell. They might be ironic and readable,  but the hyperbole-laden and intentionally unreadable body copy remains.

~Liz Crain, a writer and painter/decorator who mumbles on purpose.

 

 

 

 

 

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Facing the Faces: The Reality of Real Art, Real People

 

There’s a creative pause in ceramic art-making I call “The Bisque Freeze,” and I’d had a nearly two year case of it after beginning the portrait sculpture pictured above. Any manner of hesitancies can feed The Freeze, but they all are sourced from the fear of farking up your precious work with your rotten and unsure decorating choices once you’ve gotten it safely through that first bisque firing.

 

This piece was not only the biggest thing I’d made to date, she was both fearsome and delicate. Here’s a side-view showing the thin porous ponytail in the back. Lots could go wrong, but it can with any piece. With this it would just go wrong in a bigger way. I spent those paused years making other things and occasionally wondering how and when I would get back to the baby elephant in the clay studio.

While I had learned the Big Head construction methods in a two-week summer workshop with the energetic, affable and very clear instructor, Stan Welsh, he understandably did not cover finishing techniques, as the works needed at least a month to dry afterwards. Two summers later, under the surefooted guidance of the energetic, affable and very clear instructor, Tiffany Schmierer, I learned the underglaze wash and dry-brush methods that matched what I’d had in mind for the piece all along. Or more to the point, I learned about being bold and fearless once again in the face of The Bisque Freeze.

 

 

 

 

 

Two related asides before I continue this saga.

First, a lot of my ceramic faces are caricature portraits. To me that means that something about the very real countenance of a very real person catches me up and I find myself portraying that response in a face jug (a la my Local Talker jugs) or a portrait bust. Usually I work from a photo and only have the one view, but that’s enough and I am free to interpret the other attributes. Sometimes I go Classical Greek style and emphasize the ideal, but mostly I go Roman Republic realism,  showing the gritty detail to reveal the unique character.

In that summer workshop with Stan I made two big heads, one a rather repulsive stuffed-cheeks hot dog contest eating champ, nearly ready to spew. The other, this compelling wistful anorexic woman,  proudly sitting for her formal portrait because she was getting healthier. I don’t recall noticing the name or other info with the photo I found back then, just this: “She’s in recovery and gaining weight.” It’s the reason I could bear to explore her pained, skeletal features, because she was hopeful and proudly representin’!

Second,  when I finally felt I could approach adding color to this Major Work, I stood it on a wooden table outside, hosed it off well, let it dry in the sun and covered it with thin washes of color, happily building up the surface information and modulating areas for values, tones and interest, deep in relationship with the persona.  I was lost to my work, unaware of the handyman who’d been around a few days helping to dig a trench for new gas and drainage lines down the whole side of our house.  Later that evening my hubby reported that after seeing my piece and watching me work,  he had exclaimed with a bit of incredulousness, “Geez, when you told me your wife was an artist, I didn’t think you meant a real one!”

I’ve chuckled over that unvarnished Emperor-has-no-clothes honesty ever after; without question the finest validation out there. It’s about being deeply, undeniably real in all ways possible, even when real is still a completely squidgy interpretation. Me. The Subject. The Art. The Viewer. Real as real can be. So real, even the handyman acknowledges it.

Even though I’ve drifted away from making faces and figures for the time being, I still heartily enjoy them. Recently I’ve rekindled the dialogues with my portrait work as I gathered my collection of Ugly Jugs, Skull Jugs, Character Face Jugs, Local Talkers and Portrait Busts in order to display them from now until the end of April, 2013 at the Scotts Valley Library in an Art at the Library group exhibit entitled – of course – “About Face.”

As part of the renewed conversations with these pieces, I wondered if after 5+ years I could re-locate the source photo for “She’s in Recovery” and went googling around. It’s all so much easier now and I not only found it many times over, I learned her name, I learned her fate.  Her name was Kate Chilver and she lost her 19-year battle with anorexia at the age of 31 in 2011.

~Liz Crain, who is profoundly glad she made this portrait bust of Kate Chilver, who’s name and struggle are fondly and respectfully acknowledged.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Merely Clever

 

“Cleverness is not wisdom” ~Euripides

 

Beware the Pleasure Island of artistic cleverness! It will make donkeys of us all.

I admit, I’m no different. I’ve boogied around that isle, delighted with my parlor tricks and sight gags, elbow-jabbing viewers into acknowledgment of my conceits. “Get it!?” – which surely obliterated any tender scions of artful charm.

And I’m not the only ass here: I watched my artwork rapidly grow its own ears and tail and morph into a One Trick Donkey. Well, then!

As much as I suffered, I lacked enough understanding to dodge this pitfall. Was my work Un-skillful? Under-realized? Tentative? Brash? Or, horrors, Sophomoric? Yet, those descriptors felt tangential. I needed to grasp the heart of the cleverness mechanism so it could become my creative tool to wield with dexterity and intention.

The epiphany came from two related concepts learned at the side of my longtime mentor, Kathryn McBride:

Avoid the Merely Clever and its corollary, Apply Irony.

 

Avoiding the Merely Clever

A few years back, as Kathryn and I were walking among student displays at the annual California Conference for the Advancement of Ceramic Art in Davis, I heard her snort in amusement, and then wonder out loud if the humorous piece in front of her was “merely clever,” meaning it fell short in certain ways.

She explained that her own MFA work in Ceramics at San Francisco State had received this truthful critique and she’d became a more conscious and confident artist because of it. Decades later, she still found it useful in assessing her own ideas. And by being able to recognize mere cleverness in the work of others, she could guide students beyond the first layer of their creative impulses to a truer meaning.

From that time on, we would smile and rather conspiratorially use “merely clever” as a gentle codename for any work which took the expected and easier road home, even if exquisitely executed.

And at long last, I had the conceptual tool I needed to identify and go beyond visual one-liners myself.

 

Applying Irony

Yet, there remained works and artists who seemed to dance tauntingly close to the “merely clever” trap, yet not fall in. How? Why?

And why did one of Kathryn’s most successful perennial assignments ask her students to make a work illustrating a Tired Old Cliché? She even provided a list of 80 kickstarter sayings and phrases. Wasn’t this a recipe for a snooze-fest of obviousness? Yet hackneyed chestnuts such as “Let the cat out of the bag” and “Butterflies in the stomach” provided the springboard for some literal yet profound interpretations from students at all levels of artistry. Why?

Only in recent months have I realized the answer. It has come from a sagacious little book titled 101 Things to Learn in Art School by Kit White. Item 94 on the list is “Irony has controlled the stage in contemporary art since the end of Modernism.”

Let me quote the discussion of this a bit more:

To avoid the twin whirlpools of the easy send-up on one side and the sentimental on the other, come to a clear and meaningful understanding of how irony works as a serious factor in the world. As Richard Rorty once wrote, it is the recognition of “the contingency of all things.”

So, there you have it. We can still visit Pleasure Island, just bring along some 21st century conceptual donkey-embracing armor. Irony brings complexity, depth and wisdom to the simple shallows of mere cleverness. A meta-conscious dose of the ironic in our artwork turns the piece, tragic or comic, real or abstract, into a consideration of what it also is not and of what else it could be, evolving the work out of our clever heads into our all-contingent hearts

~Ironically, Liz Crain is a sometimes-narrative ceramic artist who completely agrees with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s admonition to “Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness,” – which Kathryn also knew well, especially when over-tired.

 

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You Cannot Fly Into Flying: Beginning Anything in Real Spacetime

 

You cannot tightrope walk by watching this YouTube clip. (But the person who created it is learning!)

You cannot watch and watch and watch,  read and read and read, talk and talk and talk, think and think and think about tightrope walking and say you are actually doing it.

The doing of the thing is the thing and that happens in Spacetime. And as that link you just read past will tell you, “Spacetimes are the arenas where all physical events take place.” Where you and your physical body are located right here, right now.  HERE = the 3 to 24 (it’s debatable) spatial dimensions.  NOW = the 1 temporal dimension (apparent agreement.)

OK, the watching, reading, talking and thinking will help line yourself up right for the doing, especially if you try to be fully present as you watch closely, read the right sources, talk to the right crowds, think about it in an associative and retentive  manner, and maybe – or even especially – run through the related physical motions. They will most certainly lead you to better observations, reading material,  conversations and cognitions galore.

Rehearsals, all!

And if they lead you to the doing part,  you might be so well-rehearsed in mind, body and spirit, you surprise yourself with how simple and honest it feels. Honey, that’s good rehearsing! As Olympic Gold Medal figure skater Scott Hamilton has reportedly said, it’s also “skating stupid.”  The doing falls out of you because you have successfully absorbed the Preparatory. The watching, reading, talking, thinking, even the pantomiming, have transitioned you to the Repertory.

Preparatory. That’s  still where I’m at with designing my Beginning Ceramic Handbuilding class.  The actions I’m involved with right now are definitely not the real teaching. All this gathering, editing, organizing and questioning are totally necessary to manage a good run when the time comes. If you want more of what’s going into that, my recent two posts here and here do some pretty elegant expository hand-wringing about “my process,” such as it is.

There is, however, a larger motivation for aligning myself with the vital differences between preparatory/repertory – or theory/practice – and that’s because the students who will come to study with me will experience their own version of it. How can I guide them as they transit the continuum from hearing, reading, watching, etc. to doing?

We both know that all the talking and reading and showing and sharing we do are but the foundational intro or interlude to touching the clay and moving it around with intention. Hell, we all can practice the valuable Coeleen Kiebert exercise of physically assuming the positions of our pots and sculptures, but it’s ONLY when we mold, pound, coil, pinch, carve, smooth, sponge, brush that we deeply know what this clay stuff is for ourselves.

Some of these beginners will undoubtedly run gladly off in many directions, full of joyful assumptions.  Wanting to do it all at once perfectly,  attempting to swallow the clay universe in one gulp.  Acting as if Spacetime didn’t include the sequential time part. That’s where I think the heart of my guide role is: pacing the doing. Intertwining the cognitive with the active in our tiny corner of the Wide World of Clay. Supplying a studied but ultimately idiosyncratic version of a sequential scaffold for them to climb around on, lift by lift.

Friedrich Nietzsche (that’s him painted by Edvard Munch in 1906 in the top illustration) said it brilliantly, “He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; you cannot fly into flying.”

Clay work taught me patience and presence. Well, not so much taught as forced them upon me, as I was definitely of the Fly Into Flying bent as a newbie. My endless groundings and crashes lasted years more than perhaps needed. Could  I have spent more time on effective Preparation? Could I have had better scaffolding? Maybe. Then again, maybe not. Because of my experiences, I don’t expect to save any artist from their personal process. But I do believe the least I can do as their flight instructor is to shed a bright and true spotlight onto the highwire act and the ladder up to it in our spacetime arena and encourage them to give it a real try.

Class Nuts and Bolts: 6 Thursdays, 2-5pm, Session I: Feb 23 to March 29, Session II (with different techniques and projects): April 12 – May 17. Held at the Santa Cruz Mountains Art Center, 9341 Mill Street, Ben Lomond, CA,  831-3364ART.

If you’re so inclined, you can call or register online at www.MountainArtCenter.org. Class is $180 for Members/$200 Non-Members.

Next time: Those visual aids! (Yes, I know I promised them last post and the post before. Clay takes an uncertain amount of time and they’re just not done yet! Think I would know by now, do ya?)

 

 

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To All the Blog Titles I’ve Loved Before

Is there a name for the Muse of Blogging?

 

At a workshop early last fall, I asked the presenter, ceramic artist Wesley Anderegg, how his ideas for new work came to him. Did he have a backlog waiting to draw from? Was it a sudden inspiration? A visual image? A concept? After all, his work uses Concept as a long suit, often leaning on a quirky visual pun in support of it. To my surprise, he laconically replied that in truth the title of the piece came to him first, and the rest of the work followed along in embodiment of it.

Now that’s an odd bit of insight, which I recognized instantly as a ratification of own my creative Step One,  not so much of my visual art process – that’s as visual as visual can be – but rather, that’s exactly my blog writing process.

The Title presents itself as a fulmination of Something I Have to Say.  Those slippery snippets of insight, the wry and dulcet posits and synchronous happenstances that make up my world?  They unite,  distill themselves and wander into my frontal lobe in the form of words.

The Title must also be delicious and tantalizing enough to impel me away from whatever else I am taken up with. Ideally, it should plant me at the keyboard and keep me there to slog through the typing, the inserting, the looking up,  the linking, the editing, the tagging, and the publishing. And the re-editing and re-publishing. Folks, it just doesn’t write itself.

If I miss getting to the writing apace, I capture the Title Headline Idea and the motley insights for it on whatever writable surface I’m near. For months now, that’s been the case, as I was way too busy cranking in the studio. The result of which – besides a ton of new work –  is I have a sizable clutch of suggestive blog titles I know I’m not likely to turn into full blown posts. They were written on the ice and the ice melted.

You know where I’m headed with this, right?  In order to release their energy and un-snag mine so as to be able to write afresh, I want to share them here.  This amounts to a cyber-version of  letting go of clutter, a la my new found holiday, Discardia. (Which you, too, should seriously go investigate and celebrate.)

So, let’s pull them out one by one and see what might have been some incalculably awesome reading. Yes, yes,  I could have just recycled it all, but this will be more fun.

1. Under the Hood with String Theory and The Swerve;  This comes from the book I was reading (The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt) and an email conversation with a friend. My cryptic subnotation reads, “proposing unifications and reasons, strings swerve.” On the same note: “Tuvan Throat Singing.” “Feynman.” Click on the links for a glimmer, cuz that’s all I have now.

2. The Mess-up; “1.One supervised experience with a hot stove. 2. How it goes terribly wrong. 3. The itch you can’t scratch. 4. What happens when it goes wrong and our reaction to what happens. What happens after that.” OK, I know this had to do with making mistakes as a learner and, as an instructor, guiding students through mistakes, or even letting them happen. And I recall I wanted to talk about expectations and perfectionism.

3. In Which I Attempt to Explain Myself; No further explanations available.

4. Flaccid Visors, Dead Elements and Other Tolerations; Meant to be a discussion of the needless annoyances we put up with, even adapt around, but how they still negatively invade our psyches. Yet, just like the Circus Trees, it can also become its own artform.

5. Singing Wrong Right; My notes say: “Brush abuser” (clearly a self-reference) “Skate Stupid” and “practice, practice, practice.” Not sure how all that quite fit together, but I think it was about bending the rules with confidence.

So, that’s five Phantom Blog Titles with Notes, gone, but now never to be forgotten. I kiss them fondly and wish them well,  like old boyfriends, knowing they gave as good as they could at the time, and so did I. Yet, it’s now Now and new titles keep arriving in my mind. Think I will grab one of those and sit down at the keyboard soon.

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What Do (Ceramic) Artists Want? A Blog Blast

Today's Kiln Yield (the good ones, anyway)

Before delving into the main question, here’s what I mean by a Blog Blast. For the past few years I’ve written longish posts. I compose and edit as I go (a not so good idea), making nifty essays which even I did not have time to read, even though they were worth it, IMHO. No more. Here’s to the short, pithy, candid and extemporaneous post. Longer than a Tweet or a Status Update, shorter than War and Peace, or even a term paper. Still worth it. Still friends.

All Bow!
I know what I want from my ceramic endeavors: the realization of what I had in my head to begin with, only better! I want the Kiln Gods to undo my ham-handedness, my fear and laziness, my lack of knowledge and brain farts. I want nothing less than Transformational Magic, that slice of perfection that no ceramic piece in the world has heretofore attained…until now. All bow.

I’m no different. And sometimes I do get that, briefly. As in performance arts, I feel I am only as good as my last kiln opening. So, when I don’t get the fairy dust, this is how I understand it.

Did I Take the Short Way Home?
Warps, cracks and breakage is the norm for mishandled clay. Glazing faults abound: wrong material/color choice, misapplied, too shiny, streaky, runny, bubbled. These are obvious flaws (except when they’re not because you wanted this exact messed-up result. After all, it’s contemporary art we’re talkin’ about!) Flaws are mostly not too fixable. Better to love and honor the quirky properties of clay and glazes on the front end. But when it does not go well in these departments, have your disappointment, even your everlasting shame and tantrum, then get out the hammer and start over. Oh, and learn to gently amend and refire a little too. Smash seven times, make anew eight. Get back on the cylinder that threw you. Learn to fly with your craft, bird by bird. No way out but the long way.

Got Appreciation for What Is?
What’s harder to understand is when a piece is gorgeous, but just not the specific gorgeous its creator intended. It happens to all of us: the heatwork of the kiln changes things and we hold treasure and call it trash only because it wasn’t what we ordered. The piece is too dark, off the expected color, bled or shrank weirdly. Whatever it is, it failed to meet our prior specs and we’re ready to smash once again. But wait! Tuck this one away somewhere, maybe for months, and then look at it without the pangs of former expectations. You might return to the “amend and refire” mode, you might decide it’s a true goner, or you might see it for what it is.

What to Want
And here’s the Tricky Bit: Don’t settle for “good enough.” Good: the enemy of Best, right? While it might sound like I suggest seeking only objective perfection, it’s really personal excellence which excites me. I may joke about wanting it all from the Kiln Gods, but I know what I alone put out there steeped in my heartfelt best comes back. Often better than I know to want, challenging me to keep stretching. I seek repeated opportunities to do exactly that.

That’s what (ceramic) artists really want.

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