creative process

Commissions Are Like Picking Scabs

 

Of course I know better. It will just re-open the wound and make it worse. Maybe leave a scar.

And there I am doing it again: saying yes to a commission proposal, when I swore them off.

I’ve had some gratifying commissions in the past. The requesters are enthusiastic fans, wanting something special from my hands. Perhaps it’s a personalized beer can for a daughter-in-law, or matching tobacco cans for a family to commemorate a father, or an oil can with pour spout inscribed to honor a motorhead buddy. I treasure that they are nearly always special gifts for a loved one.

The collectors describe their idea, maybe they even come for a studio visit. We email, we exchange images. I make a sketch. We email again. Eventually we settle on IT. I name my price. A deposit is made and then….

I’m in trouble. (Actually, I was in trouble at the outset.) And it’s all my own doing. With a number of commission successes behind me, what could be the matter? I wasn’t sure until I started asking around.

Exactly NONE of the artists I’ve queried are enthusiastic about commissions. If they say yes it’s often against their better inclinations and usually for one of two reasons:

1. They believe they need the love, money, fame or doors opened.  Or,  2. They don’t know how to say no.

Or both.

I do both. The money, fame, or open doors don’t usually motivate me, but offer love (appreciation) and  I’m  Just a Girl That Cain’t Say No.

Am I that much of a needy pushover? Naw, I think I’m just unskilled and unpracticed. After a decade of saying yes to everything, I’m now learning that not every opportunity is MY opportunity. (Thank you coach Cynthia Morris for this concept.) My spheres of creativity, my pursuits, my priorities have shifted, taking my studio rhythms with them.

Sometimes the right words come along in the moment as in, “Let me think about it.” But more often it’s a version of “I’d love to, thanks for thinking of me” and right where I should insert the lovely ironclad refusal….. I say OK and am all in. Oops, I did it again.

I need a Ten-Second Elevator Regrets Speech to parrot. I have Justine Musk’s crazy sarcastic list, “It would cause the slow withering death of my soul ” + 75 other ways to say No, which is definitely good for Creative Badass laughs,  but it still won’t get me the phrase I need:  the pleasant, clear-eyed refusal that leaves the asker not feeling sorry they asked in the first place and me with my studio schedule intact. Still Friends.

Just what IS the rub about commission work? Most times the problem is not the patron, or even the commission concept — although I have experienced disasters with both — it’s that the art-making is for someone else from the get-go. And immediately the choo-choo train of creative process needs a giant cowcatcher strapped on the front to fend off the extra assortment of expectations, assumptions, explanations, interpretations and arbitrary agendas. The presence of the patron never really leaves.

I thought the pains I felt over commission work, the procrastination, the pique, the self-doubt, were just me being temperamental. But other artists tell me of similar thoughts and feelings.  So it’s with glad relief that I’m reading Jonathan Fields’ book Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance which defines The Rub. He says free-range creativity takes a huge hit when it is subjected to expected evaluation. He speaks of the the differences between intrinsic (soul) work and extrinsic (paid) work as motivators, with the intrinsic work being more venturesome in all respects. To back this up, he cites a study by Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School  in which 23 artists created 20 works each: 10 as commissions and 10 as they wished. The artists did not know this, but afterwards all the works were put in front of a panel of artistic experts — museum curators, art historians, gallerists and the like — to evaluate for creativity and technical excellence. While they found no separation between any of the works in technical excellence, “the commissioned works were rated as significantly less creative than the non-commissioned works.” Significantly!

It’s starting to seem obvious. “When you know better, you do better.” (Maya Angelou) For the good of all — me, them and my best artwork —  I need to put a bandage over my automatic-yes-to-commissions habit and let it all heal.

~Liz Crain, who enjoys the fact that even the venerable late Victor Spinski once got so irritated at a collector’s request for amendments to his work, he took the piece – a trompe l’oeil garbage can – put it out with his regular garbage and photographed the garbage collector’s surprise at breaking it. She’d like to have overheard his explanation to the collector as he returned the money.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Love the Slab You’re With, Part One

 

Sometimes an activity you encounter meshes with your essence and you melt away into it. A friend explains the basic golf swing and just like that you’re sailing the ball 350 yards at the driving range and they’re saying, “It’s not supposed to be that easy!”

You find your bliss in the swimming pool, the computer lab, a knitting circle: all wonderful fascinations.  You sync with what you already know and scaffold from there, unstoppable in your  heedless avidity.

It’s precisely what happened after I spent a Saturday early last November at the Richmond Art Center with ceramics maven Lana Wilson as she demonstrated her method for coloring and collaging clay slabs and then making stuff out of them. It’s fresh and fabulous and lets the clay be clay and me be me.

When I returned to my studio and fooled around, working from my woefully unreadable notes and her handout, I was simultaneously back in Ceramics 101 trying to wrangle wet-out-of-the-bag clay and was also thrust forward into the freshest color and design possibilities I’ve seen in years. It was unadulterated infatuation and I could not stop my hands.

A bag and a half of clay later (37.5 pounds!) I’ve come up for air. Wow.

This method is clearly about staying in the moment. Loosely intentional. Intentionally loose. Don’t be fooled, though, it’s not necessarily easy. Even though Lana calls herself “The Queen of Low Standards, ” I will explain why that’s a canny ruse in the Part Two post. In the meanwhile, Part One will cover the slab-making.

The Black Side

Take a bag of clay  -a white clay is used here, but there are no rules, you get to decide what you like – slice off thick 1″ or so slabs from the long end and throw them down on your working surface sideways to stretch and thin them,  some or a lot, you decide. Or alternatively roll them out on the slab roller. Paint with 1-3 coats Black underglaze,  letting each coat get ‘unshiny’ before applying the next and brushing in alternating directions for evenness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I need to tell you black is not required! Feel free to use any color(s) you enjoy!

 

When you’ve got enough coats and they’ve nearly dried, try a bunch o’ textures. You know what you like. My favorite from this array was the squares/alligator roller tool (a tenderizer?) but all of them were pretty wonderful, because they retain their character when they’re manipulated, which is coming.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Colors Side

When your Black Side has set up enough, (or even not…..random markings and unmarkings are most welcome) flip everything over and pick out some underglaze colors to play with.  One to three  coats again, maybe not all the same, depending on what you think you might do for patterning in the next step. You don’t necessarily need to know anything about where you’re headed, though. Adventures for everyone!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I want to speak to the Controlling Ceramics Perfectionists in the audience – and you KNOW who you are: this process is worth the price of being messy and unclear. (What you might think is evidence of Low Standards is actually a wicked plan for unexpected beauty.) There is no possible way to make a mistake here, so own it: goofs are in your head. You are officially freed from your need to get it right because there is no wrong. OK, end of message.

Now, add more colors, thickly or thinly, with or without patterns. Know that they will change mightily as you work, so you don’t need to commit or invest or even pay exact attention. On this slab, I was playing with round, target-like circles and complementary colors, that’s all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can also do more texturing and carving as in the black side….I just didn’t here.

 

 

Tossing and Rolling

Yes, this is the same slab as the last photo! Gone are my precious quasi-intentional markings.  I threw it out more on the work surface, and it got abraded and messy, even a little more smeary than I expected. (My next batch of slabs was thinner to start with….so there was less smearing as I thinned them. Good to know.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You also can use a rolling pin to thin your slab. Lana  used newspaper between roller and slab. I did a little and then did not. The transfer of colors with both the newspaper and roller is interesting. See what you come up with. You still are doing great.

 

Cutting and Recombining

Now it’s time to cut the slab apart and  flip some of the pieces. Cut any old way…this just happens to be pizza wedges, because I’m a radial symmetry aficionado. Try stripes or puzzle pieces. Flip, overlap and roll together again, creating an entirely new collaged slab. The clay itself is still floppy wet and takes to this technique without any resistance. If it got a little dry, just brush each seam with clear water  before rolling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The parallel scratched looking area on the lower left is from inadvertent markings from my smaller roller and/or handling. if you don’t want that, roll lightly.

 

Cutting and Recombining Again

You can stay with the above pizza-like slab, but you are also free to cut/tear and recombine at will. And it only gets better in my book. Here is a variant, including  thin twists rolled flat at a few of the seam areas. It makes the slab absolutely unique each and every time.

 

 

This is the first post about this process. Look for a second post on how to form work from these amazing slabs sometime after the new year!

~Liz Crain, who was as surprised as she could be about this new ceramics method and the freedom it afforded her to reinvent herself and her ceramic process, once again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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It’s Complicated: Distilling 30,000 Years of Ceramic Art into a Six-Week Beginning Handbuilding Workshop

OK yes, that title is a tad dramatic. But it’s not a needy and exaggerated untruth: I’m actively sorting and defining what I know and enjoy about the entirety of ceramic arts in order to hone in on the heart and soul of this Beginning Handbuilding class, taught by me,  starting at the end of this month.

And this week that honing process hit critical mass. It felt a little like peeking into a ramping raku kiln and watching for the powdery glaze on the pieces to liquify, come to a bubbling boil and then to smooth out again as both it and the ware it is coating becomes blastingly red-hot. And THEN comes the moment to shut off the gas and pull the pieces with tongs into their garbage can reduction chambers. Most of you ceramicists out there will understand this reference, but if you need a visual, here’s a good one.

All this week I gathered and listed and piled and flagged.  I re-piled and sorted and started a board of sticky notes detailing each project’s intended trajectory through the weeks. I assembled the needed demos, quotes, glossary, Important Things to Know and on and on. I culled (which was clearer and easier now) and kept the best.  A Beautiful Mind got nuthin’ on me!

Last post I talked about how this class-formulating process amasses information. I think I mentioned something about comparing the ceramic teaching process  to cooking show demos, but I’m reporting in tonight that I’m not quite ready for that one. Maybe next week. I HAVE made one sample of a Press Mold Wad Pot, which you can see below,  but now I realize it’s the first of several needed to provide tangible illustrations of the important stages of just one of three comprehensive methods and techniques I will be teaching.

Press Molded Wad Pot at leatherhard

And that serves my personal understanding of Full-Service Ceramics. Sometimes students can connect the dots, but I find in ceramics it’s not all that easy. The whole process is un-obvious, far-ranging,  deceptively sidetracking and negotiable.

But that’s also the most important clue for me as as Interpreter and Guide: first and foremost, I need to have a profound and undistracted personal sense whereof I speak. If I gloss over, give the short shrift, make assumptions, it does not do the job in that satisfying way. I think I am connecting my own dots, retrospectively. As a matter of fact, I could re-title this post Things I Wish Someone Told Me Right Away.

And even then, the only way out is by doing it. So while I prepare and attempt to perfect my offerings for my new class and students, ceramics has also taught me to be more comfortable with imperfect and unexpected outcomes. With learners of all ages, that’s nearly a given. Years of helping clay handbuilding students has told me this amount of preparation is no less than the right amount, as cloggy and complicated as it can be. I’m glad it’s ONLY 30,000 years I need to review and condense and, like I said, I’m enriched and privileged to do it.

Class Nuts and Bolts: 6 Thursdays, 2-5pm, Session I: Feb 23 to March 29, Session II(with different techniques, projects and subject matter I still have to formulate): 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!

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Crouching Teacher, Hidden Student: Crafting an Excellent Clay Handbuilding Class

Step right up and lookee here: I said YES when the enthusiastic folks at the Santa Cruz Mountains Art Center asked me if I would  be so kind –  and organized! –  as to offer a structured series of Beginning Handbuilding classes. That was a few months ago and now, here they come in just a few weeks. I better get this figured out.

I got thrown into the briarpatch at the outset, because in order to write not one course description but three of them  – Short, Long and For the Press – I needed to have my raw concepts of what these classes would be about aligned with my personal take on the ginormous field of ceramics. Nothing like starting right in.

Just what do Adult Beginners or Re-Newers want? Or need? What do I have to offer them? Could I parse this out and still keep it meaningful, soulful and artistic, for us both?

How much does my editing, formatting and delivery of this wide-ranging subject affect outcomes? I concluded it was puh-lenty and I would do well to start back at my own beginning, boil it down to the bare-boned basics and embellish prettily from there.

So what you see to the left is my long-time method of distilling knowledge: get a side table, dedicate it to the topic at hand, and proceed over the ensuing unfocused weeks to pile it high with everything which might be valuable to that cause. (It’s also how I wrote my college term papers, so I guess there’s a workable precedent in force.)

Supposedly Right-Brained Creatives respond better to horizontal, visual, tactile piled-up available information – as opposed to vertical files behind cabinet drawer-fronts –  and I agree: when I have a thought, a pertinent quote, a book, an article, a snippet of anything I suspect might be useful, I just throw it here, feeling rich and capable.

In good time, I will comb through the cornucopia and discover the inherent order there. Yes, I have a goal in mind, but the only way I realize it is to plow through and let it grab me. Inevitably the outcome is so much richer and denser than what I thought I was creating.

These stacks are certain to contain my decade-plus collection of notes and handouts from my stable of teachers too. Some of them have had genius ways of simplifying and Explaining It All….or genius techniques, genius timetables, and genius projects which I can freely channel, if not outright copy. I bow to those who gave this kind of effort before me, and I reap the harvest of their cultivation. Nobody comes out of nowhere.

And that’s really all there is to it. I’m no expert. I’m just someone who’s studied how to share and how to be a guide and to deliver substance. I’ve got some ideas on what sorts of things are good to know in the beginning and what sorts of things might logically follow.  I have theories on how to engage learners and how to aid them in discovering their own realizations and about how to foster the creative process as it relates to clay. Beyond that, what happens is what happens and I mean to stay awake to it. I’m a Hidden Student inside a Crouching Teacher.

Class Nuts and Bolts: It meets 6 Thursdays, 2-5pm, Session I: Feb 23 to March 29, Session II: 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: A discussion of the super slo mo similarities between an illustrated ceramic process and cooking shows.

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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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