I hope you are doing well. The hour is late here. I fell asleep before writing and now I am racing the sunrise. It's been a weird week for me. The tail end of the summer always brings with it a great deal of nostalgia. The school year begins and for someone who spent so many years in academia I still find it odd to not be involved in it.
So you may be wondering what's up with the mug? Well I got accepted into a juried art show, and yes I did make that mug. For those of you who are new readers I am also an artist. It is part of my profession that has been on the back burner for a few years. You see I'd hit a wall with my art. Well actually I hit several walls, repeatedly, or rather constantly. After I graduated back in 05, I didn't have the equipment I needed to make work. Then I worked as a studio assistant in exchange for equipment use. That went well for about a year or so and then that studio closed. I then helped someone set up their home studio in exchange for firings. They backed out of the deal after I finished all the heavy work for them. So I finally got my own kiln and equipment, but then I couldn't get the glazes to work. After much frustration, I got a few colors the way I wanted them, but was kept out of a national show by a former professor. About three years ago I got into a small gallery in Gatlinburg. This for me was a godsend as I had run out of shelf space and couldn't make anymore work. Unfortunately, the gallery sold my work then neglected to pay me and tried to make off with over a thousand dollars of my work. The final straw came as I found out that the clay I had stored had dried out into brick hard material. I literally broke my body trying to make the clay work. To sum it up for more than 13 years I have hit nothing but setbacks and disappointments. The good news is that I'm stubborn.
As I look back on what I just wrote I realize how much I needed an outlet for my frustration. I didn't mean to go into such detail. In fact I missed the one piece of information I meant to convey. I've been working in porcelain since about 2004, and it has been kicking my butt the entire time. Porcelain was once valued up there with precious metals in the west, and after working with it for so long I can see why. As pretty as it is, it is quite the diva to work with. This week I switched to a different clay body. I basically got tired of the abusive relationship it has had with me. It seems to think I am beneath it, and do I really want to hang around with something that has such a low opinion of myself? Now it certainly didn't cause all of the problems stated above, but I can tell you that working with material that insists on fighting you every step of the way is exhausting and demoralizing. So imagine my surprise when I opened a fresh bag of new clay and started prepping it for wheel work and finding that it didn't push back at me. I set it on the wheel and had it centered in thirty seconds as opposed to five to ten minutes. It responded to my touch like an ardent lover. Now I am grateful to porcelain for making me a better artist, but I consider this blog post as my Dear John letter to porcelain. I'm not sorry it's over, I'm only sorry it took me this long to figure out that you are not long term relationship material.
So why am I telling you in intrinsic detail about my feud with self important clay? Well I imagine that many of us have something in our life where we keep banging our heads against the wall. Perhaps we think it is all due to our own failings, but maybe it is just the circumstances. Maybe we think we don't have options. I am amazed that changing this one thing has opened up the horizon. We can get fixed into an approach in our heads that keeps us from trying something else. For you it may not be clay it could be a job, a town, or even a relationship. Stop trying to make something work that isn't going to. It is okay to occasionally admit defeat and move onto something else. I stayed in my dysfunctional relationship with a material because it looked so beautiful, particularly in my mind. It is easy to idealize how things should be and what the "right" way is to get to our goals. I'm telling you now save yourself the pain, snap out of the delusion. There is no right way to go about your life. Stop trying to squeeze yourself into something that is not a fit for you. Look for what works for you because, you're a much better master to your life than anything or anyone else.
Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle
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