POTTERY: Patience

PATIENCE

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Sometimes it’s hard to be patient when learning a skill as vast as ceramics. It just isn't obvious what is involved to go from raw clay in the ground, to a bowl on your kitchen table. As I meet more potters and grow in my own experiences, it seems clear that even life long potters often specialize in specific areas of the craft and may know little about other areas. Yvette and I really have been making pottery for a relatively short time and we don’t spend every day at the studio, though I might if we weren’t in Nevada City half the time. So it is often 2 steps forward, one step back. Rinse. Repeat. Get better!

One part of the pottery process that make it easier for me to be patient is glazing. Admittedly, at first I hated it, as it seems many potters do. Kind of like woodworkers that love building the piece of furniture, but hate doing teh finishing work of stain, polyurathane, etc. There are way too many choices when deciding how to glaze a piece. There are so many variables, but the ‘paradox of choice’ is for another blog post. After some random successes and a great dude (yo Keith!) at the studio that is both great at glazing and generous in answering our many questions, glazing is the part of the process I look forward to most, especially when trying to find something new, and not risking a piece I think is good (for me that is). I’ve been absorbed in reading about glazes. We’re really lucky that Dan, the studio owner, is a ‘glaze’ guy and that we have almost 60 glazes on hand to play with. It’s a great place to experiment. And oddly, when a glazing try doesn’t work, it doesn’t really bother me. It’s either bad luck, or an application done wrong (see photo below) and something to learn from. Glazing is unlike throwing and trimming where it feels like progress should be made from the repetition. There are so many variables out of your control in glazing, that the best you can do is at least be aware of best practices, and even those don’t guarantee the result you’re after.

But back to the topic: Patience. Unlike learning a musical instrument, the bar for creating things that are decent to use or admire is much lower. Everyday, I enjoy drinking from mugs that I have made. Unlike learning a musical instrument, there are many more and diverse facets to learn, and I don’t think it is even possible to master them all. There is the skill in working with your hands, both on a wheel or in sculpting, refining a sense of design both for practicality, or simply aesthetics, and then there is the mystery of the kiln and how it interacts with the chemistry of glazes and clay bodies. So I am finding it easy to be patient, maybe because I know it is impossible to master it all. Even if I had started at a much younger age, I know I would still be learning the craft every day. And, still be getting excited when the kiln is opened!

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Breaking the Rules! and paying the price. A Shino glaze on top of a another glaze and you can get something really ugly like this! Sometimes it can work, but defintely not this combo!