Rough Ideas – Page 13

#10 summer summit 2021

Before I had the visual language for pots I loved the raw materials. If my father was still here he might tell you about the time I tried to wash the car with mud or the times we spent making pinch pots out of clay found by the beach in Montauk. He might tell you about how he encouraged me to make a glaze out of crushed Coke bottles and Elmers glue. These experiences are like stories from another age. When we cleared out my parents loft I went through their cabinet of pottery. I could recite the history of the pitcher from Mexico, the albarello from Italy, the blue and white bowl from China, and the George Ohr from Biloxi, Mississippi. My brothers knew my parents loved these things, but they sat on the shelves like obsolete trinkets from another age. These objects spoke of my material loves, a special language moving beyond the holes in my socks and into the wild stems and flowers we picked from the roadside and put in odd vases.

RELICS

Before I knew words for it
I loved what was obsolete
crumpled at the foot of a closet
lost in the street
left out in the rain
in its wet story
from another age
in a language that was lost
like the holes in socks
I loved the rust with its steering wheel
in midair above the forbidden
chassis and the mouths of tunnels
the eyes of dust
no floor with its pedals
that I was never to touch
because all of it was
dangerous
and the touch of it
would never come off
though I could tell that no one
really believed that
as it stood there behind
the garage that had floated to us
like an ark from the days of horses
and I stood at the corner and listened

– W.S. Merwin, from The Moon Before Morning, (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). Copyright 2014 by W.S. Merwin. [LINK]

rough ideas

#9 summer summit 2021

I have been looking at a group of bottles on our dining room table, each one from a different firing, each with a different focus on form and surface. On my studio docket today was to make a new series of bottles. I often think about still lives. I remember an interrupted conversation I once had with Gwyn Hanssen Pigot. We were at the Garth Clark Gallery in New York City and I asked her if all the pots in a single still life parade came from the same firing. I wondered if pots ever hung around her studio waiting for the right mates to come along as she composed her parades. Her Australian friend interrupted us–admonishing me as if I didn’t understand how successful Gwyn was–so I never got to return to the conversation. Gwyn was inspired by Morandi’s still lives. When I take photos I often think about his painterly universe of form and structure. I imagine him looking hard at his objects as if any extra effects had been scraped away, as if the emptiness of the canvas was filled through his objects.

Over there’s the ur-photograph,
Giorgio Morandi, glasses pushed up on his forehead,
Looking hard at four objects—
Two olive oil tins, one wine bottle, one flower vase,
A universe of form and structure.

-Charles Wright, from Looking Around

garlicscape solstice

#8 summer summit 2021

The thunder feels green in the moments before a looming thunderstorm. I make a loop outside to make sure nothing was left out that can’t get wet or won’t blow away. I close barn doors to the studio and cover my work in progress for the night. These are June walking loops. They reflect the garlic I am growing–even if this year the garlic lays flat like the deer have been sleeping on it. Besides the culinary uses I grow garlic because I love these loops of the scapes . These loops resonate in my fingers and through my brush like the Music this variety is named for.

Green was the silence, wet was the light
the month of June trembled like a butterfly

-Pablo Neruda, from Sonnet XL

blueberries solstice

#7 summer summit 2021

On Monday mornings my routine is to take a walk by myself–no dog, no husband–to set the tone for the week. But this morning as I headed out I stopped to pick blueberries, then take photos, and wash tools in the studio, a different way of setting the week’s tone. Over the last 15 months we have had a few trees come down or need to be taken down. One of them was a white pine our daughter Zoë planted as a seedling brought home from preschool. When the top of it blew off in a big windstorm it caused major car damage. The good news is now that it’s gone more sun reaches the blueberries.

My friend tree
I sawed you down
but I must attend
an older friend
the sun

-Lorine Niedecker, My Friend Tree

poppies rough ideas solstice

#6 summer summit 2021

I remember after my father died when I packed up all the pots I had made that my parents had saved at their loft over the years. I was surprised to see the beginnings of forms and motifs some of which I am still trying to capture. When I think back to those early attempts at making pots it’s like being pre-literate. I didn’t have the words to describe how a pot filled space, what it’s volume was, or why it was enticing. I often wonder where did the ideas come from. In a few cases I can define a specific influence. I recollect a dinner with Robert Ellison when I was in high school. He showed my parents and I some of his George Ohr pots. My dad said “I remember the things Catherine made after I showed her Picasso’s ceramics. I can’t wait to see what she makes after seeing these twisted and inventive pots.” Today in the studio I was tired of my go-to solutions. Instead I wanted to work as if I was digging potatoes — my hands feeling in the dirt without seeing , yet finding the hard shape of the prized new potato.

“Children make up the best songs, anyway,” he [Tom Waits] says. “Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.” This openness is what every artist needs. Be ready to receive the inspiration when it comes; be ready to let it go when it vanishes. He believes that if a song “really wants to be written down, it’ll stick in my head. If it wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else’s song.” “Some songs,” he has learned, “don’t want to be recorded.” You can’t wrestle with them or you’ll only scare them off more. Trying to capture them sometimes “is trying to trap birds.” Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like “digging potatoes out of the ground.” Others are sticky and weird, like “gum found under an old table.” Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful “to cut up as bait and use ’em to catch other songs.”

-From Elizabeth Gilbert’s terrific [Link:] 2002 GQ profile of Tom Waits

rough ideas

#5 summer summit 2021

I often say I feel like making work for the wood kiln is like a collaboration. But I think working with any material is a collaboration. I begin with an intention, a scale, a feeling, a form and sometimes a drawing. The next step is getting the clay to do what I imagined and the question becomes, Does it match my preconception? Today I had tall narrow vases in mind— what I made looks like I was collaborating with Dr Seuss rather than smooth stoneware clay. In the studio there is a moment when acceptance is required— the vases aren’t exactly what I intended but they have a life of their own. They show what wet clay can be like; what gravity can do. These pots moved in a direction I did not expect. It takes courage to respond. The response is what allows the forms to come to life. I react to the shape and remain open to the way it slumps, wobbles, or cracks. I ask how can I help it along so that I realize the idea.

“It’s a collaboration, making a spoon. As it is with making a vessel out of clay or a sculpture out of steel. To impose your will and force, to demand the material do what you want, take the shape you want, bow to your preconceptions for what it should be—it will not work this way. A spoon might exist in the end, but something will be missing from it, and you will feel that lack in your hand when you stir the soup. A humility is required, a willingness, in any moment, to realize, this is moving in a direction I did not anticipate, and the courage to respond to what is coming into being. To ask and attend, what shape is being asking for, how can I help it be that? This is the way we are elevated by the process and in the process.”
–Nina MacLaughlin [Link]

solstice

#4 summer summit 2021

I have been working on shifting my attitude towards weeding, moving it from a chore to an adventure. After listing to a podcast by Margaret Roach on A Way to Garden I have been calling it treasure hunting. I am looking for seedlings instead of just pulling out unwanted plants even if that’s what’s involved. The other morning I was happily discovering Mexican sunflowers and pineapple sage when I came across what I thought was an aggressive giant weed. When I pulled it out I was pleasantly surprised to find it was a radish gone to seed.

“My idea of gardening is to discover something wild in my wood and weed around it with the utmost care until it has a chance to grow and spread.”
– Margaret Bourke-White

rough ideas

#3 summer summit 2021

Last night in my dreams I wandered the garden and up the driveway in search of the right words. In real life, before bedtime, one of us walks up the driveway in the dark with the puppy, noticing the sky, the breeze, the feeling of the hills; listening to the geese or sometimes the coyotes or perhaps, just silence. I think of the vases in the image as landscape vases. They hold a flower against the mass of a hill and model the line between land and sky.

“The future tugs on us, as the moon does, come what may. In a face, in a shadow, in the overflow of dream life into real life, in all the indistinct places, come what may, come what may, we wander the night gardens of our minds in search of something we can understand. Let’s speak of what we know, and then we’ll see what we hear in the silence.”

–Nina MacLaughlin, from Flower Moon, Link: The Paris Review

rough ideas

#2 summer summit 2021

In years past as Warren assists me in myriad fashions he used to wish that I would do these projects ahead of time. I repeatedly told him that this summer series is a response to the season, a reflection of the light, a reminder of the weeds, and the fall of the shadows. I was caught between the ideas of what the garden might provide versus the actual shadows, for instance, of today’s abundant dill. I wanted the planting of a few delinquent seedlings and admiration of the rampant growth to inform the shaking of my head at my expectations.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

–T.S. Eliot , from The Hollow Men

Tags dill, solstice

rough ideas

#1 summer summit 2021

This is the first of the series until June 21st of what I hope to be 21 images, a few recollections and some poems. After so many months of the pandemic I can take aim at this series but feel more uncertain than usual at the start.