|
Letters from a Collector to a Studio Potter
|
July 5th, 2011
 Realism vs. Romanticism
Who do you trust and depend upon the most in your own ceramic work – your head or your heart? Can you separate these two things and choose one over the other as the dominant force in your ceramic work? What exactly do they mean in terms of your life and your ceramic art? These ideas are embedded in the essence and history of Western art. We can trace the dual legacies of romanticism and realism in that history and find many of the competing strands of their perspectives. We would, of course, associate the head with realism and the heart with romanticism. Let me make it clear that this has more significance and meaning then just as an art technique or attitude toward creating art. These ideas impact the very way you live in the world and make sense of it. Observers of your ceramic art might place your work within one or the other of these categories. Where would you put your work? Maybe some of us would like to think that we bridge those differences and are capable of both kinds of behavior and both ways of being in the world. You might claim that you can access both head and heart in your crafting of the ceramic object.
 Others of you might be far more partisan and claim that one of these approaches is vastly superior to the other. Romantics might claim that it is the lyrical expression of feeling, the vivid personal passion that inspires their creative process and achieves great art. Passionate love, including erotic and sensuous love, is the very engine of the human personality. Much of 19th century literature and art in Western Europe would claim that view. Isn’t it evident in the differences between the delights of poetry and the flat prose of a newspaper? The poet can celebrate the beauty and joys of life and nature. But on the other hand I would prefer journalists who write for newspapers or TV news to get their facts straight and not go off in fanciful fiction. For journalists, their integrity is dependent upon their rigorous presentation of what they know to be objectively true. For most poets, that approach would completely stifle their creative process. Maybe romantics belong in certain creative arenas and realists belong in fields that depend upon accuracy and precision in their fidelity to reporting what they see and experience. I think I would prefer a brain surgeon to be a realist instead of a romanticist if I was about to undergo brain surgery.
The HeArt of Technology
Romanticism was a hostile reaction first to the growing secularism that came out of the Enlightenment that so highly valued objective rationality, later it reacted to the growth of science and its application in various technologies that sponsored the industrial revolution. Technology has been the traditional enemy of the romantic. The machine for the romantic has been perceived as the adversary of the artist. In what ways has technology served your creative work? Could you explain and convince others that the human hand can do things with clay that a machine could never do? The industrial potteries of the 19th century were organized on the factory model and made multiple copies of the same artifact based on assembly line procedures. Today ceramic designers, many who never actually touch the clay themselves, work for corporate entities that mass produce and manufacture ceramic domestic ware. Isn’t the individual studio potter by nature and circumstances a romantic? Some people would say that romanticism is obsolete and out of place in our modern world? What do you think?
 Of course my own lifestyle is completely dependent upon a variety of technologies to provide creature comforts and ease my way in the world. I would not surrender any of them for the alternative that existed before their invention. I suppose I could get along without the microwave, although I did warm up leftover Chinese food for lunch today and often use it for that purpose. I certainly could not do without this computer and its word-processing ability. I do have a hybrid car that runs jointly on a battery and gas with resulting low mileage. I would probably surrender it to a totally electric car if there were adequate facilities to recharge them. At this very moment the air conditioning is off but summer is coming and I cannot bear the onslaught of a natural environment if it would cause me to sweat. I do use a mop and broom, both having long and honorable ancestors going back centuries. But I also highly value my vacuum cleaner, cord plugged into the wall, sucking up leaves and dog hairs on the tile and carpet. We have several wall plugs in every room, allowing me to view television, watch my foreign films, listen to the stereo, enjoy my huge classical music CD collection. I do try to limit the electric lights at night just to the rooms of the house we are occupying but I do require considerable illumination in the room when I read at night.
In my 8th letter to Christa Assad, in my book, “Searching for Beauty: Letters from a Collector to a Studio Potter, I said the following about the relationship of technology to culture and quoted from a book by Nicols Fox,
 “Both the American and English intellectual traditions question the devastating development of technology that represented the industrial revolution. Here Thoreau and Emerson join Ruskin and Morris in deploring the impact of industrial technology on the lives of artisans, workers and the environment. In a wonderful new book, ‘Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives’, Nicols Fox explores the broad dimensions of this thinking,
‘As a theme, resistance to technology appears in Romantic and Victorian literature, in transcendentalism, in the Arts and Crafts movement, the agrarian movement, the environmental movement. It is present today in the writers who cling to their typewriters, the fine cabinetmakers who cherish their old tools; the hand-weavers and basket-makers, and potters and needlework enthusiasts, who keep to their craft against all logic; the herbalists and organic growers who are convinced that what they do is important and brook no argument – all those who cling consciously in whatever manner or degree to the old ways.’
 What is the state of this issue among potters today? I can’t remember if the wheels in your studio are plugged in or get their power from your feet. Does it make a difference? Is there some organic integrity with feet powered wheels or are they obsolete now? I do remember that you have electric kilns. Is your arrangement a compromise out of expediency or can you justify the use of power appliances in your craft? Does it matter in the kind of pottery you create? The wood turner uses a lathe and it is still considered a craft. Has some accepted authority determined and defined what represents a hand crafted object? At some point, does the extensive use of electric appliances disqualify a craft product and turn it into a manufactured product?
 Is it simply the inevitable conservatism of old age that motivates tentative and uncertain reservations about technology? John Ruskin and William Morris failed in attempts to find a utopian paradise based on medieval practices. The sound of the train invading the countryside appalled Henry Thoreau. I hide in my secret garden, seeking to escape the hum of the nearby freeway. As in politics, where my vote usually guarantees the candidates defeat, I must be careful not to be a sore loser in the cultural battles of my time.
I am not sure what to label myself without offending friends, becoming foolish, or revealing my lack of sophistication. How can one confess affinity with nineteenth century romanticism without suffering ridicule? In a chapter entitled ‘Romantic Inclinations’, Nicols Fox describes this impulse,
 ‘Romantic was a way of seeing, a certain cast of light that could transform anything. In this new illumination, the imagination could play with the unfamiliarity of familiar things, accentuating the strangeness of the half-visible. This sensation of newness, of possibility, of transformation defined the word. This was the mind at playful work, allowed to range and create and interact with the ever-changing nature of reality. The Romantic’s priorities were with the exercise of imagination, with excess, with the mystical and, at times, the irrational. The natural world was a powerful and important place where God dwelt; human emotion, intuitions and yearnings were not simply valid, but vital, and could be trusted.’ ”
What part of what Fox is talking about would you be willing to give up? There is a puritan tradition in the American Arts & Crafts movement that showed up again in the streamlined designs of Art Deco and today in the highly designed forms of mass produced ceramic domestic ware. It is severely simple, devoid of decoration, shorn of any graphic or illustrated pictorial surface, pure in its subtraction of extraneous elements. Minimalism in painting and other arts strongly display this influence. This approach sends shivers into the heart of the romanticist. This approach is simply not enough, it is not nearly enough to satisfy the robust aesthetic appetites of the romantic. Take another look at your ceramic artifacts. How would they fit here?
Tags: about Richard, artist, arts and crafts movement, book, California, ceramics, ceramics today, craftsman, cultural influences, education, functional art, life, pottery, reading, richard jacobs, searching for beauty
Posted in Knowledge and Learning, Mentors, New favorites, Pots I spoke of in the text..., Really old friends/philosophers/authors/poets, Richard's Photos, Richard's Rants, Searching For Beauty, Thought Provoking, Uncategorized | No Comments »
June 1st, 2011
 The morning drizzle and overcast skies has ended and a more robust spring sun is now becoming felt in my garden. The blooms on my plants, the burst of flowers on my rose bushes, the overall spectacular display of spring color has won favor with my neighbors and confirmed my status as a maestro of the garden. I must at least make insincere attempts at modesty but the evidence in my front garden provides a local celebrity that I cannot deny. How do potters and ceramic artists handle the compliments of those who praise their work? Surely, given the hours of devotion to your craft, you may acknowledge and enjoy the rewards of having your work valued and celebrated by others. I know that in some cultures potters and other craftspeople have not historically placed their personal mark on the object. These cultures do not celebrate the individual maker but rather regard both the crafts-person and the crafted object within the body of the community and not separate from it. I need to confess right now that my name is prominently featured on the cover of my book. No one can completely escape the influence of the culture in which they born. That is certainly true for me too.
 I want to return to the Octavio Paz in this two-part blog. He is a maker of thoughts and feelings through the disciplined and creative use of words. I would like to think that all makers, those who use clay, glass or some kind of stone would identify with those who use words, such as poets and writers. In the last blog I showed you that Octavio certainly feel a strong identification and sensitivity toward craft and pottery in particular. What kind of books do potters read? I know it is silly to attempt that kind of generalization and the tastes in text would vary as greatly as any other pool of people. I do have a curiosity about potters reading fiction and poetry as well as non-fiction. I find most ceramic magazines have a rather factual and conventional prose that is essentially descriptive in nature and usually follows a general formula. I don’t remember seeing much poetry or fiction in these periodicals. Do potters enjoy creativity in the printed word as much as creativity in their pottery? Octavio Paz was a world-class poet and a marvelous essayist of the highest order.
In the book he is best know for and now considered a classic, “The Labyrinth of Solitude”, Paz attempts to explain the soul and character of Mexico as he sees and experiences it. He also tries to explore the profound differences between ‘North American’ culture (that’s us) and Mexico. Here is a sample of his comments,
 “The North Americans are credulous and we are believers; they love fairy tales and detective stories and we love myths and legends. The Mexican tells lies because he delights in fantasy, or because he is desperate, or because he want to rise above the sordid facts of his life; the North American does not tell lies, but he substitutes social truth for the real truth, which is always disagreeable. We get drunk in order to confess; they get drunk in order to forget. They are optimists and we are nihilists – except that our nihilism is not intellectual but instinctive, and therefore irrefutable. We are suspicious and they are trusting. We are sorrowful and sarcastic and they are happy and full of jokes. North Americans want to understand and we want to contemplate. They are activists and we are quietists; we enjoy our wounds and they enjoy their inventions. They believe in hygiene, health, work and contentment, perhaps they have never experienced true joy, which is intoxication, a whirlwind. In the hubbub of a fiesta night our voices explode into brilliant lights, and life and death mingle together, while their vitality becomes a fixed smile that denies old age and death but that changes life to motionless stone.”
 Of course Paz is using dramatic, metaphorical language in an attempt to capture elements of those essences at the heart of both cultures. He is not speaking as an objective anthropologist but seeking a deeper truth and insight that does not seek a balanced or factual blandness. He is speaking as a poet and it does not matter that you might have said different things in a different way. All art contains exaggeration because that is what the imagination does in creating art. This exaggeration may either impose an exaggerated simplicity or an exaggerated elaboration, but art does not merely document reality or prove what already exists around us. That is what science does. The important thing here, in this one brief sample of his more extended thoughts about North Americans and Mexicans in his book, is that Paz sees memorable differences in the way each culture forms and shapes those humans that inhabit them.
 As Paz demonstrates, this has nothing to do with being negative or positive about culture – all human societies are incomplete and fallible, imperfect and yet capable of contributing great beauty and acts of great generosity, magnificent in some realms of activity and offering the world unique achievements, yet capable of being mean spirited and self-absorbed when gripped in collective fear or insecurity. Octavio might agree with me that much of the virtue of a culture might reside in the very same things that foreigners might regard as the most perplexing or puzzling. Can Octavio’s generalizations about culture show profound insight while other people’s generalizations might just show prejudice and ethnocentrism? How can you tell the difference?
Are these cultural differences evident in those artifacts that each culture creates and displays to the world beyond it? Does the pot you make really display just your own individual creativity and unique talent or does it also represent the culture that nurtured your very person-hood? I think Paz would agree with me that North Americans might characteristically want to take all the credit, insist that they are self-made and complete in themselves. We are supposed to be highly individualistic as a people and culture. I am afraid that is what I must honestly claim for myself. I don’t think my ego could not sustain a finding that I am mostly a reflection of my culture. How can they not look at my garden and read my blog and book and see it is all me? I can deny Octavio, insist that he never personally met me nor did he ever visit Glendora as far as I know or he would not have said the things he said about North Americans. Would you want someone to look at your pottery or ceramic art and claim that they can detect the culture of your country in its form and character? Is having a specific and unique culture a good thing or not? With globalization and the electronic revolution, maybe all regional cultures indigenous to geography and specific history will soon be extinct. Do people on Facebook have cultural identities? Does Facebook itself have a culture that will some day replace all others?
 I want to end this blog with a very different view from a very different culture from that of the North Americans and Mexico, that of Japan. This view is expressed by one of that country’s greatest novelists, born in the late 19th century, Junichiro Tanizaki, in a small book about aesthetics called “In Praise of Shadows”. In this excerpt from the book, Tanizaki is making a case for the subtle and sublime virtues of Japanese culture as expressed when experiencing the toilet. Now North Americans don’t even call a toilet a toilet, (as the British do), rather we call it a restroom although I doubt if people go there for a rest. I will not attempt here to discuss why we disguise the name of the toilet with such a euphemism. It does say something about how we regard our bodies and their functions. I offer this quotation because I think it helps point out what most people find difficult to isolate and identify, and that is that their culture is embedded and expressed, not just in great art, pottery and literature, but in every waking moment and in every single activity and aspect of their daily lives. Here is what Tanizaki has to say in his poetic celebration of the experience of the traditional Japanese toilet.
“Every time I am shown to an old, dimly lit, and, I would add, impeccably clean toilet in a Nara or Kyoto temple, I am impressed with the singular virtues of Japanese architecture. The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss.  No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden. The novelist Natsume Soseki counted his morning trips to the toilet a great pleasure, ‘a physiological delight’ he called it. And surely there could be no better place to savor this pleasure than a Japanese toilet where, surrounded by tranquil walls and finely grained wood, one looks out upon blue skies and green leaves. As I have said there are certain prerequisites: a degree of dimness, absolute cleanliness, and quiet so complete one can hear the hum of a mosquito. I love to listen from such a toilet to the sound of softly falling rain, especially if it is a toilet of the Kanto region, with its long, narrow windows at floor level; there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones. And the toilet is the perfect place to listen to the chirping of insects or the song of the birds, to view the moon, or to enjoy any of those poignant moments that mark the change of seasons. Here, I suspect, is where haiku poets over the ages have come by a great many of their ideas. Indeed one could with some justice claim that of all the elements of Japanese architecture, the toilet is the most aesthetic. Our forebears, making poetry of everything in their lives, transformed what by rights should be the most unsanitary room in the house into a place of unsurpassed elegance, replete with fond associations with the beauties of nature. Compared to Westerners, who regard the toilet as utterly unclean and avoid even the mention of it in polite conversation, we are far more sensible and certainly in better taste.”
 Tanizaki goes on a bit long describing the virtues of the Japanese toilet but I think you get the idea. His book, ‘In Praise of Shadows’, was written in 1933. Traditional buildings and traditional ways of life were then being replaced by Western ways of construction and doing things. I doubt if you could find many Japanese toilets in Japan nowadays as described by Tanizaki. I doubt if many Japanese, except for its very oldest citizens, has time to sit on the toilet and mediate or hope to achieve a spiritual repose at that site. As for the title of the book, today one cannot easily praise shadows when ceilings contain rows of florescent lighting. No culture can remain frozen and static, whatever its virtues. But the ultimate wisdom gained from a long life is that all apparent gains through technology in providing ease and comfort in our lives also brings loss – the decline and death of traditional culture occurs with the same finality and termination as our own.
The important question for each generation is to decide what is worth preserving and what should be discarded for the new and novel. It is not just the decline of the Japanese toilet in question, my friends. The future of craft and the future of pottery in particular are open to the same forces and possible fate. How can we defend what we think is essential to human culture and a decent quality of life, and yet let go of those things, however memorable to us, that cannot be sustained in the tidal wave of constant change? I cannot recommend where you sit when you consider this question. I don’t think I have quite the same enthusiasm for American toilets as Tanizaki did for Japanese ones. Whether the space is located in the house or on a bench in the garden, we all need to have a quiet space for contemplation and reflection. Tanizaki and I will meet you there.
Tags: about Richard, artists, California, craftsman, cultural influences, Garden, home, humanity, learning, mentors, potter, reading, richard jacobs
Posted in Knowledge and Learning, Mentors, New favorites, Richard's Garden, Richard's Photos, Richard's Rants, Searching For Beauty, Thought Provoking, Uncategorized | No Comments »
May 20th, 2011
 We want it both ways. When we travel we want to see and experience a culture foreign to our own, or why spend all that money and time to find things just like at home? Yet most of us entertain a notion that all cultures have much in common, that all of humanity, whatever their culture, language or customs, are one big family in sharing universal attributes. The creation of handcrafted artifacts is one activity that seems to reach across the differences and demonstrates a common pattern. The making and using of objects serve as both tool and container to meet the daily needs of cultures across the globe. All people seem to have the need to embellish these objects with form and decoration that goes beyond their utilitarian function. All cultures are capable of art. All peoples have creative instincts that transform and transcend the world as they find it. We are gratified that there is not a universal sameness in these created objects. Rather they reveal the infinite varieties of human imagination and the vast differences in cultural orientation and worldview. In that sense, we do have it both ways. We find that all humans require community, family, and a sense of place and belonging. All use language, however different than ours, to give names to things and to shape how they perceive the world and give it meaning.
We regard strangers encountered in foreign lands as foreigners. But it appears far more difficult for us to understand how others can consider us foreigners when they visit our land. How could we be foreigners? We are just normal folks, doing and living as normal people do, there is nothing foreign about us! But of course that is not the way things are. When foreigners visit our land, they can be puzzled, surprised and even amused by our behavior, by the way we do things and make sense of things. Although it is difficult for us to be self-conscious and examine those qualities that make us foreign to others, foreigners know when visiting us what makes us American by contrast with their own cultural behavior and ways of doing things. As when we visit another country, such engagement is always a mixed bag, visitors being quite impressed and thrilled with some aspects of that foreign culture, but also perplexed and unsettled at not being able to operate and cope in this foreign place as one does at home.
 Just to make things more complicated, there are of course many cultures in America that co-exist and co-mingle in the same land. In a sense, our diverse cultural groups provide those qualities that make us both unique and foreign to those outside the culture. But even those cultures in this multicultural country that arrived here long ago in our history have taken on some of the cultural qualities of those who were here before them. Thus, for example, Asian or Hispanic communities in the United States have evolved into a rich hybrid of cultural qualities that after a time do not exactly duplicate their foreign origins. In truth, most cultures are integrated combinations of peoples from different origins who through centuries have immigrated or occupied the same land with others and have either intermarried or co-existed at one time or another. The idea of pure culture is as absurd as the idea of pure race.
The first generation of immigrants might be able to maintain and preserve their culture and language in its original form, aided by attempts to maintain their own communities at least partly insulated from the greater culture around them. But the second generation usually begin to integrate with those around them in the greater culture and further generations after that might attempt to retain some essential elements of a distant past such as family food recipes, traditional religious identity and beliefs, and their native language maintained as spoken in the home. At some point in this inevitable process of at least partial integration, the grandchildren might not be able to communicate in the language of the grandparents. The interaction of dominant and minority cultures has often been a mutually beneficial exchange, although discrimination and even violence toward some groups has also historically occurred throughout our history.
 Every cultural group that has arrived on our shores, and the indigenous Indian cultures found here, have contributed to and enriched the general culture. Public education was historically the vehicle through which children were given the skills and orientation thought necessary to enter the larger culture. There is a perennial issue and discussion in our country about the merits of assimilation into the greater culture; in order to open opportunities for economic success and fitting in with the surrounding society; or the very different choice of attempting to maintain a separate group identity with as much of the original culture intact and preserved as possible. This kind of coexistence has been called multiculturalism. The interaction of diverse peoples is always dynamic and formative in how they influence each other. The ability of a stronger economic power to impose its will on a minority culture requires a world in which the rule of law and sense of social justice operates to mediate such matters.
I think I might have already told you in a previous blog, but I have been writing letters the past 6 or 7 years to various mentors and authors I have long admired. I wrote 35 letters to William Morris, the British 19th century Arts & Crafts leader a few years ago, then 50 letters to Walter Benjamin, the 20th century German/Jewish cultural critic. Now I am writing letters to Octavio Paz, the 20th century Mexican poet and essayist. All these people have one thing in common, they are all deceased and thus unable to respond to my letters to them. Perhaps you might think me eccentric in writing letters to dead people and that might very well be true. Judy has indicated that if one day I report to her that one of them has answered me, she would consider my institutionalization at Happy Farms. I am not sure exactly where Happy Farms is located or if other residents also write letters to dead people there. I do love my home in Glendora and even if William, Walter, or Octavio did respond to one of my letters, I do not think I would tell her.
 I do want to share some of Octavio’s ideas with you now because he can contribute to our currant discussion. Aside from being a very prominent poet and writer, the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, he was also Mexico’s ambassador to France and India at one time or another. He taught at various American universities and has provided commentary of the differences between our culture with that of Mexico. Here is a brief excerpt from my book, “Searching for Beauty” Letters to a Collector to a Studio Potter” in which I describe how I discovered a book in which he wrote a great essay,
“One great book store is in Ojai, a small town in the hills of Ventura in central California. Bart’s Books occupies open air stalls and shelves, old houses and structures, books piled everywhere. When the store is closed, you can walk by on the sidewalk, browse through stacked boxes of books, make your selection and leave the money. I do not buy used clothing but I do love to browse used book stores. One great book I discover at Bart’s was “’In Praise of Hands: Contemporary Crafts of the World’. This book was published in association with the World Crafts Council to commemorate an international exhibition of contemporary crafts at the Ontario Science Centre in 1974. It contains one of the most profound statements I have ever encountered regarding the handcrafted object.”
The book was sponsored by the World Crafts Council, a group affiliated with UNESCO, founded in 1964 whose purpose is to “strengthen the status of crafts as a vital part of cultural and economic life, to promote fellowship among the craftsperson’s of the world, to offer them encouragement, help, advice and foster economic development through income generating activities.” If you want to know more about this important organization, look at their website at: www.worldcraftscouncil.org. WCC also stresses the need to give dignity, respect and self-esteem to craftspersons, and believes that these “people carry in their hands the living treasure of our cultural heritage.” They hold all kinds of seminars, workshops, exhibitions, and exchanges programs and conference and represent craftspeople all over the world.
In an introduction to the book, James S. Plaut, who was Secretary General of the World Crafts Council at the time of the publication (1974), identified the possibilities for the world’s crafts people to be members of the same family,
“Whatever the differences of origin, race, tradition, geography, or social order, the world’s craftsmen have one thing – one great gift – in common. They work, create, and achieve with their hands. This common bond, this way of work, transcends all barriers of language and custom, making it possible for the craftsmen of the world to invent and perfect their own language and to communicate with each other happily and fruitfully.”
 Have you found this to be true in your travels? When you travel abroad, maybe to attend ceramic conferences or to explore potters and pottery in other lands, do you find some ‘common bond’ with other potters or ceramic artists, no matter how different the culture or how difficult it is to communicate in a language foreign to the other party? Is there some overreaching union and understanding among craftspeople? I would like to think so, just as I would like to think that collectors of crafts have a common bond in their devotion to preserving and celebrating craft wherever they find it.
The essay by Octavio Paz, “Use and Contemplation” starts with a touching and beautiful passage about his direct experience with pottery. It takes a poet to truly articulate the poetics of engagement that we who love pottery can only attempt to express in our own modest way,
“Firmly planted. Not fallen from high: sprung up from below. Ocher, the color of burnt honey. The color of a sun buried a thousand years ago and dug up only yesterday. Fresh green and orange stripes running across it still-warm body. Circles, Greek frets: scattered traces of a lost alphabet? The belly of a woman heavy with child, the neck of a bird. If you cover and uncover its mouth with the palm of your hand, it answers you with a deep murmur, the sound of bubbling water welling up from its depths; if you tap its sides with your knuckles, it gives a tinkling laugh of little silver coins falling on stones. It has many tongues: it speaks the language of clay and minerals, of air currents flowing between canyon walls, of washer women as they scrub, of angry skies, of rain. A vessel of baked clay: do not put it in a glass case alongside rare precious objects. It must be filled; if it is full, it must be emptied. I take it by the shaped handle as I would take a woman by the arm. I lift it up, I tip it over a pitcher into which I pour milk or pulque – lunar liquids that open and close the doors of dawn and dark, waking and sleeping. Not an object to contemplate: an object to use.”
 Well, you can see why I am now writing letters to this man. He is a great poet and diplomat, cultural critic and intellectual; he knows how to behold the clay pot in his hands, ways to use it, and how to sing it’s lyrical messages of place, material and use. He might celebrate it many uses but no matter what he says, he does indeed contemplate its character and nature as well.
I think it is important to consider our attitude toward crafted artifacts as ambassadors of foreign cultures. Do we learn about other cultures from their pottery? Can we accept their pottery without accepting the people and culture that created it? How can there be prejudice and discrimination in the world after others do what Octavio Paz just did, pick up a pot and marvel at its character and friendly uses. Could a prejudiced person, narrow in view and naturally suspicious of foreigners and foreign cultures, learn about the creative genius and humanity of another culture if they would only pick up a pot from that culture and see what Octavio Paz saw? If not, why would a world organization devoted to world peace set up an agency such as the World Craft Council anyway?
Now that I have established Octavio Paz solid credentials with potters, I would like to discuss some of his thoughts regarding the theme of this blog, the relationship between cultures and the behavior of people representing diverse cultures when they interact, either on their own home turf or when they visit another culture. I just noticed that I am on page 4 of this blog and will end this part right now. I will continue with this same theme in Part 2.
Tags: about Richard, book, California, ceramics, knowledge, mentors, richard jacobs, searching for beauty, Travel
Posted in A lifetime of friends..., Interesting people I meet, Knowledge and Learning, Mentors, New favorites, Really old friends/philosophers/authors/poets, Richard's Photos, Richard's Rants, Searching For Beauty, Thought Provoking, Uncategorized | No Comments »
April 28th, 2011
 There is a romance to wanderlust – the sheer adventure of exploring exotic lands far away from your own origins and home. Modern modes of transportation has made all this quite possible. There is an irony here in that as foreign lands have become available they have also become more globalized and influenced by those who visit them and thus they start to become more and more like us. There is a reciprocal exchange of influences when people visit another culture or country – visitors or tourists are impacted and take back to their home culture certain new ways of looking at things and different styles of living. The visited country also is influenced by the visit and sees certain advantages in adopting ways not native to their own land. Most people assume that this exchange and interaction leads to greater interdependence and mutual understanding across cultures and countries. I am not sure that the history of contact between previously unknown cultures and countries would back up this assumption. We only have to investigate the history of European discoveries in the New World to learn that the occupation and colonization of these lands led to the violent destruction of the indigenous cultures.
 Multinational commercial and corporate transactions greatly homogenize the way people live and the ways things look across the globe. While traditional cultures might offer what is considered unique and valuable local or regional handcrafted artifacts, these aesthetic traditions are as fragile and vulnerable as the endangered species and plant life that co-exist with them in these regions of the world. Can we preserve or conserve the integrity of these foreign cultures and natural environments or will the rest of the world eventually be essentially just like us? Does being ‘highly developed’ have more to do with the quantity of things rather than the quality of things? Even the words we have used in describing these lands convey implicit assumptions of superiority. Are those nations that do not possess the same bathroom facilities or kitchen appliances we can boast about really ‘underdeveloped? Does it follow that their culture is also as underdeveloped as their economy? Would you explore the pottery of a foreign land and judge its quality by the GNP of that culture? Can culture ever be ‘underdeveloped’ in any human civilization? I am making the point that this history of assumed superiority subtlety influences how we regard and engage cultures in the non-Western world and can led to grave mistakes in judgment and the discounting of the profound achievements of cultures quite unlike our own.
Defining Love
 This leads to further issues and questions for all of us to consider. Can we love our own culture or country without having to prove it is superior in all regards to all others? Is it even rational to make that kind of claim? Why does it seem so difficult for humans to take pride in the unique virtues and achievements of their own culture while fully acknowledging that all cultures enjoy unique virtues all their own? We live in a very competitive society where hierarchies of superiority are encouraged by the way we are organized and the way we think. To be number one – be it in sports or in life seems very important to us. Those of us interested in the arts usually don’t feel the need to transfer that kind of thinking to what interests us there. I don’t remember any book on pottery or aesthetics that tries to rank the 100 best pots or paintings in the world in order of their supposed value. We do try to establish the importance of achievements in the arts by describing those attributes of the artifacts that display the sublime refinements of a significant achievement. This is quite a different thing. The qualities of a cultural achievement cannot be reduced to a simple formula by which an easy judgment can be made about worth. One cannot obtain the wisdom and meaning of a cultural artifact by trying to decide if it is a winner or loser or by the amount that you have to deduct from your bank account when you purchase it.
This can lead to another possible tendency for us – to judge the value of the piece by affixing a monetary price on it. Now we have a firm quantifiable number by which we can gauge the value of the object. What a relief! But not all cultures put a price tag on things, not all societies are inherently commercial in that all objects are reduced to commodities for sale. Much craft was created for centuries for use in daily life without thought of production for profit. I am sure that a working potter needs at some point to place a price tag on the bottom of their ceramic wares. But I would hope that the potter would not think that act in itself determines the true value and qualities of the pot. I have been to too many pottery shows and galleries not to know that the establishment of monetary value is a necessary step. I bring my wallet, checkbook, and credit cards with me because I know that the final act of acquisition requires these financial accouterments. That’s the way the real world works, at least that’s the way our world works. We must remember that this is not always the way other cultures work.
Determining Value
 As a collector, I do not want to think that the potter or ceramic artist is influenced or motivated while making the piece by opportunities to increase its monetary value. Perhaps I am being naïve here or making impossible demands for an aesthetic innocence on the part of the potter that cannot be sustained. I do recall times when very good potters have told me, when looking at their work, that some of the pottery were examples of their ‘bread and butter’ work. I took this to mean that these items were popular, often purchased, and provided a dependable source of revenue. Who am I to be a purist in this matter? I remember a passage in my book, “Searching for Beauty: Letters From a Collector to a Studio Potter” in which I discuss the quandaries and contradictions of price and value,
“Do all potters start off as humble ‘repetition’ potters making stacks of domestic ware? And slowly work yourself up to that dramatic risk of doing far less work for far more money? Is the big difference, aside from ego and ambition, the fact that some potters are graduates of prestigious university departments or art schools, mentored by famous potters, while others start as humble apprentices in somebody’s studio? I would like to think, at that crucial moment of the business transaction – to buy or not to buy, that I am far more impressed with the quality of the pot rather than the modest price. There are difficult merchandising questions for both buyer and seller. Perhaps a scale should be installed in the gallery and pottery sold by the pound. Small pots, except for those by very famous potters, tend to cost less. I have talked to a few potters who are frustrated that other potters, perhaps at an adjoining booth at some pottery fair or show, somehow get a far higher price for pots they insist are not any better than their own. I do have some standards – I will not purchase a pot I do not like – no matter the bargain price. Now, due both to my modest financial situation and the few remaining spaces left on my shelves, I am selective in adding only quality pots to my collection. When do potters raise their prices? Are the quality of the pot and the increasing reputation of the potter the basis for increased price? Or is it all a bluff? Raise prices, cut down on production and hope people will be so impressed with the high prices that they will also be impressed with the pottery? As a collector, I do hope that my enthusiastic appraisal of your pottery in these letters will not be the cause for you to further raise your prices. There must be consumer psychology behind all this. Perhaps you should consult people who manufacture and sell footwear or fast food hamburgers to discover the successful marketing principles involved. I do expect my potters to outperform stocks and bonds – no downward fluctuation, please – steady and sure accrual of worth as potters and the value of their pots mature over time. It is morbid to relate, but it appears that your future demise, after a lengthy and successful career, of course, will provide the big spike in increased value for your pots. Despite all that, I do sincerely wish you a very long and productive life. At my age, I will appear in the obituaries far sooner than the precious young potters represented in my collection. What determines the prices at estate sales? Oh, well, I won’t have to worry about that; Judy will have to sort that out.”
 
Personal Influence
It was Oscar Wilde, the 19th century Irish wit and playwright, who once said that “nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Ultimately no one can place the value on anything for you, that is something you have to do for yourself. The value of something is the meaning and importance you give to that thing. The ceramic artists has an extra burden here; they have to determine both the price for each individual ceramic piece and also make a continuing assessment of the aesthetic value of their own work. When I went on my lecture tours of Britain with my publishers, I would usually give a lecture at some university or ceramic gallery, then I would sit at a table and sign my books for those who decided to purchase them. I did not establish the price of my book; my publishers did because they incurred the cost of having them published. How could it be determined if readers got their money’s worth? How do you translate value into something as superficial as cost or price? (I guess it’s not all that superficial if you can’t afford the price.) As far as that is concerned, you are right now receiving my very profound thoughts and my very sensitive feelings completely free on this blog. Somehow that doesn’t seem fair. I have my pride and will not request a voluntary donation from the readers of this blog but if someone, rightfully full of guilt, wants to send me a pot or two I would not object.
I realize that I am contradicting myself when I earlier pleaded for potters to remain pure in ignoring the siren calls of monetary reward when creating their work and here I have just attempted to do the same thing. How much is a page of Jacobs’ text worth? This is one time when I do not wish you to respond to this blog. Your response could only be rude and hurt my feelings. We all exist in a world where we attend to both the sacred and the profane, the monetary price of objects as commercial commodities and the joyful engagement of objects as containers of beauty and meaning. We live in this world and yet we need on occasion to transcend it. I wish you the best in your own life’s journey in finding and giving your own meaning and value to those things you desire and treasure.
Tags: about Richard, book, ceramics, ceramics today, education, pottery, richard jacobs, searching for beauty, value
Posted in Knowledge and Learning, Richard's Garden, Richard's Photos, Richard's Rants, Searching For Beauty, Thought Provoking, Uncategorized | No Comments »
March 31st, 2011
How We Learn
 There is a psychological dynamic that happens when you make your own discoveries as a learner. The stuff they told me at school belonged to the teachers, a kind of official knowledge they already knew and was already in the textbooks and they insisted that I had to know it too. Even when I memorized that information for tests, it never really belong to me, it always seemed to belong to them. But my private learning was this subversive and surreptitious learning, not sponsored or imposed by parents or teachers. Here I explored and learned things because I wanted to know for myself. It became my own learning and I could proudly claim it for myself. Does this sound odd to you? Surely I am not the only person to ever feel that way?
I am trying to make the case that people should not only know what helps them instrumentally to get a job and make money. Even if that job or central activity is being a potter or ceramic artist, to limit your own awareness and knowledge to only those things that have immediate relevance to just that one human activity, however special and creative, is to limit the growth and development of your own range of abilities and capabilities. I think great curiosity about the world and the manifest richness and diversity of both the natural environment and human culture can naturally lead to a focus on particular activities. But that does not mean you have to give up the rest and limit yourself just to one corner of the garden. As you go through school, there is increasing pressure for you to narrow your interests to an isolated area of knowledge that might have some practical ability to someday help you get a job and make a living. But I don’t think school on any level, including college, should become a job-training program for just one kind of work. We should resist being put in a box, even if that is a pottery box, and you know how I love pottery. We are not just one kind of person, we are all many- splendid creatures and we cannot be totally explained by any one single identification.
  
Quality of Life
John Ruskin, the 19th century British writer, said, “there is no wealth but life”. He meant that we need to encompass the totality of life within our grasp and comprehension, that no isolated or specialized area or activity can contain the essence of life itself. Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright, courageous leader in the fight against communism in his country and former president of that country has this say about how we misdirect our energy and efforts and squeeze out the really important things in our lives,
“The dictatorship of money, of profit, of constant economic growth, and the necessity, flowing from all that, of plundering the earth without regard for what will be left in a few decades, along with everything else related to the materialistic obsessions of this world, from the flourishing of selfishness to the need to evade personal responsibility by becoming part of the herd, and the general inability of human conscience to keep pace with the inventions of reason, right up to the alienation created by the sheer size of modern institutions – all of these are phenomena that cannot effectively be confronted except through a new moral effort, that is, through a transformation of the spirit and the human relationship to life and the world.”
Well, that sounds like a big undertaking and an even greater challenge. Havel is indicating that what we need right now is moral knowledge and new kinds of relationships with each other and the earth. According to Havel, we need more intimate caring for each other and the environment and we need to further develop and apply our moral conscience. Where do we learn about that? How do we learn to become successful human beings as well as being successful in our careers? Do ceramic artists and potters have some wisdom about these issues? Did they make choices in their youth that said the quality of life was the real wealth of life? And that quality of life had to involve creating beautiful things and celebrating that beauty as an intrinsic part of their lives? I have this to say about William Morris and his friend and mentor, John Ruskin, in my book, “Searching for Beauty: Letters from a Collector to a Studio Potter”, in relationship to Havel’s quote,
“To understand the stained glass windows, wallpapers, and tapestries of William Morris, you must understand the aesthetics of John Ruskin. As we know Ruskin never made stained glass windows, wallpaper or tapestries. Why did Morris bother with Ruskin? To understand William Morris and John Ruskin, two privileged members of the English upper class, you have to understand why they organized seminars and presented lectures to industrial workers, even though those workers could not afford to travel to Italy with Ruskin or buy the wares of Morris. Havel would understand, it was to share ‘…that transformation of the spirit and the human relationship to life.’ We are all ordinary and remarkable, and we are all eligible for that transformation.”
Waiting for the Future
There are many benefits in pursuing interests that you don’t necessarily add to your job resume. Everything you know and everything you have experienced in life enriches you and makes you more complicated. You might well retort, particularly in these perilous times of recession and high unemployment, that preparing for a good job is all important and comes first. It is easy for me to ruminate on these things, after all I am retired and I have my pension and health plan. It is even more difficult to take advice from someone born to wealth, such as John Ruskin, already quoted above, who had a great influence on the Arts & Crafts movement there. I quote Ruskin many times in my book. I found and used in my book this quote of Ruskin’s in a wonderful biography of Ruskin, “The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin” by John Dixon Hunt. Here is what Ruskin has to say about the benefits of pursuing knowledge in difficult times,
“…does the pursuit of any art or science, for the mere sake of the resultant beauty or knowledge, tend to forward this end? That such pursuits are beneficial and ennobling to our nature is self-evident, but have we leisure for them in our perilous circumstances? Is it a time to be spelling of letters or touching of strings, counting stars or crystallizing dewdrops, while the earth is failing under our feet, and our fellows are departing every instant into eternal pain?”
 I don’t know exactly what the ‘perilous circumstances’ that Ruskin was talking about in this comment. Maybe something to do with the awful living conditions in Britain for workers during the industrial revolution, maybe some war the British Empire was waging somewhere at the time. The point is that there are always excuses and reasons not to do what you yearn and dream of doing and learning. Things always seem bad, the economy always seems in trouble, war or the threat of war is always on the horizon and there is never enough money in the bank account to pay for those special things after you pay the mortgage and I am not even going to talk about the price of gas. So we often put our dreams on the back burner as being unrealistic or impractical. Our dreams might include exploring, engaging and discovering new creative realms and experiences, traveling to foreign lands and experiencing different cultures; learning about some subject or theme that has always intrigued you but you never had the time to explore; all these adventures somehow never seem convenient, never easy.
Many of us delay our real life adventures and learning about new or different things to some day in the distant future. We promise ourselves that we will do all these things when the kids grow up; the nest is empty or when we retire. Then we will finally have the time to actually do what we have always dreamed about. But when that day finally arrives, all too often people find out they don’t have the energy or even the desire anymore. They waited too long. What is left is a lot of time that they don’t know what to do with. There is nothing they want to know and there is nothing they want to do. The windows to wonders beyond their own immediate lives were closed a long time ago and they don’t know how to open them now. Retirement has been a blessing for me. But I know others for whom it has been an empty void they don’t know how to fill.
Sometimes the best things in life are really free – or nearly free. What are the things you do and the things that you learn about just for the sheer pleasure and joy these things bring you? I bet some of them don’t cost a dime. Do some of then, as Havel stated, involve “transformation of the spirit and the human relationship to life’’? Here I think that artists and craftspeople have a wonderful advantage over many others. I don’t believe that many of you walk into your studio with a sense of dread at having to be there and work with clay. If you can truly integrate what you want to do and what you want to know into your daily life, and even make some kind of income as a result – then you are indeed very fortunate and among the relative few able to pull that off. We can enjoy more than one kind of experience and more than one kind of knowing. There are many ways of knowing. I join you in the pleasures of being wide-awake and alive in the world. We use all our senses, all our energy and abilities to engage the world. Some of us even try to add something to that world – maybe a pot or maybe a page of thoughts or ideas. We are indeed a community of learners and makers. I think I am in very good company.
Tags: about Richard, arts and crafts movement, craftsman, education, Garden, knowledge, learning, life, mentors, richard jacobs, school, searching for beauty
Posted in A lifetime of friends..., Knowledge and Learning, New favorites, Really old friends/philosophers/authors/poets, Richard's Garden, Richard's Photos, Richard's Rants, Thought Provoking | 3 Comments »
March 28th, 2011
Our Changing Knowledge
When we went to school as youth we were given something called the curriculum. This was a twelve-year sequence of what school authorities thought every child and young person should know by the time they graduate from high school. After that, if you went on to college, the first two years were largely filled with a series of courses called ‘general education’. There were introductory or survey courses in subjects that those in charge of the institution thought were sufficiently important that all students, regardless of their individual interests, had to take before they started taking the courses in their chosen major. Have you ever questioned those imposed courses and their lessons? Are there some things all people need to know? Are there things a potter should know that have nothing to do with pottery? I want to dare to suggest that it is that very knowledge that has nothing to do with pottery that might well be among the most important things you bring to the potters’ wheel.
 What are some of the things that everyone really needs to know? Here we need to be practical and realistic. I am just trying to make the point that these things should not squeeze out all the great stuff you want to know about that give you pleasure and joy. I think it is reasonable for us to know something about how our government works and the important issues facing us as citizens and voters. Knowing more about our history would give you an informed context for what is happening today. I would add to that knowing as much as you can about what is happening in the world so we can understand how the actions of foreign countries impact our country and economy. We also need to understand how to be smart consumers and how to take care of our family finances. There is a whole new area of knowledge that did not really exist when I was born – to know how to preserve and protect our environment and do one’s part to reduce our collective footprint on the earth. Another area of new knowledge that happened during my lifetime – we should be able to utilize the various electronic and computer appliances for our own betterment and development. To be able to think critically about these issues some basic knowledge about science would help. I would certainly include exposure to the great art and literature that constitutes your legacy of the world’s civilization and achievements. You can probably add a few more fundamental areas of human knowledge to this list that I missed but I think I will stop here.
Technology
 Thanks to computers, a huge avalanche of knowledge is available, far too much knowledge for any one of us to digest or take in. Most of this huge mound of information is best stored in the computer, not in your head. We have to decide for ourselves what is worth knowing and why. We are not going to make the same decision and the same choice. Each of us have our own passions in terms of what we want to experience and what we want to know more about. I don’t know of any neighbors, and I have lived in this neighborhood for over thirty years, who are interested in pottery. To be fair, I am sure they know things I do not know or want to know. Come to think of it, I do know just one person, a woman whose children go the same elementary school where my grandchildren go, who takes pottery classes from a nearby adult education program. I do not make judgments about what others prefer and choose for their own self-enrichment and satisfaction. I could not live without my books and pottery, but I also need to weed my garden and do my spring planting. From years of gardening, I think I know something about that activity, at least in a Southern California garden. And there are great films, plays and concerts – the list could go on and on and there is never time to do it all but I will not surrender any of it.
Personal Knowledge
One of the most important skills involved in learning is to know where to look for what you want to know. The computer does not solve this problem. In fact it makes it worse because it offers so many more choices and citations than you could possibly go through or explore. What is even more complicated is when you seek diverse perspectives or investigate some controversial issue than has multiple points of view. Here you can follow your own prejudices and end up with a bunch of expert opinions that happily agree with you. But the integrity of forming a critical intelligence that transcends your own current position demands that you confront diverse judgments that challenge prior assumptions. The act of learning requires this ability to revise and reverse your own thinking about something as well as add to it. Most of us have our egos invested in what we think we believe at the moment and it is often difficult to admit that we have changed our minds. I believe that, rather than being embarrassed by this capacity, one should feel great satisfaction when an expanded and informed viewpoint allows you to revise previous opinions and attitudes. It is a sure sign of intellectual growth.
I will go further than that and say that a sure sign of intellectual development is when you start from certainty and end up in doubt. Most people think that the normal and appropriate sequence in learning is just the reverse. I believe that to be mistaken. A highly informed perspective does not resolve an issue but complicates it. To think you had the easy and obvious answer to some problem and than find out that there are multiple ways of perceiving and experiencing ideas just as there are with ceramic artifacts. We wouldn’t just take one person’s opinion about the value and meaning of a particular potter’s work. We fully realize that each person experiences art and craft differently. Some people are surprised to know that the same diversity of judgment exists in intellectual work too. To seek the single right answer that will forever be true is a fool’s folly. To find and assess several valid and valuable responses to any issue or idea is to live with multiple possibilities, even including those that contradict each other. The great American philosopher of the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote in his essay on “Self-Reliance” that,
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.”
The danger in intellectual as well as artistic work is to have a smug presumption that you have the solution, the right answer and thus terminate further interest and activity in the area of that supposed right answer. As Emerson declared, a person that is convinced he/she already knows the right answer “has simply nothing to do.”
Knowledge of the Past
 One valuable test of my thinking on this idea would be to obtain old textbooks from fifty years ago – the ones used in elementary, secondary and the university level. It doesn’t matter the subject – science, the arts, the social sciences, history, whatever. You will be amused (or maybe shocked) that they are full of what was once thought objective knowledge that has long been revised or revoked by continuing scientific experiments or increased cultural awareness. I don’t even have to bring up how girls and women were portrayed in children’s literature and textbooks back then, much less the absence of people of color and others. All human knowledge and all human culture are dynamic, expanding, overthrowing and revising all that went before. Thus all human learners must display the same traits of being dynamic and active in their critical assessments and rigorous investigations. The same discipline and focus that you might bring to the potter’s wheel is also suitable for the open book and the printed page.
 In saying this, I want to emphasize the joy and pleasure of making sense of things, of the revelations and epiphanies possible in engaging ideas as well as art. It might sound silly, but as I sit at my computer and do this blog, I often delight myself with self-discoveries and the joy of just thinking about things. I also goof up and delete stuff after re-reading it. To delete your own stuff is hard. It is sort like when you look at some half-finished pot on the wheel and decide it is not going to work and smash the clay and start over. It’s OK to start over. My dear wife, Judy, who has the task of proofing all my writing, will often not only correct the grammar or spelling, but also say that she simply can’t comprehend what I wrote or what it meant. I love Judy very much, despite her comments, and my writing is always improved by her critical scrutiny. We learn by making reasonable approximations and errors. We need not strive to totally eliminate errors, only how to learn from them. Mistakes and errors can lead us to improved choices. Some of our greatest masterpieces in art, music and literature were first believed to be mistakes by critics of the time who rejected them. Think of a George Ohr pot as another example of a changed perception that took a long time in coming.
Our Beloved Teachers
The best teachers helped you learn by encouraging you to use your curiosity and intrinsic motivation to find out things that you want to know. All knowledge is eventually personal knowledge. The best retention and application of what is learned happens when the learner is invested in the learning and do it for themselves. School too often makes work out of what should be naturally stimulating and rewarding. Knowledge is not just knowing a lot of stuff – it is being able to make sense of what you learn and develop your own perspective and point of view and apply that knowledge to make your life more interesting and meaningful.
 As a student, I never was satisfied with most of the stuff in the textbooks and those things that teachers made you study and they talked about in class. I loved history and art projects and eventually became an art major in high school. But most of my learning as a child and youth did not happen in a classroom. In the evening, after dinner, I would paint and draw at the kitchen table until I had to go to bed. There was a small public library branch at the end of my dead-end street in West Los Angeles where I spent countless hours of my childhood. No one there told me what I had to read and what I had to know. I explored both fiction and non-fiction, read just about every book in that small branch library and started to order books from the central library in downtown Los Angeles. I was so proud one day when a librarian from the central library visited our sixth grade elementary class and asked ‘is Dick Jacobs here?’. I stood in front of my classmates and she told us that I had ordered many fine books and she congratulated me on my devotion to reading. For a very shy and introverted little boy, that was an unforgettable and very special day.
What were the worlds that you explored in your own childhood and youth? I don’t mean the school lessons and the homework assignments but your own private exploration of those things that excited and thrilled you. There is a special romance in allowing your own interests and curiosity to motivate your discoveries of the marvels of a great big wonderful world formerly unknown to you. You might even be able to remember that day and that memorable moment of excitement and pleasure when you knew that your engagement with some activity or special book would help organize your future lifetime. In my home I arrange my pottery and books with equal devotion. I have shelves from floor to ceiling with both books and pottery in my gallery, and books and pottery can be found in just about every other room, too.
 
Tags: about Richard, education, Garden, home, life, reading, richard jacobs, school, searching for beauty
Posted in New favorites, Really old friends/philosophers/authors/poets, Richard's Garden, Richard's Photos, Richard's Rants, Searching For Beauty, Thought Provoking, Uncategorized | No Comments »
March 1st, 2011
Is there a natural tempo for potters when they work at the wheel? Do production goals force them to speed up their work to get the stuff made? Is there a natural rhythm to making pots? Does this pace and timing have anything to do with the organic behavior of our natural world and its weather? There is a pulsing rhythm to the wind as it sweeps through the Jacaranda tree in my front garden and its impact on the movement of its limbs and leaves. There is a natural rhythm to the currents of a stream or creek that can occasionally be hurried into a rushing flood by torrential rain. Even the beat and timing of rain as it hits the ground is a dynamic composition in sound and movement. Are potters natural partners of the ‘slow’ movement – taking whatever time is necessary to move and manipulate the clay regardless of the constant pressures of an imposed efficiency? Does time stand still in your studio? What is the weather like inside your studio? Is it always calm and moderate?
Do you have a weather all your own? Is there an interior state within you that can be as unpredictable and extreme as the weather outside your window? Does the creative act cause a rise in your temperature? Where is the thermostat of your temperament set? If we do not enjoy volatile weather, I would think we would also prefer a calm interior life. The Stoics of ancient Rome favored such an attitude, as well as the Buddhists. Do you do better ceramic work when you are calm and at peace with the world or when you are agitated with creative fervor? Is the act of making things with clay a meditative act or an expressive one? Can they be both? I have had my share of stormy weather in my private life in my early years. At this point I prefer peace in all things.
14th letter – March 10, 2003
“Winter is still sponsoring the weather. Dark clouds hover over the foothills. The threat of rain and war combine to provide a daily anxiety. We are still early in the year and early into the new century. Much was said a few years ago about the glorious hopes and visions as we celebrated the new millennium. The old pathologies of previous centuries are being continued into this one. The world waits for war.”
As you can see, weather forms not only a natural envelope in which we are sealed but also a strong metaphorical influence on our hopes and fears about our lives and futures. We could spend hours just looking at the landscapes of painters like JMW Turner and John Constable and see what they did with clouds and skies in their paintings and better understand the awesome power of the visual representations of weather and the passing of a lighted day and the descent of a dark night. In a way the discussion of aesthetics is analogous to this natural phenomenon. During the sunlit day we can see the beauty of nature and find harmony and joy in that visual feast. As it becomes dusk and night descends, there is a gnawing danger that represents the sublime threats of an unknown and dark place.
I now realize that we need all kinds of weather. Just as we need all kinds of life experiences to fully appreciate the joys and beauty in our lives, we must also know the pain and sorrow of loss and those forces that can sponsor cruel and ugly injury to human existence. This reality is perhaps the most definite indication of a full maturity. Just as life is only fully appreciated when cognizant of the inevitability of death, we experience all kinds of weather in our lives – both in the surrounding natural environment and in the interiors of our thoughts and feelings. The human condition is not weatherproof – no matter how we try to insulate our lives from its effects. Yet we are durable, we are survivors, and for those of us that are creators of words and thoughts or makers of artifacts of clay and ceramic containers of beauty – we not only survive but we can testify to the fact that we can outlast any kind of weather – and all the storms in our lives that have tested and challenged us.
15th letter – May 13, 2003
“I have returned. Over two weeks in Britain with daily sun and blue skies only to be greeted by rain on return to Southern California. The hazards of generalization, although documented by past experience and necessary for planning purposes, can lead to surprising discrepancies and the upheaval of safe assumptions. It was the longest non-raining spring period on record in England and Scotland. Our top coats remained in the baggage and umbrellas stored unfurled.”
 As I am writing this blog, the morning sun is cascading from the window in back of me as I sit at my big desk in my pottery gallery. There are multiple sources that light the considerable space in the gallery. The French doors with their glass and open blinds are another source of illumination. The two skylights in the high ceiling provide shafts of bright sun that stab their light at selected sites in the room. I feel the warmth of the sun and I am grateful for its generous provisions. It has been very sunny for several days in a row in Southern California. This is rather unusual at this time of the year here – in February we should be getting some rain. December was a very wet month and we seem to be having a delayed fall during winter. I am not complaining, that would be ungrateful. My shelves of pottery are glowing with the warm touch of that golden light.
Weather comes to us in shades of light and dark, in bright spotlights of sun or in shadows of partially concealed pockets of darkness. Are there some people who prefer the shadows to the sunlight? Do you celebrate the sunrise or the sunset? Some people prefer the night – they become alive and find those things they most enjoy happen at that time. Others demand sunshine for their outdoor activities – to jog or to swim or to play golf or to hike a mountain trail. Are you a day person or a night person? I have the most energy in the morning – after a good night’s sleep. After lunch I take a short nap, then I am able to extend my day in the evening hours. These patterns and habits of behavior are individual to each person. Some people’s workday extends into the night and everything else shifts for that schedule. Some people live and work within interior environments where they do not know if it is day or night outside. Is it important to know or care whether it is day or night?
 Some people like to eat outside in the sunlight or a shaded patio. The backyard barbeque is an iconic appliance in Southern California. Many restaurants in the area offer outside dining as well as inside accommodations. I generally prefer to eat inside. And I must confess, even at the risk of having my manhood challenged, I do not barbeque. I cannot for the life of me find anything pleasant about leaning over a hot barbeque on a hot day getting hot food ready for a hot outdoor meal. Try to be understanding, I am just a grumpy old man and you must consider the source. Besides I don’t like bugs in my food and I don’t like the temperature where I am eating hotter than the food. I think I have proven in these comments that the weather indeed can arouse the passions of those of us who differ in our attitudes. Please, barbeque to your heart’s content, but bring that medium rare steak inside and serve me in a comfortable air-conditioned interior.
 I wish all of you the kind of weather you most value. I read in the newspaper of heavy snows and storms in the Midwest and East – of roofs heavy with snow collapsing and icy roads where cars skid and long lines of them becoming trapped and abandoned. Maybe there is a romance in that kind of weather I do not understand and cannot appreciate. After all, you must forgive me my own disposition in this matter. Like all of us, I am finally just a creature of that weather that has conditioned my life and outlook. My rose bushes are beginning to spout those early spring leaves, so dark and green with the promise and potential of glorious blooms in just a few more weeks. I eagerly anticipate the coming spring. I join the countless poets who have sung the praises of that season. Surely the poets had it right, no wonder it was a favorite theme – the green and glory of that explosion of color that allows us to endure and forgive the passing winter. Truly the seasons of nature frame and celebrate the seasons of our lives.
Posted in New favorites, Richard's Garden, Richard's Photos, Richard's Rants, Searching For Beauty, Thought Provoking, Uncategorized, Weather and Ceramics | No Comments »
February 22nd, 2011
 What impact does weather have on you? This is not just about whether you need to wear your coat or take the umbrella when you go outside but involves much more than that. Does the weather impact your very soul and morale? I would think what some people call ‘bad’ weather –be it rain or snow or a cruel cold wind, would be good weather for potters. Aren’t potters indoor people? A nice warm studio, maybe a cup of coffee or hot tea, and you can work on that wheel to your heart’s content regardless of what is happening outside. The worse the weather, the more appreciated is that enclosed and insulated studio where you spend so much time and derive so much joy. Do I have it right?
I am going to integrate passages about the weather from my book, “Searching for Beauty: Letters From a Collector to a Studio Potter” throughout this blog. If it turns out long enough, I might even stretch this out to two blogs. Weather is an active agent in the contextual reality of our lives. I make references many times to the weather in my book. I often introduced a letter with comments about the weather. It sets the mood and frames the atmosphere in which I operate and experience all other things.
4th letter – September 1, 2002
 “Warm greetings from a very hot place. I sit comfortably at my desk, safely barricaded behind the window, observing the defeated intensity of the sun. No gardening today. Plants don’t do well in this kind of weather. The flowers wilt and the plants do not have the energy to move. No breeze from the bay for us. We wait for relief, dependent upon the uncertain predictions of television weather reports. We live in a valley close to the foothills. The air quality has improved so much that the mountains that formerly disappeared for several months each summer are mostly clear and near now. From the crest of a nearby hill, we can now actually see the placement of our home above the freeway and below the ridge line of mountain ranges We live in a ‘Mediterranean’ climate that is rare in the world. I have compromised this habitat by the placement of dozens of sprinkler heads that allow a lush garden with plants that cannot claim indigenous status. In the abstract, as a matter of principal, I endorse the untouched natural environment as seen in the mountains above me. In practice, I have created a garden environment that could not exist without my constant intervention. I rationalize that this kind of honest confession at least partially excuses the violation.”
Does your pottery also represent a climate? Some pots are warm in their earth colors and glazes, convincing you that the warmth of their colors might also make them warm to your touch. Others seem cool in their soft blue, grey and green glazes, leaving doubt that they ever felt the awful heat of the kiln. Surely a potter should be grateful for that searing heat of the kiln – even if it is unnatural in that it does not emanate from the rays of the sun. What would you do without the fiery hell of that kiln? We know what temperatures are required to make your pots whole. Well, what temperatures do you require to flourish?
I am not an objective or reliable witness regarding the weather. I am a native Southern Californian; any kind of ‘bad’ weather is quite traumatic and upsetting for me. I am content to exist in the almost continuous bubble of moderate, sunny weather. In fact I don’t even like the imposition of weather – it disturbs and disrupts my gardening and represents a general inconvenience. Thus I confess a bad attitude toward weather and seek the more expected and obvious patterns of the sun coming up at a certain time in the morning and a dependable sunset that implicitly promises a sunrise the next morning. I guess it is hard for old people to have their accustomed schedule and habits threatened by the dire warnings of late night TV news regarding their weather predictions for the next day.
 I do not think we can establish the claim that there is a perfect weather for ceramic artists. I am aware that they flourish in all climates in almost all regions of the world. I do not know this – it is an honest question – but is the clay or soil better for ceramics in certain areas of the world that might have some relation with the weather of that region? Does earth baked in desert heat make better clay to be baked in the kiln? You must forgive me if these questions seem naive but I must start from my innocent curiosity if I am to learn anything at all. A self-conscious ignorance is the most promising beginning of any active learning. The only thing I really know about the earth beneath me is as a gardener. Where I live in Glendora it is an opaque adobe soil, non-absorbent to water, hard to dig in the summer heat. I use lots of bags of soil amendment when I plant my roses and perennials. Is adobe soil any good for making pots? You would think that someone whose blog is sponsored by a clay company would know something about clay, wouldn’t you?
  
8th letter – November 10, 2002
 “Fall has sponsored the first rain of the season. I am not fond of weather. The very demonstration of weather is traumatic for Southern Californians. As a former teacher, I knew that the shattering impact of rain outside the classroom windows was a dangerous source of discipline problems. In the same sense that fish do not know water, Southern Californians do not know weather. It has rarely intruded in my life. We are encased in a unchanging cocoon that does not allow significant contrasts. The impact of seasons on my garden are blurred and faint. A few leaves falling, plants activated with flowers at different times but blooms in the garden all year around. Variation in heat requires minor adjustment to the interior thermostat that controls the air conditioning unit. The umbrella is stored in the closet, a largely unused and exotic accessory. The weather in Southern California rarely has the power to determine our behavior or plans. It gets very little attention. Our notoriety with others is based on earthquakes and smog, not hurricanes or tornadoes, not banks of snow or flooded rivers overflowing.”
Can you tie the character of people and their culture to their weather? Here we must be cautious in not falling into historical patterns of racism and ethnocentrism in our thinking. There has been an historical prejudice on the part of some northern cultures that people who lived in the hot tropical climes near the equator were more lethargic and indolent. The rise of the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries and the accompanying military and economic power of northern Europe might have been a factor in this claim. I wonder how the contemporary expansions and successes of nations like Brazil, China and India square with that old prejudice? Of course the quality of a civilization cannot be calibrated solely by material wealth and GNP. What are the advantages of adjusting to the real weather and living in the honest environment of the weather itself? I hide out in my air-conditioned house in the summer. What I am missing? Maybe people in tropical countries have the right idea in adjusting their life style to the weather. What do you think?
 Speaking of that, there is a most interesting contemporary movement, having to do with ‘slow’ food and slow living that is related to environmental concerns. In fact I just found a website called “Slow Food” that is highly informative. They support nutritious, clean, healthy food, grown locally. They also support local small farmers and biodiversity in their corps and the care of the earth. They are a reaction to the ‘fast food’ franchises and industrial agriculture and the growing problems of obesity among youth and the general population. Health concerns are directly related to the kind of food we eat. They sponsor ‘earth markets’ where farmers can form cooperatives in selling their food. They encourage people to grow their own food in community gardens.
10th letter – December 16, 2002
 “We are back from Washington, D.C., ready for the family gatherings and rituals of Christmas, adjusting to a series of rain storms after surviving snow and freezing conditions back east. Regional distinctions exist and do matter. They build different kinds of houses and wear different kinds of clothes than we do in Southern California. Things happen to the natural environment back there that is completely skipped in the changes of seasons here. We saw the naked skeletons of trees. I discovered that they are not really dead and there are as many varieties in the forms and twists of their trunks and limbs as in the former shapes and colors of their lost leaves. We visited every memorial devoted to past presidents and heroes of previous wars. Perhaps the evident limitation of space on the Washington Mall for further memorials will influence decisions about future wars. Despite the climate, and with the help of the fine subway system, we visited almost every museum and gallery, paying tribute to art collected from all realms of geography and culture.
When you visit a previously unknown land, it is important to look as carefully at the totality of the landscape as the fixed objects organized for your stare at the museums. The entire world becomes quaint in your voyage of discovery. The people encountered only exist during your visit, surely they cannot live in that weather beyond your own endurance. Because you must actively overcome the prejudices of your own time and place in encountering new experiences, it is valuable that you first observe the ‘other’, whatever that might be, in the innocent bias that allows incredulous astonishment. The heavy price of assimilation and acceptance is to reduce the exotic to the familiar. Few individuals, in my view, are able to consistently renew passionate encounters with familiar objects and landscapes. They are just too comfortable to make the effort. The dislocation of travel inspires fresh insights into your previous orientation.”
How do potters relate to this? Should they join local farmers in protecting the earth and its biodiversity? Aren’t farmers and potters natural allies in protecting and conserving the earth both for the food and clay it provides? Don’t both farmers and potters make their living from the earth beneath them? Isn’t the very act of experiencing ceramic art (or any craft or art for that matter) a ‘slow’ experience? As a gardener, I am willing to join the emerging movement of ‘earth people’ who are grateful for the bountiful gifts of the earth and how they contribute to our well being. Don’t potters have special reasons to celebrate ‘Earth Day’ every year?
Tags: about Richard, California, ceramics, Garden, life, pottery, richard jacobs, searching for beauty, weather
Posted in New favorites, Richard's Garden, Richard's Photos, Richard's Rants, Searching For Beauty, Thought Provoking, Weather and Ceramics | No Comments »
February 1st, 2011
 The word reading can be used in a metaphorical sense that is not limited to the more obvious act of reading the printed text. To ‘read’ people is to observe them very closely and to make an assessment of their nature and character by what you observe. To ‘read’ a pot involves the prior knowledge of what to look for in terms of the mastery of the craft visible to the eye in the object itself and beyond that, the cultural and aesthetic messages embedded in the ceramic character of that object. Then of course there is the conventional definition that involves the reading of a book. The act and art of reading involves sharing a physical space with some other being or object and being able to perceive the essential features of that other element. For most people, it involves visual acuity and a sensitive insight of what features being observed are vital elements, and what features are irrelevant or trivial in making an evaluation of what you are perceiving. It is an active process, not a passive one.
I am making the case that what I am talking about here is not a casual activity nor is it so rare that only a few special people have the natural genius to develop the act and art of insightful observation. Observation is not the same thing as perception. In reading the printed text, one can be quite literate and have mastered the mechanical chore of identifying the words correctly but be completely lost as to their intended meaning and personal significance. In the physical act of recognizing the other, one can have excellent eyesight, observe the other in bright light that reveals all features, and still miss those features that are the very essence of the perfectly observed object. Even the basic physical act of seeing, as recorded through the mechanisms of eye and brain involves something more than that. It involves judgment, it involves choice, and this judgment and choice are those flashes of recorded visual memory that observers decide are sufficiently memorable to consciously note their significance and to try to make sense of what they have just seen in light of everything else they know.
  
The first act then is to see, to really clearly focus and visually concentrate on the object. This is the act of reading as used in this sense. The second series of behaviors on the part of the observer involves the art of reading that object. This art is always contextual, and it involves the identification and integration of the your single experience of the object with all those exterior elements that can explain and give meaning to it. This is an intellectual and aesthetic effort that places the object within the field of personal knowledge. It is the assigned or assessed relationship of the formerly isolated object with everything else that the observer knows and has experienced that can be summarized as the art of the experience known as perception. This ability is a dynamic one and it can be further developed as the observer matures and becomes more complicated in his or her knowledge and experience.
 I am not claiming that this ability has some sort of universal rules that all of us should follow, that if followed, will cause all of us to reach universal agreement on what we have seen and what it means. All of us are prejudiced in both behavior and making sense of our behavior, in our assessment and evaluation of what it means to be in the world and what it means to engage the ‘other’, be it a person or object. I do not intend this to be a criticism. We all have preferences and we often profoundly differ in what we value. I do have concerns when this natural resistance to those things we do not favor censors out those elements that we at first find distributing or unfavorable. In intellectual work this is called cognitive dissonance. We simply filter out, often even without making conscious decisions, those elements that might offend our sensitivities. This can severely limit or restrict those things that we might well enjoy if we could expand and extend our understanding and appreciation of elements that might be foreign to our origins or personal experience.
Again this perspective and posture of the individual person is contextual. We all exist within a cultural orientation and placement. That orientation also contains a perspective that is grafted on us with our birth and forms a cultural cocoon within which we exist during our life times. This involves a normal kind of natural ethnocentrism that cannot be confronted or challenged unless one is willing to question it. For instance, the innocence of our origins is only directly challenged when we travel to another culture. There we discover the startling revelation that not everybody lives like we live, not everybody values what we value, and that there are other ways of living in the world. We can of course go home, resolved to never travel so far again that we cross the boundaries of our own placement, and hideout in our own culture, safe and secure behind the gates and walls of our native site.
 The great challenge, in reading that book, or visiting that foreign country, or in viewing that ceramic art that appears to be unlike the teacups in your mothers closet, is that you might discover and even learn to value what was formerly unknown to you. This profound moment of revelation can not only spur personal development and growth, it can increase the acute sensitivity of being open to the world, to observe and experience the marvelous array of what the world has to offer and celebrate the pleasures derived from being an active and engaged observer of all it’s abundant treasures.
I fear that far too many people only read those things that reinforce what they already know. I frankly think this attitude can hinder the life long adventure of seeking and experiencing those things that extend your frame of reference beyond the immediate vicinity of your permanent residence. In saying this, I do not mean to infer that one must give up one’s own preferences and meekly accept everything experienced as equally legitimate. We must make choices, we simple don’t have room in our heads and hearts to import all that the world has to offer. But in making those choices, we do not need the excuse or rationale that what we decide to reject thus has no value for others. We do not need to trash that which we do not accept for ourselves.
I do become agitated when I believe that what I do not value is in danger of crowding out or eliminating what I do value. But I still can be an advocate for the preservation of what I believe are valuable cultural legacies in the world without seeking to erase all other impulses in the arts. Tolerance is never exercised with those things you already value. It is only tested when you confront those things that challenge what you value. The engagement of great art or great ideas should never be a completely pleasant or agreeable experience. You only know for sure you are really learning when you recognize that what you previously knew and valued has been dislodged or disturbed by new aesthetic and intellectual experiences.
 In my book, “Searching for Beauty: Letters from a Collector to a Studio Potter” I wrote in response to John Ruskin in his book, “Sesame and Lilies”, concerning reading and the importance of the reader. Ruskin insists that readers should be active performers, with important roles as interpreters and co-authors of which they extract from the book and use for their own purposes. Here is my response to Ruskin and his ideas,
“Could it be that the observation and perception of reading and pottery require some of the same behavior? The pot is solid, has weight, and exists external to the perceiver. Although the book is a temporal object, the solitary auditing of the content is an internal process. Still, both require an ‘open and imaginative spirit’ on the part of the perceiver and reader. Surely pottery can meet Ruskin’s injunction for the author and book, that it be true and useful, unique in source and shape. Ruskin demands active participation; Nord supports Ruskin in urging the co-construction of meaning by creator and participant. How do we prepare for this kind of work? What kind of work has the potter and author left for the participant/colleague? I fear that most people do not have the energy and time to construct their own meaning. They were not given permission by assignments in school to develop that capacity. They do not know that the significance and authority of the book and pot are not dependent upon your submission to them. They do not know that, co-equal with the pot and book; your life is a primary source, as unique and complex as book and pot. All my books and pots comprise the raw resources for the construction of self. That attitude breeds respect, even love, surely not contempt, for I need them and they make all the difference in my life.”
 I do not collect pots and books as trophies to enlarge my personal ego or show them off to guests as supposed proof of my exquisite taste and superior intelligence, nor do I use them as props for purposes of interior decoration. I collect and engage pots and books because they empower me; because they give me hope that the human species has redeeming virtues despite contrary evidence; because they grace my existence and daily life with beauty and meaning; and because they enhance my better nature and encourage behavior from me that displays a kind of generosity beyond self-interest.
I wish to start this new year with these hopeful thoughts and wish you the very best in your own journey through 2011.
Tags: about Richard, book, ceramics, decoration, home, pottery, reading, richard jacobs, searching for beauty
Posted in Really old friends/philosophers/authors/poets, Richard's Photos, Richard's Rants, Searching For Beauty, Thought Provoking, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
January 13th, 2011
Reflection
Both time and memory are expendable and fragile. Time is quite independent in attitude. It will not slow down its daily rush to suit those of us who wish to delay its finite length as measured in our life span. Due to my long life, I now have an extensive span of assorted memories stretching back to early childhood. I know that the older memories are not very reliable, and that even the more recent ones bear my self-serving version of what I think happened. Others close to me who had witnessed the same events might have a different version of what we think is a single reality. Even with the most earnest and honest attempts to retrieve the past, memories do play tricks on all of us. It is only natural for people to try to remember only the happiest moments of the past and let go of the rest. Others cannot forget those terrible hurts or incidents that brought them such recorded pain. These unwelcome memories often do not seem to fade with time but become all too durable. They are a few wise philosophers who have advised us that we have more to learn from our past pain than from our past happiness. What do you think?
The calendar allows us an excuse to make an accounting of the year just passed and the possibilities for the year newly engaged. How do we make such an assessment? I am not talking about New Year resolutions here. They are easy to make and even easier to forget. One cannot assess how one wants to change in the New Year without seeking improvements in both behavior and circumstances. If the wish for the new year consists of a desire to win the state lottery or thousands of dollars on the television game show Jeopardy, then these desires will remain largely dreams or fantasies of an easy and unearned success.
Changing Behavior
So wanting to change behavior must come before wanting your circumstances to change. The economic recession we are in now is not going to change immediately just because of our wishes for it to do so. The same can be said for our hope that the war in Afghanistan will end so our troops can come home. These and other similar issues appear to be out of our direct control or influence. So maybe the first decision to make is to identify those behaviors of your own that you might actually be able to change or modify. Then you can realistically organize your efforts to execute that plan during this coming year.
The hope of course is that by changing our behaviors we can also change to some degree our circumstances. I do not think this is an unrealistic goal and well worth some reflection and effort. We can marshal our energy and resources at the beginning of this new year and offer ourselves a fresh supply of hope. We can make new beginnings in a number of gestures, testing and trying out new behaviors that can modify or even abandon those old habits that did not enhance our situation. The delicate balancing act of recognizing the issues that confront us while at the time refusing to be just a victim of circumstances allows all of us the opportunity to be our own local heroes. Simply getting through the day requires a kind of courage. Getting through the day with grace and generosity requires an affirmation of the human spirit and the commitment to make a positive difference in the world. We all cope daily with a number of variables that test our mettle and strain our capacity. There is a new movie just out, a remake of an earlier film that was originally a novel. It is called “True Grit”. How would you define that term? Could you claim it as your own personal virtue?
 Are there specific attributes of the maker that reflects this ability to renew oneself? Are creative people more able to create new behaviors for themselves as well as their creative moves on the potter’s wheel? Is the creative act itself a form of renewal? Isn’t it time, at the beginning of the rich promise of a new year, to try new things? To experiment with technique or style even despite your currant success with the old? Isn’t it better to try something new when you are contented with what you are now doing, rather than attempt to change when you are stuck and desperate? Isn’t that true in your private life too? Perhaps an unreflective state of bliss can become a kind of stupor. Success does breed complacency. What do you need to happen to arouse your creative juices and dare to try something that you are not sure you can even do? Aren’t all makers risk takers?
  
Creative Makers
I want to provide you with one viewpoint regarding the questions above from a creative maker. Among the dozen or so books I am currently reading, one very fine book is “Choosing Craft: The Artist’s Viewpoint”, edited by Vicki Halper and Diane Douglas. The entire book is a series of statements by craftspeople made over the post Word War II years in America. Anni Albers was one such craftsperson, director of the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus in Germany, refugee from Nazi Germany along with her husband, the painter Josef Albers, published in Design Magazine in 1944 that was quoted in “Choosing Craft”. Here is just a sample of some of her thoughts in a series of her statements I selected from her essay,
“Our world goes to pieces, we have to rebuild our world. We investigate and worry and analyze and forget that the new comes about through exuberance and not through a defined deficiency. We have to find our strength rather than our weakness. Out of the chaos of collapse we can save the lasting: we still have our ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, the absolute of our inner voice – we still know beauty, freedom, happiness…unexplained and unquestioned. Intuition saves us examination.”
“We learn courage from art work. We have to go where no one was before us. We are alone and we are responsible for our actions. Our solitariness takes on religious character. This is a matter of my conscience and me. We learn to dare to make a choice, to be independent; there is no authority to be questioned. In art work there is no established conception of work; any decision is our own, any judgment.”
“We learn to trust our intuition. No explaining and no analyzing can help us recognize an art problem or solve it, if thinking is our only relation to it. We have to rely on inner awareness. We can develop awareness, and clear thoughts may help us cultivate it, but the essence of understanding art is more immediate than any thinking about it.”
“We learn patience and endurance in following through a piece of work. We learn to respect material in working it. Formed things and thoughts live a life of their own, they radiate a meaning. They need a clear form to give a clear meaning. Making something become real and take its place in actuality adds to our feeling of usefulness and security. Learning to form makes us understand all forming.”
You will notice that Albers takes a somewhat different perspective than my own. I always think it is a good idea to listen to a variety of differing viewpoints, but finally you have to trust your own judgment. She emphasizes the intuitive over the intellectual approach, feeling over thinking. Is it necessary to make a choice between the two? What do you think? How do you feel about this? It is a matter of temperament and preferences that will always differ between individuals. It is also reflected in their work. Some ceramic art is highly designed and obviously crafted through a tight control of technique. Other work is highly expressive, vivid with the emotional impact of a more spontaneous style of the maker. I have both approaches represented in a variety of artifacts in my pottery collection. I think the creative act inherently contains elements of both the emotions and reflected thought. In the best of times, both the expressive and analytical elements work together, silent partners in the creative act. They need not be on the surface of the maker’s consciousness but they are there nonetheless.
I think that both Albers and I agree that the creative process is therapeutic for the maker in a number of ways. It too is a place where time and memory play a part in the steady construction of self as w ell as the creation of vessels or other ceramic work. The embedded memories of all these experiences accumulate in an increasing mastery that can command a greater and greater vocabulary of possible results. In that sense, both time and memory are friends and allies of the maker. I want to end this particular blog with a quotation from my book, “Searching for Beauty: Letters from a Collector to a Studio Potter”, concerning how makers create themselves as they in turn create the pot.
 “The observable integrity of the individual pot is a representation of the integrity of the person who created it. Ironically, this stumbling struggle to attain mastery only becomes convincing when it also demonstrates the fallibility of your human status. You are embedded and enshrined in the artifact – including the unconscious orientation of your time and place, the worldview grafted on you at birth, the parochial elements of the neighborhood of your youth. You cannot ever erase all evidence in the pot of the world that made you. You can only add self-conscious elements that form the truly creative aspects. This dual struggle requires great energy – to create yourself and those self-advertising artifacts that celebrate that self – all at the same time. You must surely learn to love yourself – forgive yourself – and go on. In fact perhaps the greatest triumph will occur when you find yourself in the pot, when the pot represents a personal identity that you could never understand any other way. Perhaps each pot becomes a self revelation to yourself as you fuse person with pot.”
Tags: about Richard, aging, artists, Beauty, book, ceramics today, craft, Garden, life, measuring success, pottery, searching for beauty
Posted in A lifetime of friends..., Really old friends/philosophers/authors/poets, Richard's Garden, Richard's Photos, Richard's Rants, Searching For Beauty, Thought Provoking, Uncategorized | No Comments »
|
Others of you might be far more partisan and claim that one of these approaches is vastly superior to the other. Romantics might claim that it is the lyrical expression of feeling, the vivid personal passion that inspires their creative process and achieves great art. Passionate love, including erotic and sensuous love, is the very engine of the human personality. Much of 19th century literature and art in Western Europe would claim that view. Isn’t it evident in the differences between the delights of poetry and the flat prose of a newspaper? The poet can celebrate the beauty and joys of life and nature. But on the other hand I would prefer journalists who write for newspapers or TV news to get their facts straight and not go off in fanciful fiction. For journalists, their integrity is dependent upon their rigorous presentation of what they know to be objectively true. For most poets, that approach would completely stifle their creative process. Maybe romantics belong in certain creative arenas and realists belong in fields that depend upon accuracy and precision in their fidelity to reporting what they see and experience. I think I would prefer a brain surgeon to be a realist instead of a romanticist if I was about to undergo brain surgery.
Of course my own lifestyle is completely dependent upon a variety of technologies to provide creature comforts and ease my way in the world. I would not surrender any of them for the alternative that existed before their invention. I suppose I could get along without the microwave, although I did warm up leftover Chinese food for lunch today and often use it for that purpose. I certainly could not do without this computer and its word-processing ability. I do have a hybrid car that runs jointly on a battery and gas with resulting low mileage. I would probably surrender it to a totally electric car if there were adequate facilities to recharge them. At this very moment the air conditioning is off but summer is coming and I cannot bear the onslaught of a natural environment if it would cause me to sweat. I do use a mop and broom, both having long and honorable ancestors going back centuries. But I also highly value my vacuum cleaner, cord plugged into the wall, sucking up leaves and dog hairs on the tile and carpet. We have several wall plugs in every room, allowing me to view television, watch my foreign films, listen to the stereo, enjoy my huge classical music CD collection. I do try to limit the electric lights at night just to the rooms of the house we are occupying but I do require considerable illumination in the room when I read at night.
“Both the American and English intellectual traditions question the devastating development of technology that represented the industrial revolution. Here Thoreau and Emerson join Ruskin and Morris in deploring the impact of industrial technology on the lives of artisans, workers and the environment. In a wonderful new book, ‘Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives’, Nicols Fox explores the broad dimensions of this thinking,
What is the state of this issue among potters today? I can’t remember if the wheels in your studio are plugged in or get their power from your feet. Does it make a difference? Is there some organic integrity with feet powered wheels or are they obsolete now? I do remember that you have electric kilns. Is your arrangement a compromise out of expediency or can you justify the use of power appliances in your craft? Does it matter in the kind of pottery you create? The wood turner uses a lathe and it is still considered a craft. Has some accepted authority determined and defined what represents a hand crafted object? At some point, does the extensive use of electric appliances disqualify a craft product and turn it into a manufactured product?
Is it simply the inevitable conservatism of old age that motivates tentative and uncertain reservations about technology? John Ruskin and William Morris failed in attempts to find a utopian paradise based on medieval practices. The sound of the train invading the countryside appalled Henry Thoreau. I hide in my secret garden, seeking to escape the hum of the nearby freeway. As in politics, where my vote usually guarantees the candidates defeat, I must be careful not to be a sore loser in the cultural battles of my time.
‘Romantic was a way of seeing, a certain cast of light that could transform anything. In this new illumination, the imagination could play with the unfamiliarity of familiar things, accentuating the strangeness of the half-visible. This sensation of newness, of possibility, of transformation defined the word. This was the mind at playful work, allowed to range and create and interact with the ever-changing nature of reality. The Romantic’s priorities were with the exercise of imagination, with excess, with the mystical and, at times, the irrational. The natural world was a powerful and important place where God dwelt; human emotion, intuitions and yearnings were not simply valid, but vital, and could be trusted.’ ”
Laguna Community Blogs
Buy "Searching for Beauty" from Axner.com
