The Stereotypical Artist

How to Dress like an Artist

If I asked you to describe an artist what would you say?  They are flaky, lofty, full of angst, or “interesting”?  Would you say that they are absorbed with “self-expression”, or that they are “starving”?  I looked up what people thought an artist was on Urban Dictionary, and was not surprised by the variety of answers that I found.  One person said, “Someone who wears a bitter scarf and burns concert pianos in manors while masturbating and to operas very loudly with a bourbon in one hand.”  Another said, “Someone who believes that “creativity” and “individuality” is the highest point which man can achieve, despite the fact that they provide no valuable service or advancement to society as a whole.”  There are all these stereotypes and preconceived notions about artists, how they should act, how they should dress, and so on.  When I first started college, and even now, people would ask me what I was majoring in and roll their eyes when I told them.  Just yesterday, I was talking to someone about what I was going to do after college, and upon hearing that I am an art major and my husband is a history major, she just laughed and said “Well…good luck…”

How to Dress Like an Artist

In one of the final chapters of It Was Good Making Art: to the Glory of God, Theodore Prescott discusses the concept of the identity of the artist and how the world views said artist.  One thing that he said, in particular, is what started me thinking about how the world views artists, “My point is that being interesting is an important value within the art world.  I believe that like the concept ‘artists express themselves,’ the idea that artists are interesting people, lead interesting lives, and make interesting things is part of the popular identity of the contemporary artist.”

If you think about it, stereotypes are annoying, but they have to come from somewhere and there is definitely truth in them.  I decided to do some research about what the more modern stereotypes are.  As such, I decided to start out with the question “How does an artist dress?”  Normally when I think of the stereotypical artist, the image that comes to mind is a french painter with a beret, a paint covered smock, and a curly mustache.  However, we are not in France, and I have never seen anyone dressed like that except in movies.  One of the first things to come up was a wikiHow entitled “How to Dress like an Artist,” so you too can fulfill the stereotype.  As I was reading through the guide, I had to laugh because it basically described how EVERYONE in the Portland area dresses and shops.  It included tips like: give up shopping at department stores and only go to thrift stores or vintage boutiques, consider tattoos or stopping shaving, and make your own clothes.  However, whatever you do, your new style must be “uniquely you,” and you can’t care what other people think.  I have included some pictures that I found on a pinterest board entitled “Dress Like an Artist” which embodied the how to guide, and as you can see, half of our campus (and particularly last years seniors) dress in this manner.

How to Dress like an Artist

At the very end of the guide, a few tips were given for people to consider when they were developing their new style.  I found one particularly interesting: “Dress so that art can happen. Wear leggings that allow you to dance, or choose shirts that can be splattered with paint or charcoal.”  This tip really embodies one of the ideas about artists that Prescott mentioned in the chapter, “The artist does not make art as one would work at a job, with set hours every day, and an entrance into and exit from a work world and a work consciousness.  Everything in the artist’s life may be part of the artistic process, or subject matter for the art.”  When I was reading these two quotes, I was struck with the idea that this actually describes me.  I don’t normally dress in giant sweaters and scarves, but I am constantly wearing jeans and a flannel because I know that the chances of me randomly going into the studio to throw or the lab to glaze are pretty high and so I have to wear something that can get dirty.  I realized that I can’t look at a dish without thinking about how it was made, and I always have a little sketchbook with me incase I get an idea for a pot.  Even I cant get away from these concepts, and I know that I have a lot of friends that are the same way.

How to Dress like an Artist

So are these stereotypes good or bad?  It depends on how you look at it.  Some stereotypes are generally harmless, such as the idea that artists lead “interesting” lives.  However, not all of them are.  Clearly, judging by the responses in Urban Dictionary, there are a lot of negative opinions out there about artists, which is sad to think about.  I, personally, don’t know anyone who burns piano’s and calls it art, but those people are definitely out there.  A lot of contemporary artists strive to do art that is “new” and “edgy,” and as such, end up doing these really extreme things that get extreme responses.  I cannot claim to be a fan of this type of art (in fact, if you know anything about me, I can’t stand this type of art), and I think that it is really sad that it can cause people to overlook the artists that are actually making good, well crafted work, because they don’t understand the contemporary artists.

If you are interested in more wikiHow guides about being an artist, you will be glad to know that you can also learn how to become an artist by completing just a few simple steps.  My personal favorite guide teaches you “How to Act Like a Tortured Artist.”

How to Dress Like an Artist: http://www.wikihow.com/Dress-Like-an-Artist

Dress Like an Artist Pinterest Board: http://www.pinterest.com/missysosnoski/dress-like-an-artist/

How to Become an Artist: http://www.wikihow.com/Become-an-Artist

How to Act Like a Tortured Artist: http://www.wikihow.com/Act-Like-a-Tortured-Artist

Urban Dictionary Artist Definition: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=artist

Resonate: Communion Vessels

Large Communion Vessels: Stoneware

As a part of my Art and Christ class, we were assigned to create a work of art that embodied the ideals and themes of the semester.  It could be a piece for someone one else or a piece for yourself.  As such, I decided that I wanted to make brand new communion vessels for my church.  To be honest, this is something that I have been wanting to do for my church for a very long time for one simple reason: the communion vessels that they were using make me cringe every time I look at them.  They were these really awful, clear glass plates and bowls, from target, that were identical to the ones that Wesley and I had for a very short period of time in our first apartment.  Now when you first look at them, the look fine.  Boring, but fine.  However, the first meal that we ever ate out of these bowls was spaghetti, and to be honest, looking at spaghetti through clear glass is a little disgusting, and so for some reason, every time that I took communion, the image of spaghetti came to my mind.  The other reason that I really wanted to make communion vessels for the church is because I want to start bringing art into the church, and this was a great starting point.

Small Communion Vessels for gluten free juice and crackers: Stoneware

I approached my pastor’s wife about the idea of making the vessels and she thought that it was a really great idea and gave me the go ahead to start working on them.  Funny enough, just a few days later, on Sunday morning, I had 3 different people, with no knowledge of the conversation that Amanda and I had, ask me if I would be willing to make new communion vessels for the church.  Turns out that the previous weekend they had been at a conference where one of the speakers talked about the importance of art in the church and the first person they thought of was me.  Needless to say, I was flattered, and even more excited to make the vessels.

Last Sunday, the pieces were finally finished and I was able to take them to church in time for the service.  It was wonderful to see the congregation interacting with the goblets and plates as they worshiped our Lord.  There were some people who lingered next to the table for a full minute, before sitting down again, as if the vessels were making them consider the gesture of communion with new eyes.

The old Communion Vessels

Pastoral Interview

Pastor Kevin Bates and his wife Amanda

For those of you who don’t know (I have no idea how many of you that is), I am currently taking a class called Art and Christ as a part of my major.  It is a great class that is centered around discussing theological issues in art, how to be a Christian artist, and the like.  As one of our assignments, we were to interview pastors and find out what their views were of art in the church, art as worship, and the Christian artist.  As such, I decided to interview the pastor of the church that I have been attending, Kevin Bates.

Kevin is the pastor at Resonate, which is a non denominational mobile church that takes place in Laurel Ridge Middle School.  Every Sunday morning, around 20 people show up at 8:00 in the morning with a truck load of bins and equipment to transform the entire cafeteria into a sanctuary.  Since we have to carry everything in, set it up, and take it down every Sunday morning, there isn’t a lot of ways to incorporate art into the service, for several reasons the main one being that art takes up a lot of space and moving it every week increases its chances of getting broken.  As such, I was very curious as to what the church’s stance, and more specifically Kevin’s stance on art was.  I was not disappointed.  To my delight, in addition to Kevin, I was able to interview the missions pastor at the same time, Jake Pflug, and particularly with them together, I was amazed with the level of support for the arts that I found.

Jacob Pflug, missions pastor at Resonate

Kevin started out by saying, “The theology where god is creator … then we have been created as creators as well in a reflection of God.  Our creativity is a form of expressing that image.”  He then continued to say, “Do I think art has been lost?  Absolutely.  People have reserved it for ‘thats what they used to do’ with the Cathedrals.”  So he believes that our challenge today is in figuring out how to create an environment that promotes and utilizes art in the church?  “Music is a form of art and we have figured out how to use it every week in worship services and make it a standard thing?  But how do we use painting, sculpture, and pottery and make that a standard thing?”  That’s the struggle.

Their vision and desire is to disciple the specific people group of the artist.  How do we as a people incorporate your art into the fabric of the church?  It could be as exciting and cool as creating art pieces that could be auctioned off for mission groups.  Or what I am doing which is creating actual functional pieces, communion vessels, and possibly someday having many different ones so that we can cycle through them every Sunday so that the art continually tells a story.  In addition to that, they want to work with the artist on how to do that functionally so that they feel honored in what they are doing and so it becomes a worshipful experience for them, versus putting together a cookie cutter program. Evangelistically, they have had dreams of doing art classes, teaching, or outreach in order to reach people outside the walls of Sunday morning.

I will leave you with one last thing that Kevin mentioned about the effect of art versus preaching.  He said that he can record his sermons and put it online, he can put it on a cd, he can write a manuscript of it and publish it, but no one really want to hear it, listen to it, or read it again. However, there is something about paintings and art which cause them to speak, last, and be more impactful than writing. 

If you are interested in Resonate, here is the website: resonatecc.com

Non-Objective or Representational?

Soda Fired Teapot by Don Sprague

In the latest chapter of It Was Good Making Art: To the Glory of God, Makoto Fujimura wrote on “Collaboration.”  I have to say that as beautiful and inspiring as his work is, I cannot agree with his philosophy of art.  He says, “I believe that in many ways, spiritual qualities and ideas can be more readily accessible in abstraction than they would be in representational art, where renderings of familiar things often carry with them conceptual baggage.  This baggage can mislead or even prohibit the viewer from moving further and further into the spiritual to which the artwork points.”

I have many things to say about this statement, the first of which being “What?  Really?”  What about crusifixes?  What about icons?  What about crosses?  All of those things are representational and LOADED down with baggage, but isn’t that what makes those images so incredibly powerful?  The entirety of Christianity is based on baggage.  Its based on the fact that we as humans are sinners with tons of baggage, but that doesn’t matter because God put is son on this earth to die for us so that we know we are forgiven for our sins.

Teapot by Richey Bellinger

That being said, clearly this statement stands true for some people, and clearly Fujimura has found his niche of people who agree with him.  However, I think that for the public as a whole, representational work is more powerful.  Many of the people that I know who have not studied art don’t have a taste for non objective or abstract work because they don’t understand it or they see the color splashed on a canvas as something anyone could do.  I know that I used to be that way.  In my opinion, and I could be wrong, you will reach more people with your work if they can tell what they are looking at.  If they can pick images out of your brush strokes.

I, for one work entirely with representational work, and even more than that strive to make it functional.  I want my mugs to be not only usable, but functional.  I want you to be able to throw them in the microwave, the dishwasher, or even the oven should you desire to.  I strive to make everyday objects into beautiful works of art.  I want to make things that will make you smile with every sip, or look forward to your cup of tea in the morning.  One might think that this is the ideal of every ceramicist, but that is not so.  I discovered that the first time I picked up the book 500 Teapots.  (For those of you who don’t know about the 500 series, it is a collection of books published by Lark Ceramics in which they will have a call for artists around the nation to send in photographs of their work.  They then choose the top 500 of whatever category they are currently working on and publish it as a bound book.  To date they have done teapots, clay figures, chargers, cups, pitchers, and many more.)  I thought that most of the teapots depicted in the book would be relatively simple forms with elegant glaze work, but to my dismay I found that 90% of the book consisted of decorative teapots, many of which were unrecognizable as such.

Teapot by Malcolm Davis

Teapot by Susan Beiner

When I set out to make a teapot, I keep many things in mind.  I consider the form and where the spout will be placed on it in order for it to look good and for ease of pouring.  I also consider how the handle should be shaped and where it should be placed so that it does not strain the wrist when pouring.  The lid cannot be to rounded or too flat depending on the shape of the form.  These are only a few of the things that must be considered when making a teapot.  The works that I have shown by Don Sprague, Richey Bellinger, and Malcolm Davis are excellent examples of really good, functional teapots.  There is that simple elegance to them that I was craving when I opened the book, and they look like something that you could feasibly have your morning tea out of it.

Teapot by Brian Hiveley

I have also provided examples of teapots that I would consider abstract, or non objective teapots.  They are teapots only by definition.  Each one has a “handle,” a “spout,” and a “lid” though sometimes locating those things can be quite the ordeal.  The teapot by Susan Beiner in particular is, in my opinion, ornate to the extreme.  The handle looks as though it would break if you were actually going to pour tea out of it, the body has a hole in it so it won’t hold any water, and I have only examined it by this picture, but I believe the lid is fused to the pot.  This is clearly not a piece that is made to be used, rather to sit on a shelf.  In contrast, the teapot by Bryan Hiveley is considerably simpler, the handle looks like it would be easier to hold, but the lid is impossible to find and the body looks like it holds two drops of liquid.  Neither of these pieces blow me out of the water.  In fact, they almost make me cringe when I look at them, but I do recognize that they have their place in the world.  Some people seek to collect pieces for show, pieces that are different and interesting.  I cannot get past the idea that it is a teapot you can’t use.

Now, for your enjoyment, I have included below a rendition of Death of Marat by Jaques-Louis David onto which Rowan Atkinson’s face has been photoshopped.

Death of Mr. Bean

I also wish to include this lovely festive episode of Mr. Bean which kept me company throughout the writing of this blog post.  It reminded me of the video that our dear Professor, Tim did for the Lippi’s in recent years.  Merry Christmas!

http://www.ceramicstoday.com/potw/hiveley.htm

http://susanbeinerceramics.com/cgi-bin/portfolio.cgi

Is quality a thing of the past?

The theme of my life recently had apparently been quality.  It seems that in all of my classes, we have talked about this idea that we live in a consumer society.  One of the chapters in the book we are reading was about Craftsmanship, and it posed the question “Is quality a thing of the past?”  In my Sociology class, the entire semester has been concentrated on the term “McDonaldization” which basically means that our society wants everything to be efficient, calculable, easy to replicate, and above all cheap, even if it is at the cost of quality.  As a result, nothing is built to last.  Cellphones are built to last about 2 years, which is so funny, because that is how long my contract lasts!  Printers break every few months.  My grandmother still uses the pots and pans that she got as a wedding present around 5o years, and mine (which I got as a wedding gift barely over a year ago) are already beginning to wear.  But all this is ok, because I can just buy a new one, right?  Why should I bother fixing the pressboard cabinet that my husband just broke when it would be so much easier to go and buy a new one?

Unfortunately, this idea has seeped into Art.  People no longer seem to care about having original works of art.  They are perfectly satisfied with decorating their house with prints from Target, wall decals, movie posters, and even fake flowers (because who has time to take care of real plants?).  All that you need is something to go on the wall.  Something to fill that empty white space.  Why should I buy a $300 original painting done buy a local artist when I could buy a $30 print of the Eiffel Tower from target.  Besides, I know that print is cool because I saw it at my neighbors house.  Why on earth would I spend $20-$50 on a mug that was made by a local potter when I could just pick up a mug at Fred Meyers for $8?  Well, I will tell you why.  That $20 mug was made by someone who cared about what they were doing.  They thought about how to form the cup so that it would fit into your hand, how to shape the handle so that your wrist wouldn’t get tired from holding a drink that was too hot, how thick or thin the rim would be so that it would be pleasant to kiss every time you take a drink, they thought about the glaze and which color would best compliment the form and how best to fire it.  Then, they took a lump of stoneware or porcelain and brought life to that mug.  They walked it lovingly through the process and, at the end fired it at a high temperature so that not only would it be beautiful, but it would be sturdy.  You wouldn’t have to worry about it chipping every time you washed it in the sink or put it in the dishwasher.  It is something that will last for a lifetime, something you can have conversations over, something that will inspire people, something you can hand down to your kids.

Heath Ceramics: Dinnerware Set

Fortunately, there are many people who think like I do and are trying to put quality art into the homes.  One of my favorite companies is called Heath Ceramics.  This is a company that was started in 1948 by a woman named Edith Heath.  She had a passion for clay and glaze and wanted to make high quality dishes to distribute to the common home.  They still exist today, and I love their mission statement.  The entire thing is rather long, but here is a bit of it:

“We thoughtfully make, gather, and sell enduring objects that enhance the way people eat, live, and connect.  We are a passionately creative, design-led manufacturer, who, among other things, strives to impact peoples’ relationship with the things they buy…We offer a product that will resist trends, be loved, and function over a lifetime, even passed on to the next generation. We take pride in the longevity of our pieces and design new colors and styles to complement existing collections, not replace them. The price of our products reflects the actual cost of producing items in a responsible manner in the US…We strive to become a model for US manufacturing — inspiring designers’ domestic production and US manufacturers to think creatively about their business models, placing financial profit as the means, rather than the end.”

Heath Ceramics: Bud Vase

I don’t know about you, but that is a company that I can support.  As a college student, striving just to make ends meet, I obviously can’t afford to stock my cupboards with their dishes, but if I had the money, I would in a heartbeat.  The dishes that I was given for my wedding are from Fred Meyers.  I was married in August of 2012.  To date, half of the plates have broken, and there are maybe 3 of the remaining dishes that don’t have a chip.  Not to mention the fact that the larger plates don’t fit in the microwave because they are square and the corners get caught on the walls.  There was clearly not a lot of thought and energy put into the creation of my dishes.  At Heath Ceramics, they don’t want to just make money, they want to enhance quality of life.  They want to make something that is so sturdy that it will not only last for your lifetime, but your children’s lifetime as well, and their children’s lifetime.  I love companies like this!

Geek Chic: Emissary Board Gaming Table

There is another company that I love has a similar mission statement, but a different product.  It is called Geek Chic.  They make heirloom quality furniture for Geeks.  It is anything from dining room tables that are designed for people who love boardgames, to filing cabinets for your comic book collection, to shelves to display your action figures on.  Everything that they make is hand crafted out of hard wood such as walnut, cherry, or maple, and they have a “Valet” service so that they can make sure you are getting exactly what you need, and help you decide how to customize every inch of it.  Everything they do is expensive, but you get what you pay for.  You get a piece of furniture that is going to last forever.  Again, I don’t own anything that they have made, but I have only read good things about them.  (Note: Another awesome thing about this company is that their gift cards are minted coins.  How cool is that?!)

These days, people think that craftsmanship needs to be instant and that the word “expensive” is dirty.  It used to be the case that sculptures, paintings, and other works of art would take YEARS to craft into a masterpiece.  Now, people want to order something of the same quality and get it in DAYS.  I see this all the time in people who are new to wheel throwing.  They will watch me demo how to throw and then expect to be able to do it when they sit down at the wheel.  When they discover that it is hard and that it actually takes work, instead of putting in the time that it takes to gain the skill they need to make anything, they just dismiss themselves as not being able to throw. Instead, they stand back and admire art from a distance. But when it comes time to actually buy it, but they don’t want to pay the price that it is actually worth.  If something is expensive and it is worth being expensive, then you should not only be willing to pay good money to purchase it, but want to.  The person that spent their entire life putting in the time and effort to craft a beautiful set of dishes, a painting, a table, or whatever, are masters of their craft and deserve to be paid for their work.

http://www.heathceramics.com/

http://www.geekchichq.com/

Good and Evil

We have recently started reading a new book for my Art in Christ class entitled It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God (the revised and edited edition) which is a compilation of essays exploring ideas such as truth, goodness, and beauty in art.  In the first chapter, entitled “Good”, I ran across a quote by C.S. Lewis that really caught my eye:  “[E]vil is not a real thing at all, like God.  It is simply good spoiled.  That is why I say there can be good without evil, but no evil without good…Evil is a parasite.  It is there only because good is there for it to spoil and confuse.”  We talked at length about this concept in class.  It interested me because I liked the idea that evil isn’t being “bad”, rather it is the absence of goodness.  As people choose goodness, they become more themselves, more whole, and as they choose to walk the path of evil, they lose who they really are and become ghosts of themselves.

Ted Dekker

Funny enough, the day after we had this conversation, I attended a talk by Ted Dekker, my favorite author, in which he enforced this concept.  Dekker talked about the idea that our bodies are not our identity, they are more like a costume.  Our job, our likes and dislikes, our stresses and problems, the way we look are not us, that is just our costume.  We think of ourselves as physical beings who occasionally have temporary, spiritual experiences, when in reality, we are spiritual beings who are having a temporary physical experience.  It is the physical world that distracts us and bogs us down from our ultimate spiritual reality.  What he had to say really resonated with me, and it also explained a lot of the ideas and concepts in his books.  All of his books are about exploring these really deep and dark themes that take major roles in our lives, like judgement and good vs evil.  He creates these very troubled characters in order to tell these stories too, characters who have walked so far down the path of evil that not only are they ghosts of themselves, but they have let that evil consume them entirely.  Dekker wrote a book with Frank Peretti, entitled House, in which they took this idea of exploring good and evil to the extreme.

All of this reminds me of 2 Thessalonians 1:9, “They will be punished with eternal destruction, forever separated from the Lord and from his glorious power” (NLT).  One of the things that I have always believed is that hell is not a cave of red flames and a man with a red pitch fork and horns, rather that it is a void.  An existence completely without God.  As we become less and less of ourselves, we set ourselves on the road to hell because ultimately being less and less of ourselves means being more separated from God.

Freedom Within the Rules

Seung Mo Park: Aluminum Wire Sculpture

We have finally reached the end of Grace and Necessity, so this will be my last post on Rowan William’s book.  It has been a very challenging book, to be sure, and I can’t say that I enjoyed reading all of it, but I am glad that I did read it.  He had a lot of really good points and concepts that I am sure I would have never considered had I not read this book.  Maybe I will even come back and read it someday.

Chapter 4 was one of the more challenging chapters for me, partly because I seemed to be latching onto the most confusing parts rather than focusing on the parts that I actually understood.  For that reason, I seem to only be able to remember the parts that I didn’t really understand that well.  For instance, in section 3 of this chapter, he says, “Art is not functional to the self, but it does function; and any account of what the production of art involves has to recognize that it is also the production of the self.”  This makes no sense to me.  The way that I interpret that in my head is that art is not functional on an emotional level, but it is on a physical level.  That doesn’t make sense though because it seems contrary to what Williams talks about in the rest of the book.  It doesn’t make sense if you flip it around either and say that art is not functional on a physical level, but it is on an emotional level.  People use art to vent emotions, to work through thoughts, to calm nerves, to express themselves all the time, and it is even an accepted form of therapy, so it is absolutely functional on an emotional level.  It is also functional on a physical level in many ways: paintings, encaustic art, and assemblage are hung on a wall and used to be aesthetically pleasing, pottery has any number of uses from drinking your morning coffee out of a mug to serving dinner to sitting on your mantel, and there are many other forms of art that have many other functions.  So what does this quote mean?  Several people tried to explain it to me, but it still didn’t make sense.

Seung Mo Park: Detail of aluminum wire sculpture

All that aside, there was one thing that we talked about in class that I really liked a lot.  The point was made that the phrase, “We create because we were created” doesn’t really work because we are not God and as such, we will never even come close to being capable of creating as God does.  We are not endless and all powerful, we have enormous limitations, however we do have an incredible freedom within those limitations.  Pastor Eric D Naus at Moody Church in Chicago, IL talks about the idea of having freedom within the rules of Christianity and of life on their church website, and I love what he has to say about the matter.  For his first example, I shall quote him at length because he put it so eloquently:

“Have you ever been captivated by a concert pianist as she gracefully runs her fingers up and down the keys?  She seems to play by intuition, effortlessly producing beautiful melodies.  When I watch such a performance, I immediately feel a sense of jealous awe.  “I wish I could play like that!” I think to myself.  And so, going home that evening, I dust off the old piano books, sit down at the upright in my living room, and attempt a song or two.  Of course, I keep hitting wrong notes, and have to play far too slow to be enjoyable.  Frustrated at the reality of practice-makes-perfect, I give up within five minutes!  By contrast, the freedom I watched on the stage was only the result of submission to the rules.  That pianist subjected herself to countless hours of practice.  She gave up other activities to specialize and focus on her craft.  She dedicated herself to an understanding of notes, and chords, and theory.  Only after strict adherence to discipline over time did this pianist develop the ability to play with such joy-filled liberty.”

Seung Mo Park: Wire mesh portrait

Really, this example applies to artists, doctors, nurses, historians, martial artists, and any practice in which someone can become a master of anything.  For things to come naturally, for you to feel free within the restrictions of your practice, you have to put in the time in order to gain knowledge and skill.  You have to know your limitations so well that you don’t necessarily think of them as hindering you.  One of the things that my ceramics professor, Don Sprague, is always telling me, particularly when I am making teapots, is that before I do something funky or different with the handle, spout, or general form I have to know what makes a good teapot so that I know what I am compromising.  I have to know all about the limits of the clay, where the center of gravity should be while pouring the tea, what shape the pot should be in order to have the optimum liquid to surface area ratio.  I have to know all of that before I can start changing things up.  In the last couple of years, I have had a lot of practice making pottery on the wheel, and I am getting a lot better, but if you watch me throw, and then you watch Don throw, you can’t even compare us.  The clay is like butter in his hands and he moves and shapes it.  He makes it ripple to life like it is nothing.  He is clearly a master and I am clearly still learning.

Speaking of masters of their trade, I discovered a new artist today while I was browsing Colossal, an art blog, and his art is SO COOL, I can’t even get over it!  His name is Seung Mo Park, and he is a Korean artist whose medium is aluminum wire and wire mesh with which he makes two really amazing kinds of artwork.  The first is made out of aluminum wire in which he creates these large, lifelike, 3-D sculptures out of a continuous coil (they are absolutely fabulous…well everything he does is fabulous).  The other is made of the wire mesh in which he layers it on top of each other and strategically clips out portions of it to create portraits.  I couldn’t find a lot of information on him that was in English because he doesn’t seem to be very popular in the United States, or if he is, he doesn’t have a lot of presence on the Web, but I did manage to find a great video of him that shows the process he goes through to create the wire mesh portraits.  He makes it look almost effortless.  I would love to try doing something with it, but realistically I know that it would take YEARS of practice to even come close to gaining the skills that I would need in order to make it look half as effortless as he does.

http://www.moodychurch.org/crossroads/blog/rules-or-freedom/

http://fineprintnyc.com/blog/the-metallic-mastery-of-seung-mo-park

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/category/art/

Artist Interview: Ron Linn

Wood Fired Jar

In my Art and Christ class, we had the assignment of interviewing, or really just having a conversation with, an artist of faith, preferably one that works in the area that we are interested in, and finding out how they incorporate their beliefs into their artwork as well as how they hope to affect people through their artwork.  I was privileged to meet with Ron Linn, a wood fire artist here in Oregon who has made some of the most beautiful and inspiring artwork that I have ever seen come out of a kiln.

Palce Teapot

Linn has a long and rich history in clay, starting back in high school.  After continuing on to college, he realized that rather than majoring in business (the degree he had chosen upon starting college) he wished to pursue art, which is a lucky thing for us or the world would be short an amazing potter.  About 12 years ago, he was invited to participate in an anagama wood fire in Washington, and he fell in love with the process, going on to build two kilns of his own (one is a small wood fired soda kiln, the other is a much longer train kiln, I think he said about 100 feet).  He is now teaching high school art classes full time and is able to, with the support of his very encouraging family, continue to make work for himself out of his own studio with the rest of his time.

Faceted Bottle

Something that I have always struggled with and wondered about as a potter, is how do you communicate your faith and personal beliefs through jars and other vessels.  Pottery on the wheel isn’t like painting or drawing.  You really aren’t working with images or symbols. Is it possible to show your faith with such limitations?  Linn said that, for him, the work he makes isn’t so much an explicit expression of his faith as it is the fact that his faith is so much a part of who he is that it is impossible to separate the two.  The creative process is an expression in itself and he gains an incredible amount of piece from that act.  It is his hope that when people handle his work, they have a meditative moment in which they experience that peace that he felt.

Wood Fired Teabowl

One of the things that Linn said that really resonated with me was, “Wood firing feels like life to me.”  In life whenever you try to take control of things, or when you think you know better than God, situations don’t turn out well.  You have to learn to leave things in his hands and trust that he knows what he is doing.  Like the very organic nature of wood fire, nothing is ever going to turn out the same way twice, and it is so much better if you learn to just let go.  I have heard many beautiful metaphors for wood firing, namely the idea that it is like birth, but for some reason, what Linn was just so much more potent and impacting.

I went away from my interview with Ron Linn impressed with the honesty of his answers.  I appreciated his willingness to talk with me about his artistic process and look forward to applying some of his insights to my own work.

All of the images were taken from Ron Linn’s website: http://www.ronlinn.com/ronlinn/index.cfm

Altered Bottle

Tactfully Shocking

Piss Christ (1987)
Andres Serrano

One of the things that Williams keeps coming back to in Grace and Necessity is the idea of the Christian Artist working with the element of shock.  In the first chapter, when discussing Maritan, he warns us to be cautious of working with jarring images, “The danger for art is not in the production of the shocking or the jarring, but in the pursuit of what is shocking as an exercise of the artistic will; a complex discernment is required here.”  Later, in the third chapter of the book, he touches upon the issue again while discussing Flannery O’Conner.  “‘You have to make your vision apparent by shock,’ says O’Connor given that ‘the supernatural is an embarrassment today even to many of the churches.'”

Andres Serrano is a good example of a christian artist who has gotten in trouble for the use of shocking imagery.  His most famous piece being Piss Christ (1987), in which he photographed a crucifix in a bottle of his own urine.  Most take one look at this photograph and dismiss it immediately as vulgar and blasphemous.  In fact, there was so much controversy over this piece, that in May of 1989, it was denounced in Congress as the result of a campaign spearhead.  Even today, almost 30 years after its creation, a man attacked the piece with a hammer as it was hanging in a gallery in France.  The same night, a group of Catholic protesters gathered outside the gallery opening to oppose his work.  Though many people who look at it take immediate offense, the interesting thing is that the Roman Catholic Church itself never denounced him over this piece, instead while he was showing it in an exhibit in Italy, an officer of the papal court at the Vatican told reporters that he was, “a transgressive artist but not a blasphemous artist.” Regardless of his intent, Serrano’s piece captured the attention of the world due to its shocking nature, illustrating both William’s cautions and O’Connor’s assertions.

Sister Wendy contributes to the conversation by bringing in the concepts of “pure” and “comforting” art.  “Comforting” art provokes little thought, but inspires knee jerk reactions like “that is beautiful” or “I hate that.” Pure art on the other hand, may be either ugly or beautiful (depending largely on the eye of the beholder), but requires something from the viewer. Each time you walk away from it, you are more enriched. Wendy notes that it is difficult to ascertain what works will be known in the future as “pure” art, but that “comforting” art is more easily identified.

So here we have two ways of viewing at: shocking and non-shocking, pure and comforting. Somehow these two continuums work together; not all pure art must be shocking, and some shocking art is comforting (Wendy thinks Piss Christ is such a piece). For the christian artist, both of these concepts are of use, but not without forethought. As Williams said, shock ought not be pursued for its own sake.  However, to refrain from its use entirely would be to water down both the art and the message it is trying to send, making the entire exercise pointless.

Below is a truly wonderful interview with Sister Wendy.  If you don’t know who Sister Wendy is, she is a nun who has devoted her life to the study of art.  She has some really great insights as to art and the world as a whole.  I very much recommend that you watch the video.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/8460351/Piss-Christ-photograph-attacked-with-hammer.html

http://dirty-mag.com/v2/?p=234

Grace and Necessity: On Choices

Aluminum cast of a fire ant colony.

“Animals (the ant, the spider, the nuthatch) produce work of outstanding beauty, but it is like the beauty of the natural world because it is ‘transitive’, it has a definable and general function; human activity aims at the embodying of meaning by deliberate choices, and other creatures.  It is, [David] Jones further suggests, something to do with the fact that, for Christian theology, God’s act of creation is utterly gratuitous, describable as a kind of play.” (Grace and Necessity, 86)

God created us, not out of necessity, but because he chose to as an act of play and love.  He created us in such a way that we would have the desire to seek him out, to want him, and not because it was natural, but because it was our choice.  It is the quality of choice that sets us as humans apart from the animals.  Animals create because they must create in order to survive.  The same can be said about humans, to an extent, however, we create through deliberate choices, animals create because the designs for their survival are imprinted in their very being.  Take the ant for example.  Ants are tiny creatures, that are disgusting, annoying, and absolutely incredible at the same time, for they are some of the grand architects of nature.  Walter Tschinkel, one of the leading experts on the study of the behavior of ants and the structure of their colonies, pours molten aluminum into ant colonies so that he can better study their structure and so that he can educate other people on them as well.  However, the ant colonies are not just well designed, but beautiful as well, looking almost like a coral reef.  As beautiful as it is, the ants do not design it to be that way, they design it to be purely functional.  All the little tunnels and “caverns” have a purpose, whether it be for depositing waste or storing food.

While the ants create thing of beauty out of necessity, Humans tend to create beautiful things because they have the desire to do so. For example, a Ferrari 458 Italia and a AMC Pacer perform the same basic function. However, the Ferrari is a thing of beauty, not because it has to be, but because someone wanted it to be (this frankly brilliant example is courtesy of my husband, but I thought it worked quite well).

Rock sculpture by Andy Goldsworthy

On a more artistic level, observe the work of Andy Goldsworthy.  Like the animals, he creates things that are of a transient nature, literally.  He creates them, photographs them, and sometimes, not an hour after finishing them, they are completely destroyed, such as his ice sculptures.  However, for him, it is the process that matters just as much as the product.  He has an awareness of and a desire to understand nature without destroying it.  Thus, the reason he photographs his work.  He works entirely with the materials that nature has provided him with, and then photographs it so as to capture that moment in time.  On his website, he opens it with a great quote that really embodies his work and illustrates the point that I have been trying to make: “At its most successful, my ‘touch’ looks into the heart of nature; most days I don’t even get close.  These things are all part of a transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient; only in this way can the cycle remain unbroken and the process be complete.”

Ice Sculpture by Andy Goldsworthy. You can see the process of him creating this sculpture in his documentary Rivers and Tides.

Below I have included the video that CBS posted earlier this week about the man who makes the casts of anthills.  It is actually a really interesting video.  He sells them to museums to put on display for educational purposes.

For those of you who are more interested in Andy Goldsworthy, check out his website.  There is also a really wonderful doccumentary out about him called Rivers and Tides.: http://www.ucblueash.edu/artcomm/web/w2005_2006/maria_Goldsworthy/TEST/