Gabby

Yappy, I always like seeing your experiments. I have never seen a nude on a baking dish. Maybe a year ago I did a sculpture of my deceased bulldog which looked so cute after bisque firing, perfectly red/white/black (her authentic colors) and then disappointed me after glaze firing. Somehow I missed that the terracotta underglaze would no longer be terracotta colored once fired at cone 5. Live and learn. Tomorrow on my workbench will be the first piece I will have done with many colors of underglaze. Usually I just do black ad white or dark blue and white or green. The clay is red, so I expect to be surprised but hope not to be too surprised.

I am a very early riser, typically 5:30. I check email and do yoga or something on most days. If I have something drying in the basement I will go check it and tidy it up at 6:30 but I wouldn't start anything then. If I don't have an out-of-house obligation like my teaching the summer term (8AM start time) or my weekly volunteering (8AM start time), I start in at work after the dog's morning walk. If I am going to work in clay, or work at anything else that involves excellent attention, it will be between ten and two. I might read/write/take notes between two and five. Five and later is family time- no time to myself. If you turn the clock back to when I was working full time, I sometimes started my job at 6, or when it was a teaching job at 7 15. It was all about being home for the kids after school. I never had any time for projects of my own in those days, between my work, the part of work that inevitably came home with me, and the demands of raising three children.

Is there a local kid who could help with the physical stuff related to heavy shelves?

Lee, in reference to your speculation that creative people may suffer more than their share of bedevilments, you might find interesting the book Touched with Fire, by Kay Renfield Jamison. She is a scholar, clinician, and master storyteller whose own bipolar disorder brought her to study the relationship of mental disorders and creativity. She also looks at the predisposition to the abuse of alcohol and other substances. There is a strong correlation between great creativity and some mental disorders as well as alcoholism. In bipolar disorder it is the hypomanic state, the transition state, rather than the poles that connects closely to creative achievement. I don't think research suggests that creativity and physical illness or creativity and more general suffering are strongly correlated though. Said differently, people with physical illness who are highly creative would likely have been just as creative had they stayed well. Life hardships in general can cut either way in terms of creativity and creative productivity, sometimes enhancing and sometimes stifling. ( I was a teaching fellow for a course on this subject some years ago when I was doing research in this area).

It sounds like you are handling a difficult situation brilliantly. I am not ill but a young one I love beyond measure is seriously, permanently ill, and I am glad for medicaid.

This is a very important question, and I am glad to see it posted.. I am in my sixties, but as I am fairly new to clay, I don't have repetitive use injuries from the practice. I also don't generate any sort of volume. When I took a wheel class for the first time one year ago, I realized I needed to throw standing. Right now that is how I am accommodating where I am physically. I also don't work for more than a couple of hours at a stretch.

Forgive me in advance if this has been asked before. I have over the years seen a variety of visuals online that display for a collection of eminent creative people- writers, artists, and so forth- how they spend their days, typically. The interesting thing in these is the variety in the time of day people spend at their creative work, some starting in the morning and ending at 4, say, others starting at 4 and going into the night, some working at a stretch and others doing a couple of shifts, and so forth. There is also variety in how they spend the times they are not working. Some have a habit, like a walk. The choreographer Twla Tharpe, I believe, takes a cab to the gym every morning for a couple of hour workout. Some people have time specifically dedicated to reading (most of the writers do) or to family/spouse time. So there is my question. Recognizing that some days are obviously different from others, and some here have studios that are available only in warmer weather or not in really hot weather, what is the typical day, hour block by hour block, during a time of year you are at your ceramic work?

I learned the habit of first getting most of the clay off my hands in a water bucket. I then use hand towels. For surfaces I use big sponges.

Pres, are those beautifully shaped teapots full sized or small? Are they a commission from a bee enthusiast?

I am too new to clay to think in terms of big shifts. I am still figuring out things I can do that are satisfying as a first step, in terms of the clay, the shape, and the types of glazes. In my first class about two years ago the teacher asked which clay we wanted for the session and I chose a dark brown, not realizing it was very coarse on the hands and that none of the glazes in the studio would show up on it. They were all dipping glazes. I decided then to try doing hand-building at home and thought I would try to be as spare as possible in terms of what I needed to buy and store, particularly of glazes since I don't have room for lots of glaze buckets. So I bought some porcelain and thought I would use that and underglaze and then just have one glaze-clear. It was all about simplicity and economy. Then two things happened. I signed up a year ago for my first wheel class in which we worked in red clay or in a blend of red and porcelain recycle. It felt wonderful on the hands and looked beautiful glazed and fired. At the same at home I discovered the Potters Choice line of glazes that are simple to use and store and not that expensive if one isn't making large numbers of pieces. I cannot see myself ever mixing my own glazes, as I am just too messy for it to be a safe process. I still use the porcelain when I am making a plate for a friend with a painting of her dog lying in front of her houseboat, but otherwise I am focused on the red clay and am trying to build my skills and settle on the glaze combinations I prefer. I know what my goal is, but my throwing skills have a long way to go. Until I get there, the question of the next goal is moot. I have no commercial interest, so market issues do not have a role.

I have child-sized hands with proportions like Lee's in the sense of a square palm and not very long (okay, in my case short) fingers. I have been finger-printed many times because I have worked for both the federal government and the city and have worked in public schools, all of which require them. I am very difficult to finger print. In fact I think I have always had to go back a second time after they decide the prints are not good enough.

I am, of course, purely a hobbyist in clay, but I can share how I organize the primary work I do. I use two systems simultaneously, a desk calendar and a white board that is probably 6' across. I use nothing digital. The desk calendar is for planning tasks and dates associated with teaching. Everything is placed there by when I intend to do it, but I don't stick to that schedule religiously. I am usually ahead of plan. These might be notations like "Write and send in syllabus to the U" or "Prepare class notes for session 1", or put together class assignment for Day 3"... I don't write in things that are completely routine, like copying the day's materials the day before or things like that. The white board has sections for each project/effort in which I am engaged. That will have a sequence of things that need to get done for each project, like a timeline, and if there are actually necessary completion dates, when I plan to do them. So there might be 6 different timelines on different parts of the board, with dates written in.

I'm immersed now in my summer teaching intensive at the state university, so little will happen clay-wise until August. I have destined for the kiln today a little creamer for my sister, a small snack bowl, a hand-built heavy rice bowl in a squared shape with impressions of birds from a wood roller, and a porcelain plate that will eventually have painted in underglaze a friend's Newfkom (cross between Newfoundland and Komodor) in front of the tiny houseboat to which they have just moved..

I am stuck a little on what counts as a toy. Is a clay bulldog or clay hippo a toy? I have made those. Another project that has long interested me that I have not yet executed is "not paper dolls." Anyone who played with paper dolls knows how flimsy they are. One could make a flat clay figure directly for dressing. Alternatively, I have some glass bottles in my basement to be embellished as "outfits" and plan eventually to make actual character heads on dowels to change up among them. Again not quite a toy, but do you know those zen gardens that typically consist of a pan of sand, a little rake, and a bunch of pebbles.? I have seen those with textured clay balls in place of pebbles. How does one finish a ball all over that doesn't disturb a kiln shelf, please? For that matter, any game played with tokens could be made up with clay tokens- checkers, a game where one moves tokens forward, tic tac toe... I have long ago try to make a top out of clay. Most Jewish kids have tried that, probaly, inspired by the song:" I had a little dreidl, I made it out of clay..."

Anything I have that is special, whether something I have collected or something left from my parents or my husband's parents or anything of sentimental value, I have entered on a spreadsheet with a physical description in one column and an explanation of why it matters in the other. Some things are entered in groups, like "Lithuanian houses," or "Mama-made paintings." I did not always do this, but we went through this when we updated our will.

I purchase or am given ceramics now and then as well. When my children were young we attended an annual holiday arts and crafts fair where my husband and kids had a maybe ten year ritual of heading off to a booth that offered Lithuanian clay houses to choose a holiday gift for Mama. These houses were intended to enclose a candle or perhaps incense as part of a Christmas display, though the houses did not say Christmas in any way otherwise. Each year I would open a couple of parcels that would show me the houses the kids chose for me that year. I love them and have them out all year round. My sister in law for many years lived in Asheville SC and often sent pottery to someone in my family as a holiday gift, before shipping got so absurdly expensive. For many years too people often sent me clay pigs of the sort that have long been popular in Mexico and South America, either round and brown with three legs or with flowers painted on their sides. In the last decade or so I have purchased ceramic sculpture for myself on some occasions I wanted to commemorate, like my 60th birthday or a memorial. I have several pieces by one artist and one by another whose work I saw at a local Summer arts fair where neither shows anymore, but I have their cards.

I think that the best thing to do when a person is out of good ideas, the creative block part of the question, is to do something off of ones normal beaten path, or even on ones beaten path but with an uncommon style of attention. Off the beaten path could be visiting a new place, reading a new book, or attending an event one would ordinarily never pursue. How could one not get some ideas from that? Revisiting ones beaten path might be to walk that same familiar route one takes each morning but to be deliberate in paying close attention to things you wouldn't necessarily look at. I actually wouldn't wait for feeling creatively inert to adopt this kind of practice. If it is a regular practice, it has preventative potential. The author Julia Cameron, who also wrote a popular book for writers called The Artist's Way, calls the regular habit of such "excursions" Artists dates, an appointment with oneself to do something new and interesting that isn't art. There is a guy named Todd Henry who consults with creative businesses, like design firms, who encourages specifically what he calls "unnecessary creating." He encourages people to build into each week a period of goofing around with a creative medium not their own. So a writer might draw or a painter might write a haiku or a potter might sing. The point is to choose something different so that there is no performance pressure in it and so that one is effectively using different physical and mental channels. Einstein used to pick up a violin. Richard Feynman played bongo drums and painted. In neither case were these simply pastimes. having more of an instrumental function.