Early Spring
...sometimes early spring can be pretty dry & windy in Northern New Mexico. It's a good time to drive up toward Chama & find some more stoneware clay - easy enough to dig and, in arid weather, simply pass through a series of screens to remove rocks. "A potter is kind of like a farmer," one of my clay mentors said to me a few years ago, and, returning to the source, up here, digging, having waited till the weather is right for what I want to do...I see that.
...once in the truck & this far north...why not go to Colorado for a couple days? I was thinking more about that, being a potter, a farmer. To what extent do you make what you're making & to what extent do you try to prepare the conditions & see what results? As the weather changes. I never quite believe those who claim it's totally the former. I was thinking about things like that as I drove. The snow was melting. Winter was almost over.
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...then when I got back, I got back to work. I loaded the kiln - to what extent should you be making work other people might need or like, and to what extent do you make work you yourself have already ascribed a value to, before it's even completed, since you had to make it?
Today at lunch I read in the current New Yorker that Aretha Franklin - still - makes sure to collect her money before-hand in hundred-dollar bills & she puts these in her handbag. She puts her handbag on the piano where she can see it while she sings...ever since I read that fact I've been thinking about it.
Something every artist should meditate on.
"Respect is as precise an artifact as a Ming vase," David Remnick goes on to say in that article about her.