B Altman Art

Clay as Life’s Guru . . .

2011-10-04T15:46:00.000-07:00

Or How Many Cracked Bowls Does It Take To Learn To Let Go?

I’ve been working in clay for over 40 years. (Gasp! I just figured that out and can’t believe it myself!) After all these years, I still get nervous/anxious/excited/relieved when I finally have the work ready to be glaze fired and bring it to the kiln. It’s a weird bundle of floating anxieties, which begins as I’m glazing the pieces and doesn’t end until I get the very last fired piece out of the kiln.

If I haven’t mentioned this recently, it’s good to say again: The lesson you learn early on when working in clay is not just the parable about “letting go”. Rather, it’s the huge slap upside the head that inevitably happens just when you think you’ve got it all figured out. In clay, as in life, you are bound to learn sooner rather than later, you are NOT in control.

Once you’ve handed over your painstakingly, lovingly crafted pieces to the kiln gods, it’s over. You have relinquished your authority. You can hope that the firing will go well, the glazes will perform as expected, the results will be as imagined and planned but, really, you never know.

Yesterday, I delivered twenty pieces including the commissioned platters to be fired by my fine friends at the Potter’s Studio in Berkeley. In 2006, I moved into my Oakland studio and found out there wasn’t a 220 amp hook up nor an easy solution to venting my electric kiln through the roof. The only alternative was to find a place which would take outside work to be fired. Voilá! The Potter’s Studio has been my preferred choice for outsourcing the firing ever since.

At first, I was very leery about giving up this important part of the clay making process as I’ve been doing my own firing since 1977 when I bought my first electric kiln. When we sold our Berkeley property in 2006 where I had a wonderful studio, I still used that small kiln, a raku kiln and a new larger digital Skutt kiln. I sold the first two and moved the Skutt into the new studio.

The Skutt has now morphed into a largest most expensive display unit ever made.

Skutt kiln as display unit

I have to admit, both Bob and Jasmine, two of the Potter’s Studio technicians, are so versed in kilns, firings, etc., I’ve come to not just rely on them, but to actually feel a sense of relief knowing that they’re professionals who take special care when stacking and firing the work. While I’ve had a few disappointing outcomes, they were not the result of technical misfirings, but rather my own slipups.

Here’s one that happened to a couple of porcelain pieces. It took Bob to point out that glazing just the inside of the piece was creating stress on the thin unglazed outside porcelain wall as the glaze began to melt. The expansion of the glaze as it matured on the inside made it crack.

cracked porcelain pinch pot with unglazed exterior

interior of the cracked porcelain pinch pot with matte glaze

I have since begun to use a clear matte glaze on the outside of the porcelain pieces to prevent this from happening. It rarely happens to the stoneware pieces because they have more grog or clay strength to hold the walls together, thankfully.

porcelain pinch pot with clear matte glaze exterior

interior of the porcelain pinch pot with matte glaze

So now I wait with baited breath to get the call that the pieces are ready to be picked up. Until then, I’ll be sending up little prayers to the kiln gods, hoping they’ll do right by the work. After all, it’s now in their hands. OK, theirs and the folks at the Potter’s Studio.

Lesson learned once again. We are not in control.

Collector or Hoarder? . . .

2011-08-01T00:26:00.000-07:00

Or You See Piles, I See Creative Clutter.

“An artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: hoarders collect indiscriminately, the artist collects selectively. They only collect things that they really love.”

From How to Steal Like an Artist, www.austinkleon.com

Being an artist, I would like to think of myself as a collector. I can point to my collection of 13 tea pots (a couple inherited, some bought from other potters, some made by myself), 18 baskets – mostly bought while traveling in exotic climes) and textiles too numerous to count at this point as fine examples of my artistic penchant for having and keeping lovely things. But lately, this label has been called into question.

Our "basement" which will soon be transformed.

We are cleaning out our “basement” (really, just an overly large furnace area with shelving). My husband decided, oh, maybe a year or two ago, that our basement needed some organizational updating. Translation: Let’s just get rid of stuff we aren’t using, haven’t used or never will use again.

This presents a dilemma for me. I have a very difficult time letting go of things, especially things that, well, could actually be used or useful once again or even more difficult, things with a history, a story, a heart connection (I still have my Junior prom dress).

All you have to do is look inside our guest room closet. There you will see a lovely array of beautiful clothes - some, mine from the 60’s (the pink strapless is the prom dress), some, my mother’s from the 50’s and a few, my grandmothers from the 40’s, who, I might add, had many of her things made to order back in the day.

A few of the lovely frocks from days past.

But luckily for me, we’re not cleaning out closets just yet.

The basement project started out slowly. First I had to get up the gumption to sell my prize antique full size wrought iron bed – the bed given to me by a college paramour. His dad owned a junk yard where he found it, had it restored and presented it to me with its original springs AND a new mattress. I had this bed for 14 years before I met my husband-to-be. It was the first bed we ever slept in together. We moved it from our first little home in the flats of West Berkeley into our huge master bedroom in our new home in the East Bay hills.

The antique wrought iron bed we moved into our new master bedroom.

When we decided to get a new, bigger mattress, we decided to get a new bed. The wrought iron bed was put down in the basement and sat there languishing for six years.

I guess I always thought that I might redo the guest bedroom and use it there instead of the serviceable but not so romantic full size futon bed we have there now.

The iron bed sold for $200 on Craig’s List a year ago April.

The next big thing was my husband’s tatami mats and queen size futon. When I met him way back in 1986 this was one of the few possessions he had in his rented room in the Berkeley hills. Being a huge fan of things Japonesque, I was smitten immediately by his aesthetic taste. We used them in our guest space in West Berkeley but never arranged them here in our hillside home. They sat in the basement for eleven years.

They were sold as a unit for $140 on Craig’s List this May.

A few other things have been sold, given away or taken away by various non-profit organizations and e-waste outfits. Our garage has become the staging area for the piles of stuff we moved out of the basement. This past week, I spent at least 2 full days going through boxes of saved financial documents and other papers from 1998 until the present, where, to my delight, I happened upon all my old employers' and college professors’ evaluations (was that ME they were lauding?) And finally, I went through one box of my mom’s stuff when we moved her out of her last independent living situation. That’s where I found a treasure.

It was stuffed in the box with an old pillow and a mattress pad, balled up in a plastic bag, all stained and smelly. Luckily, I took it out and had a look. Here was this incredible hand cross-stitched quilt my mom had made years ago. But so stained I was afraid it would never be useable. Tide, OxiClean, a good spraying of Shout and a long soak did the job.

My mom's cross-stitch quilt now in our guest bedroom.

Our basement is on the way to being the clean, well-organized storage space my husband has been dreaming of. Thankfully, he rarely comes to my studio where I’ve collected hundreds of old Ceramic Monthly, Art In America, American Craft, George, and other nifty magazines, which I plan to use in my work or sell someday. And then there are the rolls of paper, the boxes of boxes, the piles of mat/foam board, the stacks of old frames, the drawers filled with tools, paints, craypas, pencils, erasers, foam cups, paper clips, straight pins . . .

Collector or hoarder? It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

Right?

Clap if you believe in Qi . . .

2011-07-17T12:37:00.000-07:00

Or How I Got My Groove Back.

What would you be willing to change to get your life back on track? A long held belief system? Or something as trivial as your small glass of wine with dinner? Or your nightly dip into the ice cream container?

This is what it has come to in my quest to reclaim my life as I once knew it.

It’s totally against all of my innate beliefs to go to a doctor of Chinese medicine. My father was an eye surgeon and my brother followed in his footsteps. I grew up just outside of Davenport, Iowa, home of the Palmer College of Chiropractics, which my dad used to infer was the “College of Charlatans.” In my family, if standard medical practice didn’t administer it or prescribe it, it was worthless.

My dear friend Roberta, who suffers from MS, is now taking Chinese herbs given to her by a doctor of Chinese medicine, Dr. Z. She went from being almost bedridden for months to getting on a plane and going to a mediation workshop in Denver less than two weeks after she’d started on the herbs. When she suggested I go to Dr. Z to see if he might be able to help me with my own lack of energy, I’ll admit I didn’t race right over. My familial background made me a bit skeptical even though I could see how it was helping her.

That said, three weeks ago, I went.

After looking at the three pages he had me fill out about my health and dietary choices and asking a few pertinent questions about my current lymphoma diagnosis, Dr. Z. took about 5 minutes to feel my pulses, look at my tongue and palpate my abdomen. He then gave me his Chinese diagnosis:

Qi/blood vacuity

Phlegm heat nodulation

Blood stasis

Spleen/kidney vacuity with some yin vacuity

Wei Qi vacuity

Liver depression/Qi stagnation

Blood heat

And I thought I being diagnosed with lymphoma was worrisome!

Of course, when I got home, I ran right to my computer to Google these odd phrases. What do I know about vacuity or Qi stagnation? (After the fact, I realized I should have just questioned Dr. Z about them but I was in a “this-guy-has-the-OMD-after-his-name-just-nod-and-thank” mode.) Their meaning can be summarized in a few simple words. I’m clogged up. Nothing in my body is flowing. Qi, (pronounced ch’i for those of you who are unfamiliar with this Chinese term), refers to “an active principle forming part of any living thing. Qi is frequently translated as ‘lifeforce’ or ‘energy flow’, and is often compared to Western notions of vitality, as well as the yogic notion of prana and pranayama. The literal translation of "qi" is air, breath, or gas,” from Wikipedia.

You could say Dr. Z found, not that my body has run out of gas, but rather it has difficulty getting the gas/breath/blood/phlegm to move around in a healthy fashion. For this he sent me home with a small bottle of powdered herbs I’m to mix with warm water and drink, twice daily. OK. No problem.

The magic potion

My morning and evening brew . . .

. . . good to the last drop.

But there was another little problem. According to Dr. Z, my body’s fat stores are holding onto toxins. His thoughts are this could very well be the cause of many of my symptoms, even, perhaps, the lymphoma. For this he sent me home with a diet.

It's basically the Atkins Diet – very few carbohydrates, no sugar, no wine or alcohol, only certain fruits and vegetables, and of course, protein. And on the first page of this diet, are these instructions:

“The goal for you is weight stabilization. Your diet is the strategy for achieving. . . a 10 lb weight loss.”

For those of you who don’t know me personally, you might be thinking, “well, Bobbie must be a tad zaftig and could use to lose a few pounds.” You would be wrong.

I am 5 feet tall and I wear a size 4. Everyone who DOES know me to whom I’ve told this, has said, to a person, “You, lose 10 pounds? You’ve got to be kidding.” Exactly what I needed to hear because, really, did I want to go on this diet?

No.

The strange thing is when I brought this diet home to my husband, he took one look at it and said, “Let’s try it.” This is a guy who goes through several loaves of Acme rye or olive bread a week and can’t do without his glass of wine or beer with dinner. He also isn’t really overweight but always thinks he needs to lose a couple of lbs.

OK, so I’m willing to give it a try. I can easily forgo bread, potatoes, rice, pasta (not as easily), and my occasional glass of wine (I’m not a beer drinker). I can cut my ½ of a banana a day down to ½ every other day. I can give up certain fruits and vegetables listed on the diet’s page marked “unfavorable” – i.e., mangos, prunes, figs, lima beans, acorn squash, turnips – and fill up on the favorable ones – i.e., apples, blueberries, strawberries, artichokes, broccoli, cauliflower.

But what I’m not willing to do is give up my chocolate and my ice cream.

The chocolate addiction is merely a habit I picked up over the years. I blame it really, on being female. I know very few women who don’t need their chocolate fix daily. And as we all know (or if you don’t, you should by now) good dark chocolate is a health food. Yes, it has lots of those healthy antioxidants, and there are now studies, which show those people who eat chocolate with 70% cacao or greater have a 400% less chance of getting Alzheimer’s! We’re not talking Snickers Bars. We’re talking the good stuff. I have mine, a small square once in the afternoon and once in the evening daily. Heaven.

My ice cream addiction? It’s genetic. Truly. My mother told me years ago that when she was pregnant with me she ate a pint of ice cream a night. A NIGHT! And you don’t think I came out of the womb screaming for ice cream? It’s always been one of my four major food groups. Even as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uganda, where it wasn’t that easy to get decent meat, I managed to find a source for buying a half gallon of ice cream to keep me from going through withdrawal symptoms. Now, I can’t say ice cream is a health food, but, in my case, it is a good source of calcium. And since my favorite flavors these days are strawberry (there’s my fruit/berry antioxidant) and chocolate chip (read above ¶) I think I can safely say ice cream in my diet is definitely a healthy habit.

But here’s the real justification for not cutting out the things I really love from my diet. If not eating the chocolate and the ice cream means I’ll live another three weeks in a skilled nursing facility, sitting in a wheel chair wearing an adult diaper, not remembering who I am or who anybody else is with spittle drooling down one side of my mouth, I’ll choose having my chocolate and my ice cream every time.

It all comes down to this. Do I care about how long I live? Maybe. But I care more about enjoying the life I have left. Isn’t that what we all care about?

So here is the update on the results of taking the herbs and sticking to the major parts of the diet. I’ve lost 4 pounds in 3 weeks although that’s not really my goal. My goal is to get my energy back. The last four days I have gone without a nap. I have been working in my studio for hours at a time.

Wedged clay waiting to be rolled. . .

. . . into a nice slab. . .

. . .which will become a lovely platter.

I have been out with friends and/or my husband after a full day and not felt totally depleted. And friends who have seen me at my lowest, dragging my butt along day after day, have said recently, “You really seem brighter.” I can honestly say that’s exactly how I feel.

Tonight, I think my Qi is flowing fine and feeling groovy.

It’s late. I’m going down for my last dip of ice cream and ½ banana before bed.

It’s been a damn good day.

Where Oh Where Has My Energy Gone? . . .

2011-06-08T18:39:00.000-07:00

Or It's Amazing What You Can Do When You Don't Feel Like Doing Much.

Running on Empty

I suppose I could blame my absence from the blog on the energy drain I’ve been feeling since I last wrote. Or the fact that in the past couple of months my immune system seems to have taken a hiatus and left me unprotected from the internal viruses my body harbors or the external ones passed along by friends and family. Having just recovered from some debilitating infection and before I could get myself back into my routine of gym/studio/dog walking, I would come down with something else. OK, let’s just say, health not withstanding, I haven’t felt much like writing.

And yet, it’s not as if I’ve dropped off the edge and stopped participating in life. Besides getting into the studio weekly (or weakly, however you want to characterize it), I went to see the A’s lose to the Giants at AT&T park, then lose to the Yankees at the Coliseum (depressing and energy sapping in and of itself). I sat through six and a half hours of Wagner and his Walküries, sang in the three hour production of Kurt Weill’s Street scene with OSC and OEBS, and have managed to be available for convivial visits with friends and family. All that and I even planted our Victory Garden 2011.

Looking down at our Victory Garden 2011

If you ask my husband or my close friends, they would tell you I’m overly busy, doing too much and that’s why I’m so tired by the end of the day. I’m almost embarrassed to admit naps have become commonplace. Unfortunately, most of the time, I wake up from a nap almost as tired as when I put head to pillow.

Energy in a bottle?

So now the search is on for what hopefully is the answer: Energy in a pill. Advice is coming in from all corners. I’ve got the bottles of Coenzyme Q10, Juvenon, Wellness Tablets all lined up in the bathroom. The trick is to remember to actually take the damn things. Being a formerly fairly healthy human being, I’ve been fortunate enough not to have to take much in the way of medications and still be well. When I go in for a routine exam these days I seem to be an anomaly – a person of a "certain age" who doesn’t have a list of medications an arm long to rattle off when they ask, “So what medications are you on?” In fact, I’m not on anything but Vitamin D3 tablets when I remember to take them. That’s it.

Maybe what I need is a medication that will help my memory so I can remember to take the other medications? Or I could get what my mom had which helped her after she’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and couldn’t remember from one day to the next if she’d taken her meds. We got her this wonderful device, which was a kind of alarm clock that held each day’s worth of meds. It would ring and open up right at the time she was to take the pills, like once every 8 hours. This worked like a charm. I wish now that I’d kept it when she went into the nursing facility and no longer needed it.

One of my dear friends who is suffering from MS has found a medical doctor who also dispenses Chinese herbs. She’s been working with this fellow and has found a new “core of energy” and is encouraging me to seek him out to see if maybe he can be of help in my situation. I’m willing to try.

Meanwhile, even though it seems not much has been happening in the studio, since I last wrote I finished making the platters, which are now ready to be bisqued. I also glazed the last few vessels and have to admit I’m very happy with the outcome.

Pinch pot with Koke Blue Glaze

Pinch pot with Textured Bronze Glaze

Thrown and altered vessel with Textured Bronze Glaze

I even sold an older 2D piece off the mantle of our living room to a good friend on whose wall it looks spectacular, if I do say so myself. Unfortunately, the frame took a beating (inadvertently dropped awhile back while being dusted) so I had to search out a new framer, my old trusted framer, Chris of Design Framing, having retired. I delivered it into the newly trusted hands of Heather Piazza, owner of Creative Framing & Gallery in Oakland – what a find! She’s not only going to be able to save the frame, but she’s actually taking the whole thing apart and redoing it so the piece once again floats rather than being shoved up against the Plexiglas. All done for a very reasonable price. Perfect!

And (with a little smile) I might mention I recently made a deal with my husband’s former business partner who has decided (with my slightly veiled threats of taking it off the office wall where it’s been hanging for probably 15 years) he might want to finally purchase my drawing. With the downturn in business, we mutually agreed that he could buy it in installments. So as of today, I get a little monthly income which will help pay for my monthly studio rent.

Hey, I can say I'm single handedly keep this miserable economy going! Amazing what can be done even when you think (and sometimes feel) you've run out of gas. I guess the answer is – not special pills, not Chinese herbs but . . . OK let’s hear it for . . . TA DA . . .

Naps.

Still Waiting for Godot . . .

2011-03-18T14:12:00.000-07:00

Or What's the Difference Between Lymphoma Fatigue and Just Being Damn Tired?

Pigpen in his dust cloud

After my previous upbeat declaration that I was going out and living my life to the fullest, a huge cloud came by and just hung over me like the dust endlessly flying around Peanuts Pigpen. A combination of my own uncertain health issues, the progression of one of my dearest friend’s MS symptoms prompting us to form a “meal/ride” chain for weeks and leaving me to revisit the meaning of having a disease and how it zaps one's mental as well as physical being, and then the unprecedented number of cold, grey, rainy, stormy days, has left me flattened.

Nothing much seems to enthuse me. Granted we took a lovely little vacation to Baja California Sur to celebrate our birthdays in February. The fine dining at a few terrific restaurants, the Mojitos and Piña Coladas served pool side, the sun which never heated up more than we could bear, the day long boat ride which took us to swim with the sea lions, the arts and crafts fair in Todos Santos, the walks along the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortez, all had me feeling somewhat relaxed and in fairly good spirits.

Sailing out of Cabo San Lucas to watch the whales

The lovely doll maker at the Arts and Crafts fair in Todos Santos

Walking the beach along the Pacific Ocean near San Jose del Cabo

It also helped that I didn’t have my computer with me nor did I watch TV or see a newspaper for nine days. Sometimes, putting oneself on a ‘news/information’ holiday helps clear the clouds, if only for those cyber/news-free moments.

Leaving the sweet sun behind in Los Cabos, when we arrived in the Bay Area, a huge storm was raging on shore bringing with it high winds (we sat in the plane on the tarmac at LAX for over 1 ½ hours waiting to take off for SFO), rains, hail and flooding which didn’t stop for the next week. Apparently, my ‘fairly good spirits’ were left behind with the sun.

Nothing seems to perk me up these days. Not working in the studio. Not singing or knitting or reading a good book. Not walking the dog on the rare sunny day. I haven’t stopped going out into the world and living each day, but not much seems to be sparking that zest for life.

Last week I decided to go back to the gym again hoping to get those crazy happy-making endorphins stirred up. My endorphins are either still in deep hibernation or have gone out on strike. Five days at the gym in ten days and you’d think a little burst of good vibes would have surfaced.

Nada. Nothing. Zippo.

It doesn’t help that the news around the world is dire – Christchurch, New Zealand, Japan, Libya, the Middle East in general, the union folks in Wisconsin. How to force myself to take a ‘news/information’ holiday when I read the newspaper daily with my morning cuppa joe? And then there’s the computer, the radio, the TV. How do I discipline myself to not go there, not turn the damn things on? Not look, not listen, not watch?

And honestly, I don’t know how much this “Waiting for Godot” syndrome – waiting for the night sweats, high fevers, anemia, chronic fatigue - is affecting me, but I’m beginning to think it isn’t helping.

Maybe this is simply a case of "chronic disease depression"? Or more to the point, that age old question, "Is life just getting you down, honey?" How will I know when being tired is more than just being tired?

Frankly, I’m too tired at the moment to even think about it.

Feeling Downright Snow White-ish . . .

2011-01-07T16:41:00.000-08:00

Or When Life Gives You Poison Apples, Make Apple Strudel.

Dreams are a wish your heart makes.

The season of gift giving is over and yet, as I take time to reflect upon the last few weeks of 2010, I am left to wonder about the meaning of “gifts” in general and what I have come to know about gifts in my own life, in particular.

According to the dictionary, a gift is something given voluntarily, without the expectation of receiving something in return. And if we are fortunate enough, some of us are given the gifts of talent or aptitude. And let’s not forget the legal definition of gift – “a voluntary transfer of property or of a property interest from one individual to another, made gratuitously to the recipient.”

I am pleased to admit over my lifetime I have been the fortunate recipient of gifts in each of these categories.

But in the past couple of weeks, I have received a gift that doesn’t really fit neatly into Webster’s definition. Of course, I was tickled with the sweet gifts from friends – chocolates, special soaps, meals made and meals shared, time together.

Japanese ornament for 2010 from Jürgen

And I was especially delighted with the thoughtful presents my dear husband gave me for Christmas which included this beautiful Japanese ornament – our 2010 ornament – to add to our growing collection I place every Holiday season on our little Smith and Hawkins wire tree replica. It takes the place of the real trees we used to have every year my mom-in-law, Gerta, came to us for Christmas. Then, we always had a Noble fir with real honey candles, which she’d bring from Germany. We would light those candles every evening and each time we did, we’d say, “Now it’s really Christmas.”

Nowadays, I say that when I finish decorating this little tree.

Our Little Tree - 2010

But the one gift, which came disguised as a ‘poison apple’ is the one which seems to be the most profound on a deeply personal level. On December 17^th I went through a painful bone marrow biopsy, the results of which were used as a medical base line to determine the stage of my cancer (stage 4) and the prognosis (intermediate as opposed to good or poor). The lymphoma is, in fact, in my bone marrow and in my bones.

Dr. K called me with these results the week after Christmas. According to him and from all he had told me beforehand, this was not unexpected. So I took it in stride. After all, there is still apparently nothing to be done but wait for those pesky symptoms to show up – the night sweats, the fevers, the anemia, the tumors – before they will begin treatment (chemo). The plan is to see Dr. K. every three months for a physical exam and blood work and if after a year of these appointments, nothing has changed, I’ll see him every six months.

That all seems reasonably doable. I’m feeling fine physically except for the occasional backache and I'm looking good according to everyone who sees me these days. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “You look terrific!” in the past month or so. I think it’s not so much because I look terrific, but because I don’t look sick. But, all right, I can take that in. I look terrific!

And until I see Dr. K in three months, I won’t have to think about having a terminal illness. In fact, lately, I’ve been thinking how we all suffer from a “systemic disease with no known cure”, as Dr. K so succinctly put it when he first described the type of lymphoma I have. The disease is called “being human”. Every one of us will die of something at some point. No one gets out of this life alive.

So that was that until the ‘poison apple’ came this week in the form of the final piece of information from the bone marrow biopsy. I have an abnormal gene formation, a trisomy 12, which according to my Google research, is a prognostic indicator of the disease. This was the test I thought I would decide to have or not and without knowing was already done through the biopsy.

The prognosis is not good. According to the percentages of patients with this particular abnormal gene, I will be dying sooner rather than later from the lymphoma. Of course, I could always be in the smaller percentage of those who live a bit longer, but then I could win the lottery, too.

Big inhale. Bigger exhale.

So here is the gift – the “Prince” I’ve found having taken a bite of this poison apple. It’s very simple. In fact, it’s my real “wake up” call – a real slap upside the head (not the gentle kiss promised) telling me, “Wake UP, you idiot! This is your life! THIS is the day you have. There is NO and there has NEVER BEEN a guaranteed tomorrow. Take this day and make the best you can of it. Whatever crap occurs, deal with it or not, but take what’s good of the day and be grateful for it.”

And that’s what I’m trying to do each and every day. I’ve never felt more alive, alert and engaged. My Snow White-ish days are over. No more singing “Someday My Prince Will Come.”

My Prince "Today" has come and we’re going out on the town. Feel free to join us.

Like Alice Down the Rabbit Hole . . .

2010-12-01T14:12:00.000-08:00

Or How a Day Can Go From Bad to Worse.

The phone rang at 12:15 PM. I picked it up immediately looking first at the caller ID number, not recognizing it right off the bat but assuming this was the call I for which I had been anxiously waiting. Dr. K, my oncologist who was away from his office for several weeks and I had a “phone appointment” at 12:20 PM and I thought, hopefully, he might actually be calling a bit early as we had a lot to talk about.

It was not. It was Filiberto, our gardener, who wanted to talk about the next day’s work in our garden. I cut the call short, not wanting to depend on call waiting to let me know Dr. K was on the line.

From that point on, the day and I simply fell apart.

When Dr. K hadn’t called by 2 PM I called his office and after several tries to speak to a person, not just leave a message through the voice mail maze, I heard he was running 1½ hours late because of emergencies. If I had gone into his office and checked in, I would have no doubt been told he was running late, encouraged to go have a bite to eat, come back and check in later. But a phone appointment running late? Well, too bad. Didn’t the person who scheduled the appointment tell me this could happen?

No, but it didn’t matter if they had. Dr. K was unavailable until who knew when and I, waiting for news I pretty much knew wouldn’t be good, finally let go of all I had been holding in, all my fears, my frustrations, my anger at this latest diagnosis and had my first huge melt down. I fell sobbing into the arms of my dear husband who had been waiting with me to speak to the doctor. After helping me gain a bit of composure, he encouraged me to go to the gym and "work it out", which I did and it helped - a little.

When I went through my first bout of breast cancer, the only time I remember crying was before I had even been diagnosed. Three months after we were married over twenty years ago, I felt a lump in my right breast. When the surgeon who examined me said the word “biopsy”, tears began to flow, even though he said he was so sure it was “90% nothing to worry about”.

This being the third time I’ve gone through a diagnosis of cancer, I now believe the worst part is always in the very beginning, when nothing is certain except the fact that somewhere in your body, cells are growing haywire. When there is still no prognosis, no treatment plan, no idea what comes next, these are the most anxiety-ridden, the toughest days of all.

Which is why, when no phone call was forthcoming from Dr. K with this very information which I hoped would somehow put me at ease, help me get on track to fight this “indolent” disease, I fell apart.

Unfortunately, this time with this disease, which I can now refer to with its specific name, small lymphocytic lymphoma or as it is more well known - SLL, I will not have the benefit of any of these things, no prognosis, no treatment plan, no idea what will come next.

I learned this from Dr. K who finally called at 7 PM apologizing for the bureaucratic snafu. Apparently, since he didn’t schedule the appointment himself, which is how it is supposed to be done, he didn’t know about it until he heard I had left messages. But better than the 10 minute phone appointment I would have had with him in the middle of the day, he spent almost an hour on the phone with us, giving us all the information he could, that from the last CT scans, there are no enlarged nodes in my chest area (good news), but that this is a “systemic disease which cannot be cured” (not so good news). There is no treatment necessary until I have symptoms, i.e. night sweats, fevers, anemia, fatigue. How will I know when these symptoms are bad enough to require treatment? He had no real answer for that.

Jürgen asked all of the scientific questions about monoclonal antibodies and such. I took notes on this. Mine are: CD 5, CD 20, CD 23, BCL 2 - all positive (not good) but CD 3 and CD 10 are negative (good). He asked about a specific test which would more accurately tell if I have the gene which portends an early demise from this disease or not. Dr. K knew about this but I don’t think it is done routinely at Kaiser. And anyway, do I really want to know this in advance? Know that I might have only 5 years left as opposed to say 15? Not something I can decide easily or in a hurry. I’ll get back to you on that one.

So nothing from the phone call gave me anything with which I might forge ahead on a path to recovery, a plan of action, what to do while waiting for the tell-tale symptoms. All that I’m left with is this floating anxiety. And the knowledge that at any moment I just might have another melt down.

So where is that Cheshire cat with his magnificent grin when I need him?

Life Goes On in the Studio . . .

2010-11-20T17:22:00.000-08:00

Or Doing the Work is the Best Medicine.

The platters are coming along. I spent a good three hours in the studio on Wednesday after going to the gym. I finished a prototype platter, the one done as an example for Tina so she can choose the glaze she’d like and if she likes the idea of inlaid porcelain slip or not. It’s now drying slowly before being bisque fired.

Leather hard platter with porcelain slip added.

Leather hard platter with porcelain slip inlay.

While I was working on adding the porcelain slip to the carved portion of the prototype platter, I had a visit from Judith who is doing an article for the first OSC (Oakland Symphony Chorus, of which I am a member since 2006) newsletter, SING! “SINGer Spotlight” is, to quote Judith, “a piece highlighting interesting chorus members, and we thought you would be an appropriate starter for this column.” Really? Me? I have a few intimate friends from way back who might describe me as “interesting” but chorus members? OK, so they must be going alphabetically starting with the sopranos. Well, no, Judith assured me otherwise, although they are starting with the sopranos. Anyway, she came armed with a camera and, hopefully, managed to get a decent photo for the column.

Leather hard platter with porcelain slip inlay on both sides finished.

I finished one of my pinched vessels now ready for bisque firing and decided, with the help from my studio friend, Tyrell, that I was also finished with the larger one.

Leather hard pinch vessel with wax resist, carved pattern.

Other side of leather hard pinched vessel with carved pattern.

Sometimes you just have to see your work through someone else’s eyes to make these “it’s done” decisions.

Front side of large pinched vessel ready to dry.

Back side of large pinched vessel ready to dry.

And then a piece sitting on the shelf above my drying shelves caught my eye. I’d almost forgotten I had done this porcelain piece with desert blue glaze, which I glazed and fired recently. It pleases me from every angle. More of these will come, no doubt.

Porcelain pinched vessel with desert blue glaze, carved, torn, coiled.

Another view of porcelain pinched vessel w/desert blue glaze.

Another view of porcelain pinched vessel, carved, torn, coiled.

Close up of carved, torn coiled porcelain pinched vessel.

One more view of porcelain pinched vessel.

All in all, it was a good day in the studio. If laughter is the best medicine, then my studio has got to be the funniest joke ever.

Things You Hope To Never Hear From Your Health Care Providers . . .

2010-11-20T16:34:00.000-08:00

Or If You Can't Say Anything Nice . . .

In the past two months I’ve had my share of appointments with doctors, physical therapists and radiology technicians and all I can say is somewhere along the way medical and training schools have definitely dropped the ball when it comes to what we used to call “bedside manners.”

Here are just a few examples of what, in my humble opinion, definitely could have been left unsaid.

When my physical therapist was studying films of my lower back and asking me about my symptoms and type of pain I was experiencing he said, “Well, considering what you’ve told me about your pain and how it is affecting your daily life and what I see here as the state of your back, you are doing extraordinarily well. I have other patients in wheelchairs with this type of lumbar situation.”

Like I needed to hear this.

Then there was my regular doctor who called me in the evening (you know it’s going to be something you don’t want to hear when they call you later than normal office hours, but anyway . . .) to tell me that the MRI she ordered for my lower back pain showed severe arthritis, nothing we weren’t expecting. But then she said, “It also showed you have some enlarged lymph nodes and so I’m ordering a CT scan to get a better look.”

OK, that wasn’t so alarming, but THEN she said, “Now you should know that I wouldn’t order this unless I thought it was absolutely necessary because CT scans emit a lot of radiation.”

Did I need to know the amount of radiation given off by a CT scan was higher than most radiological tests so there could be something else to worry about? No. Or the inference that SHE was obviously worried about the enlarged lymph nodes or she wouldn’t be ordering the test? No, again.

Sigh . . . and believe me, she’s always been the best when it comes to knowing what to say and what not to say. Hers was a mild gaffe comparatively speaking.

Much worse was the ENT (ear nose and throat) surgeon who called me in the early morning (before I was even out of bed so again, I was sure it was something I didn’t want to hear) with results from my lymph node biopsy. He wasn’t the doctor who did the actual surgery (he was out of town) so I guess I should give him a bit of a pass because he really didn’t know my case. But even so, do I really want to pick up the phone and have a doctor start out by saying, “I’m sorry but I have some really bad news”? And in the next breath say, “Are you sitting down?” Luckily for me I was still in bed at the time, but CRAP! Is that what you want to hear at 8 in the morning, before you’ve even had coffee?

I don’t think so.

And lastly, there was the very chatty radiology technician who was administering the CT scan I had last Friday. Lots of banter back and forth while she got me up on the gurney before sending me through the radiation-zapping machine, and injecting me with an iodine infusion for one last picture. Then she made this conversational faux pas. As I was collecting myself thinking well, at least that’s over, and after she told me I should drink plenty of water to flush the iodine solution out of my overworked kidneys, she said cheerfully, “Well, we’ll be seeing a lot more of you here.”

What?

“Oh yes,” she continued, “You’ll be getting these scans pretty regularly. Oh and drinking all those yummy banana smoothies.” She was referring to the barium liquid they have you drink when they do CT scans of your stomach, intestines and bowels, which gave me a great case of diarrhea the last time I drank it. I was homebound for the rest of the day and evening.

When I balked at the thought of going through this on a regular basis and questioned why, she said, “You have lymphoma, yes? Well, CT scans are really the only way they can follow the progress of the disease.”

Well, didn’t that make my day? Just what I needed to know. The only thing that kept me from fuming about that for the next couple of hours was the horrendous traffic on the way home from the medical facility. Mental road rage took over.

My dear mom used to say this but in a much more genteel way. Here's my version: If you can’t say anything nice, why not keep your bleeping mouth shut?

As Rosanna Rosanna Danna used to say . . .

2010-11-12T14:10:00.000-08:00

It's Always Something.

You go in to get an MRI for pain in your lower back, worrying it’s something more serious than arthritis – another disc problem, a fractured vertebrae - and you find out there’s something else, something possibly even more serious than you ever imagined.

“Enlarged lymph nodes in the retroperitoneal area.” That’s what my doctor told me over the phone last night. I shouldn’t worry that this has anything to do with my previous stage one breast cancer. But I need a CT scan, a scan, which in her words “carries a significant amount of radiation.”

My doctor, Dr. S., is very conservative. She hesitates to order tests unless she is absolutely sure they are necessary. I’ve had this lower back pain for almost two years. With my original complaint she smiled and told me this is a product of aging, recommended I take ibuprofen when necessary and sent me to a physical therapist.

Then the disc in the upper thoracic neck area ruptured and I spent a couple of months on morphine and medical marijuana, masking any pain in my lower back as a bonus. Now I am blessedly free of pain from the ruptured disc, and off all the heavy-duty medications. But right on cue, the lower back pain has returned.

At my yearly check up a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned I still have significant lower back pain so my doctor scheduled an MRI to see what’s going on. The result came back – severe arthritis. This wasn’t news as the x-ray I had last year picked that up.

But then, the shocker: Enlarged lymph nodes in the retroperitoneal area. I go in for the CT scan this Sunday.

Rosanna was never more right.

I wrote this over two months ago, I was thinking about posting it and then just became overwhelmed by what was happening to me or rather by the medical conveyer belt onto which I found myself inextricably thrown.

In the past two months there have been visits to Dr. K., the oncologist, extensive blood work, a lymph node biopsy and in between, blessedly, a trip to Europe, which had been planned for over a year to visit friends and family celebrating my brother-in-law’s 60^th birthday. For those two weeks I was able to move fear out of my mind and focus on the moments of beauty in Vienna, the joyful reconnections in Berlin and in the back of my mind, hold onto the hope that these large lymph nodes were just remnants of a past infection from my days living in Africa.

Or . . .?

But hopes and wishes rarely make correct diagnoses. This week I learned I have small lymphocytic leukemia and/or chronic lymphocytic lymphoma. The gist is I have lymphoma, cancer of the lymph system. That’s the bad news.

The good news is the pathologist used the word “indolent” – lazy, in no big hurry to do away with me just yet. And for now the only real symptoms I’m experiencing are being unusually tired (who my age isn’t?) and a whole new surge of what I’m calling ‘hot flashes’ – which may or may not be attributed to the node business. But I am, after all, years beyond those hormonal flashes, which we ladies of a certain age all endured to one degree or another. Whatever is causing them, they’re back.

Today I go in for my second CT scan, which will be used to stage my particular cancer. In December, Dr. K. will do a bone marrow biopsy to finish the staging.

In the meantime, I am working on platters in the studio.

Getting the wedged clay ready to roll into slabs.

Slab put on my makeshift 'mold'.

Platter with coiled handles drying into leather hard.

This is, after all, supposed to be about my life as an artist, not just my life as a patient.

But then, life has a way of drifting out of the lane just when you're sure you're driving straight ahead. No matter how firm a grip I thought I had on the steering wheel, this journey has just taken an unexpected turn.

And so the blog morphs into “my life as an artist who is, a once again, a cancer patient.”

Never more true, Rosanna. It's always something.

It's the Little Things That Count . . .

2010-08-31T15:10:00.000-07:00

But Sometimes Big Things Make the Difference.

I’ve been looking for little things to hang my ‘I’m getting better’ hat on these days and have found several.

Victory!

The first came a few weeks ago as I was finishing my daily toilette – always with a spritz from my favorite perfume, Amarige by Givenchy. It only takes not being able to use one of your hands to make you realize how much you normally use that hand on a daily basis. Being left handed, I was so thankful that my ruptured disc affected my right hand, thinking, quite foolishly, that it would be less debilitating when the right arm went numb and the right hand went weak. The first time I tried to press down on the perfume bottle’s atomizer, I was shocked that I couldn’t do it pressing with my right index finger. OK, so not a big thing, right. I mean, my left hand could take over that task easily.

But there were so many things I couldn’t seem to do using my right hand. Buttoning pants. Unclipping the dog’s collar while holding the leash with the left. Reaching for and lifting out the large granola jar from the right-sided cupboard. Even opening the passenger side door handle sometimes proved impossible. And forget trying to clip fingernails on my left hand! My grip was gone.

Still not useable with my right hand.

So every day since I’ve been off the meds and have felt no appreciable pain in my neck or back, I’ve tried the atomizer test. This would be the test to tell me if the nerve damage was temporary or permanent. The first time it worked I was so surprised I actually missed my wrist – not really paying attention to where I was aiming. But then the next day it was back to futility. All my trying to push down with the right index finger was for naught. My physical therapist said this was normal, sort of like trying to get your car engine started after it’s been sitting around for weeks. It takes several starts to get the spark activating the neurons in the nerve, which is still healing.

Today, I can report that while I still don’t have the strength to clip my nails easily, my index finger is working brilliantly and daily in the push-down-the-atomizer test. It’s amazing to me such little things can bring so much satisfaction.

It also doesn’t hurt to have friends and family mention how good I look or sound now that I’m completely off all the drugs. (And I thank god for those good drugs, which apparently kept me totally unaware that I was looking and sounding that bad!) Just another little sign that life is getting back to normal.

But there are bigger signs such as taking back routines I had to forego because I couldn’t move without pain, like cooking, shopping, tending the garden, taking the dog on his daily walk or visit to the dog park. Can I admit it was sweet to hear folks at the dog park say they actually wondered where I’d been all this time? They saw Obie with my husband but still missed seeing ME. We’re a strange but fiercely connected group of people who congregate with our pooches at the park. We notice when someone is missing. Still, I was truly flattered to be missed.

Obie at the Alameda dog park - on alert.

And then, of course, there are the bigger issues I must face besides how to apply perfume when dealing with nerve damage. As I wrote earlier, my biggest fear was that I would never manage to get back into the studio to do the work.

I am happy to say as of yesterday, I have been in the studio, not daily but at least twice a week for a couple of hours at a time. I finished glazing the three vessels I started before the cervical rupture on May 5. Scarlett’s piece is part of this group. They will all be fired this week. But more importantly, I have another commission, one that has me very excited and looking forward to starting immediately. My friend Tina came for a studio visit a couple of weeks ago and has commissioned me to create a series of serving platters for her. We discussed clay body, glazes, size and shape and possible surface decorations. I plan to do a small prototype first to give us both an idea of what might work, what not and what she will choose for her specific platters. Who knows, this might be a whole new direction for me. I’ve already had another friend mention she, too, might like a platter!

So, platters it is.

It seems like such a small thing, but when I stand back and look at how far I’ve come since May, it’s huge.

Ruminating Over Lost Time . . .

2010-07-14T13:28:00.000-07:00

Or How I Came to Realize We’re All Born With an Expiration Date.

In the past two months I have only been to my studio to pay the rent and to water my ficus, which I have to say is looking extremely happy since I repotted it a while back. I am so looking forward to reclaiming this space as a working studio and not the glorified, extraordinarily expensive storage unit it became on May 5.

It’s been over two months since I woke up with a pain so excruciating I could barely get down the stairs, into the car and driven to the nearest ER. It took almost a week to get the proper diagnosis of a ruptured disc in the T1-T2 area of my neck (the ER doctor suggested I must be at the beginning of an onset of shingles and sent me home with a three page write up on the subject and a prescription for a strong anti viral medication). And then it took another few weeks to get the right pain medications to keep me, for the most part, 24 hours pain free.

At the time my doctor told me it might take 4-6 weeks to recuperate on my own, I couldn’t take it in. I was in the midst of finishing up a commission piece. I had the possibility of starting another. We had a wedding to go to in Chicago end of June. Flights and hotel reservations had been made. It was only the beginning of May. Surely I would be fine by June.

But after my first trip to the Spine Clinic where I saw the pictures of my completely herniated disc pushing the normally rounded nerve root to a flat line, there was the specter of surgery hanging over me. It seemed this might be the only way I could keep from having a permanent disability - the rupture causing my arm to go numb to the wrist and my right hand to lose quite a bit of strength. But after seeing two different surgeons who both suggested I let time do the healing, I began a self-imposed shut down of my life as I had been living it, all the while not knowing if time and inertia would really do the trick.

Physically, doing nothing was easy since by mid May I was so doped up on morphine, medical marijuana (that’s another whole story) and sleep medications, the days went foggily by. It was my mental impatience which made it difficult to accept the "doing nothing" as nothing more than a waste of time.

All around me, however, others were "doing" for me. My very kind and thoughtful friends arrived to deliver delicious dinners, drive me to and from, and bring me flowers, DVDs, books on tape, even a box of new drawing pencils and gum erasers in case I got the urge. Visitors came by and I held court in our light-filled sitting room, me supine on the sofa with feet propped up slightly, eyes probably glazed over and they, sitting opposite, being all up beat and encouraging. At the time, I couldn’t keep a thought in my head and I could barely keep a conversation going. Looking back, I see all I really had the energy to do was to heal.

Now it’s mid July. I am totally off the morphine and mj and working my way off the sleep meds. I am pain free with only the occasional shoulder ache (which is how this whole episode started, me thinking I had just pulled a muscle). There is no residual numbness in my arm but I still have weakness in my hand. My physical therapist says this will be the last thing to recover. Regrettably, we missed the wedding in Chicago, but have been invited to join friends in Lake Tahoe this weekend.

I have to remind myself I've come a long way from the days not too long ago when if I manage to get 5 phone calls done in a day I was “doing fine”. Yesterday, I drove myself to my first voice lesson in months (where I found out not only can your muscles atrophy from disuse but so can your vocal chords!); paid a visit to my studio to deliver my sketching paraphernalia, water the ficus and have a nice chat with my building mate, Tyrell; and then took the dog to the dog park. I was completely spent by the end of the day but hey, I managed to do it!

I so look forward to getting back into the rhythm of my former life. And I especially look forward to reconnecting with my creative self, and reclaiming the "overpriced storage unit" as my working studio.

Who knows, maybe the next series I start will be touched with a new perspective? No matter where my creativity takes me, it has become abundantly clear that unfortunately, at a certain age, our body parts simply start to wear out.

So in the end, sad to say, we are all merely fragile vessels with a finite shelf life.

Too bad the expiration date isn’t stamped where we can see it.

Viewing Life Through My Mind's Eye . . .

2010-06-25T15:09:00.000-07:00

Or Maybe I Just Need to See An Ophthalmologist?

First - (and I must say I'm quite proud to admit): I just had a look at my 'To Do List' for today - 7 items to do, 6 items done! Granted 5 of the 7 were phone calls to be made. But, hey, just last week, one phone call would have knocked me out for hours. I'm doing much better today.

Second sign that I am healing: My arm which was numb to the wrist is no longer numb! Yes, that means the herniated disc is receding and allowing the nerve to bounce back. The bad news is I still have weakness in the grip of my right hand. That's OK. I don't have the energy to hold on to anything heavier than a newspaper anyway, and luckily I'm left-handed, so not a huge problem right now.

Third and the most important reason to believe I'm headed in the right direction: Slowly I've started cutting back on the morphine and finding (so far) I am still pain free and not suffering from withdrawal symptoms just yet. You can't know how happy I am about this. I am getting back to being my old self. Well, not totally, but today I drove down to Trader Joe's, did a little shopping (being very careful to buy only what I could easily carry), drove home and actually made dinner (with my husband's help). OK, I did have a one and a half hour nap between the shopping and the dinner making but still, this is progress.

Meanwhile, I saw my physical therapist, Wayne last week and he showed me how to make my very own cervical traction contraption so I can spend time being in traction twice daily. This supposedly will help relieve the pressure of the herniated disc on my impinged nerve. Before Wayne gave me the printed instructions on how to construct this very simple device, he handed me a paper to sign saying I wouldn't kill myself by knowingly misusing it (implying suicide by towel and rope) or unknowingly (implying I might overdose on my pain meds, put my head face down on the towel and thus accidentally asphyxiate myself which apparently has happened before). So far, I'm happy to tell you I haven't been tempted either way.

Otherwise not much else to report. When I take the time to reflect on my life as it was BHD (before herniated disc) and try to imagine how it might be after I'm "healed", I realize this is another one of those 'aha moments' - one similar to the one I had soon after my mastectomy/reconstruction over eight years ago. Then someone asked me if I was looking forward to getting my life back to normal. My first thought was my life will never be 'normal' again. But then upon further reflection, I realized the real truth of the matter, that this was my 'new normal'. That my body would never be the same as it was before all the surgeries nor would I. From that moment on, I realized the life I was living was my 'new normal'.

So here's how it begins this time in my mind's eye: I work my way off the pain medications, hoping to be pain free but always aware of the fact that at anytime, the pain can and probably will return to throw me off balance. Hoping beyond hope to once again be my 'normal' self in the studio, I see myself effortlessly wedging clay into conical shapes. I take one and slap onto the center of the wheel. With wet hands and a water-filled sponge held lightly in the right, I bend over and with my elbows pressed down onto my thighs for stability, I put all the weight of my upper body into my arms and hands which are cupped around the clay as the wheel turns at top speed. Very soon, I pressure this lump of clay into the beginnings of one of my lovingly crafted vessels.

Or perhaps, being more realistic, I may have to find a way to accept that this may never be part of my new normal. I may have to accept the fact that my mind's eye can't even begin to see what a picture of new normal might look like.

Hey, do you think 3D glasses would help?

Maybe I'm Just Too Old to Surf . . .

2010-06-17T17:30:00.000-07:00

Or What Can You Give Me For A Bad Case of Impatience?

It’s a few days after East Bay Open Studios and I’m still ruminating about my fate this year as opposed to last. Last year at this time, I was riding on top of a creative high after setting up a thoroughly successful Open Studio. Sales of my clay and collage work, commissions with deposits for new clay pieces and a very sizable deposit for what I thought would be a challenging but ultimately satisfying 2 dimensional triptych all gave me good reason to feel enthused and encouraged for months to come. Little did I imagine that this 2009 creative wave would come crashing down onto a desolate shore beginning in 2010 when the large triptych commission fell through just at the point of having the preliminary sketch approved (see post: You Win Some and You Lose Some. . . )

It took a while to pick myself up, dry myself off, and get back to work. I caught a glimpse of a new wave rolling in when a second generous commission request came from my dear friend Scarlett. Could I create a clay vessel for her friend, Kate, who was just beginning the difficult journey of surviving and living beyond breast cancer? And could I do it in the black Cassius Basaltic clay? Absolutely! I decided to do several pieces at the same time and let Scarlett choose the one which ultimately spoke to her. The largest of the four was the one I really thought would be IT but it didn’t make past the drying process. Stress cracks and cracks from uneven drying were its deathblow. It may have been the result of my being too impatient to get it finished. Also, on further inspection, I really didn’t like its overall shape. It felt less than elegant, too ‘clunky’ at the foot.

Here are the three that made the cut before the bisque fire:

And the one Scarlett chose:

I was just about to have them bisqued and begin working on more pieces in this vein, when I was struck down with this %$@#$@#! herniated disc in my lower neck. As of May 7^th, doctors’ orders are to cease and desist working in the studio until further notice. They think it may be the repetitive way I hold and turn my head while working, which has worn down the disc. So here I am, in the middle of 2010 with no wave in sight. I am, thankfully, pain free but it’s the meds, which bring my relief.

Unfortunately, nothing relieves me from the feeling that time is rushing by leaving me behind waiting impatiently for the next creative wave.

Taking It Easy Isn't So Easy . . .

2010-06-01T17:23:00.000-07:00

Or So I'm Finding Out, The Hard Way . . .

For those of you who check in now and then to see what I've been up to, this probably comes as a "well, it's about time" moment. For those of you who are new to the blog, welcome. I invite you to peruse previous posts and the slideshows to the right where you can read more about my process and see the work in progress.

Meanwhile, here I am, finally. I didn't even realize it's been two whole months since I last posted. The first month I was actually working on a new series of pieces in Cassius Basaltic black clay. There's no excuse for my not keeping you in the loop since I was taking pictures of the progress and the finished pieces. I had every intention of posting them. Looking back I can find no real excuse to not writing in April except at the time making the work was apparently more important to me than writing about making the work.

In any event, April came and went. I woke up on the third of May in such excruciating pain, I could barely walk down the stairs in the house to get into the car and be driven to the hospital's emergency room. I won't bore you with the details of that visit nor of the next couple of weeks when my ailment was totally misdiagnosed. Just to let you know, now I am down for the count with a herniated disc in the upper thoracic area of my spine. I'm taking a lot of drugs to keep the pain at bay while I wait to heal or have surgery, which ever comes first. Better living through chemistry is my current mantra.

Bottom line is I've been told not to spend too much time sitting in front of the computer, along with a warning not to even THINK about working in my studio because of the delicate nature of the injury to the nerve which affects my right arm and hand (thank god I'm left-handed). When and if I get the chance, I will try to post pictures of the last pieces which are waiting to be bisque fired. Maybe I'll post some of my thoughts and episodic ramblings of the past few weeks just so you know how it's been.

So don't give up on me. Keep checking in. But please, don't ask me to take it easy. When that's all you can really do, believe me, it really isn't.

Change is Never Easy . . .

2010-04-01T22:02:00.000-07:00

Or How Working in Black Clay is Putting on the Pounds.

In my studio, it’s never easy to change from working in one medium to another. When working in 2D collage and mixed media, I have my table set up with a large piece of heavy-duty plastic placed over the stretched canvas top and underneath white butcher paper. The plastic keeps me from cutting into the canvas when using my Xacto knife. All of that is removed down to the permanently stretched canvas which is used when I work in clay. But this is the set up only when I’m working in lighter colored clays – stoneware and porcelain.

What takes more time is when I’m working exclusively with Cassius Basaltic, the “black” clay – it’s actually chocolate brown. It necessitates my stretching another piece of heavy canvas on top of the first and then a piece of light cotton canvas material on top of that since this clay will stain anything that it gets on.

And it does get on everything that isn’t protected in some way or another.

I was introduced to this particular clay years ago. I’ve always loved the look of black pottery and used to do raku firings to get that result. I even had my own raku kiln made to my specs by the inmates at Deuel Vocational Institution, Tracy, California, where I was an artist-in-residence for years. Teaching ceramics classes there, every couple of months on a Saturday, I would drive up to the exercise yard at the prison in my big yellow Dodge station wagon packed with the raku kiln, the propane gas tank fitted with the appropriate hose and burner, several large metal tongs and assorted tools, all of which were thoroughly inspected going in and coming out. It was a day long event for my ‘guys’ who would work with me through their lunch into the late afternoon, until they had to get back to their cells for ‘count.’ They made some incredible pieces and they, too, fell in love with not just the process, but also the beautiful surfaces it can produce.

With all that going for it, raku can be very time consuming and is more of a collective process than an individual endeavor. I needed another person to help lift my kiln off and put it back on the stacked clay pieces for the fire. Then, even more folks were needed to pull the red-hot pieces off the shelves and place into combustible material quickly to force a reduction burn and smoke, which makes the bare, unglazed clay go black.

After I left the job at DVI, I rarely if ever did a raku firing with my own equipment. Luckily, I found this Cassius Basaltic clay, which matures into a black ceramic surface. Granted, it doesn’t have the subtlety of raku but it does satisfy my lust for the deep black I once created with fire and smoke.

But there is a bit of a problem. Working with Cassius Basaltic clay really IS like working in chocolate - the smooth consistency; the way it gets on everything that isn't protected; the way it coats my hands when I've finished a throwing session.

No wonder I'm eating more chocolate than usual. This change in the studio, the move to working in black clay may mean another change is inevitable. I may now have to reorganize my closet - find those larger size jeans and put the smaller ones towards the back.

Thinking about this is just making me hungry. Excuse me. I'm going to get a piece of chocolate brittle.

Life Speaks to Me in Signs . . .

2010-02-26T17:42:00.000-08:00

And When It Does, I Listen.

As I said before, I am not new to being open to 'signs' when they show themselves - sometimes just when I need them and often when I least expect them. The next were a bit of both.

The second sign came to me the day after my return from Harbin in the form of a request. My friend and vocal instructor Scarlett asked me if I might create a special clay piece for her dear friend who is going through heavy chemo as well as a double mastectomy/reconstruction in the next few months. And would I include my own writings, which describe these pieces as ‘my life as a vessel’ – torn, carved, altered and delicately balanced?

I had been itching to get back into clay, wondering what direction I might take after finishing the 2D Dora and Anna commission. Just thinking about working on this theme again stirred my creative juices and of course, I agreed to do it without a second thought.

The third was an email I received yesterday from a dear friend whose daughter-in-law has just been diagnosed with breast cancer and who, according to my friend, would like to talk with me about my experiences, as she will be having a mastectomy/reconstruction in June. Of course I’m always available to share my experiences with any woman who has become a member of this sisterhood none of us ever wanted to join.

The final sign came again through an email from Joe, our friend and collector of my art over the years and who recently purchased one of the 2D series “Protector/Betrayer” which I created during my first bout with BC. He now owns the piece titled: “The Myth of the Cure.” (see August 2009 post - "My Life As A Vessel) And he wrote, “I wanted to tell you that after several months now it has been a source of inspiration living with your work of art. I love it.”

These signs have raised an internal mirror, which I can no longer ignore. I can see more clearly now who I am to myself and to those around me. I am the 64 year-old woman who lost her breast, and is no longer afraid to bare her body to the world. I am the creative person who has taken that loss and used it as her muse. I am the artist who takes her scarred soul and damaged body and with them, makes objects of beauty to be seen and admired and sometimes even loved.

Seeing this reflected in the internal mirror helps me accept a little more easily the deepening wrinkles and sagging skin, which is so obviously present in the external one. Not that I like it, but, hey, as I always say to my friends Nancy and Ricki when we go out every year to celebrate our birthdays together and I insist on taking pictures, “we’re never going to look as young as we do today.”

Do I take these birthday pictures as a sign? Only when I can remember where I put them.

A Time For Baring One's Soul . . .

2010-02-25T11:18:00.000-08:00

and Other Body Parts.

I wrote this days ago and have been pondering ever since if this is the sort of thing I should post. It made me question what the purpose is of my blog. Originally, I thought it would be my answer to having a static artist's website. It seemed a perfect way to combine my artwork, and my creative process with my love of writing.

But now I wonder if this isn’t just another way for me to journal about life’s experiences and how they affect me as an artist. Should I hold back when something seems too personal? As a good friend of mine recently told me when I posed the question to her, “what is art if not the baring of one's soul? In my opinion, nothing is too personal when it comes to our art.”

So it comes to this then: Am I truly ready to shed my clothes and go running naked into cyberspace – scars, warts and all?

I guess I am.

February 21, 2010 -

Is there something about birthdays, which, as we get older, opens our eyes to seeing ourselves if not anew then at least in a different light? I’m not necessarily talking about taking a good look in the mirror although, that can also be a rude awakening. But every year, it seems to be a time to look inward, to have a little peek at who we think we are, to ourselves, to those around us. Have we lived up to our own expectations? Have we buried feelings, which are now so deeply covered we can hardly remember what we felt and why? Often, this looking comes not from some internal need to know, but from outside happenstances.

Which is what just happened to me.

I believe in signs. There have been many in my life - some, which I recognized at the time and some which, only after time, were obvious to me. This past week has been fraught with so many signs – some subtle, some hit-me-over-the-head obvious – that I had to stop and really take a moment to reflect.

The first appeared at Harbin Hot Springs, a clothing-optional retreat we visited this past week. It was the first time in eight years we were at Harbin, a place we often frequented before my body was changed so radically by scars and a new breast with its reconstructed but colorless nipple. It was eight years ago this week when I underwent that body/life changing mastectomy/reconstruction. Our last visit to Harbin eight years ago was a time of saying goodbye to the body I had grown up with and grown into – of reveling in it, still visually whole with merely a couple of almost invisible scars from biopsies and a laparoscopic gall bladder surgery.

At that time, I wasn’t sure I would ever feel comfortable baring my body so openly again. We took pictures. I have no idea where they are.

But there I was last Tuesday afternoon, unwrapping the towel, which kept me covered from the communal dressing room to the warm pool, and slipping into the exquisitely soothing waters, looking around, hoping to find at least a woman my age, if not someone with a scar or two. But no, mostly there were only older men, younger men and the beautiful bodies of younger women.

I was the only crone present. But a bit more embarrassing to me was the fact that no one, not one person had a scar anywhere on his or her body. There were lots of tattoos in interesting places, but no scars.

It wasn’t a big deal, really. OK, so maybe I felt a little uncomfortable, but I was there, wasn’t I? I didn’t hesitate to go into the water. I dressed and undressed in the communal dressing room. I had taken that leap of baring my body to strangers after all these years and so I gave myself big pats on the back for even showing up.

That evening in the Harbin dining room (where clothing is required – the old ‘no shirt, no shoes, no service’ signs clearly posted) I noticed a few older women, none of whom I had seen in the waters. My hope was that the next day I would.

And I did. As before, I slipped into the warm pool, after depositing my towel and my flip-flops at the top of the stairs. I perched myself just to the right of the stairs where I could actually sit on a ledge and out of the corner of my eye, watch the folks coming and going. Even in clothed situations, I’m an inveterate people watcher.

There were several grey haired women in the pool that morning. We gave each other the knowing nod and smile – this being a ‘quiet meditation pool’ – no conversations allowed. And I wasn’t surprised at all when a tall, lovely looking young woman eased her beautiful body with her perfectly perky boobies down the stairs into the water followed by an even taller broad shouldered young man, her obvious companion. They made their way to the far wall of the pool and like many other couples, noodled a little (overt sexual intimacies are strictly verboten in the pools) whispering and cooing quietly. There were others who joined us over the next while and soon with the sun warming the air and the temperate water relaxing me into a less anxious state of mind than the day before, I started to feel much more at ease.

It wasn’t until I glanced casually to the top of the stairs that I saw the sign. There, with toes facing my black flip-flops, (which I was sure I took off toe end pointing the opposite way) was a prosthetic leg standing alone, without a body attached. I couldn’t believe it. Someone, like me, was in the water missing a body part. Who could it be? Of course I couldn’t tell since all I could see were people’s heads and sometimes shoulders and occasionally, frontal parts if they decided to float face up. But even before I saw who it was, (it was, in fact, that young Adonis with his beautiful woman) it hit me that each of us in the pool at that moment was missing a part, had a loss, if not physical, then certainly psychological, emotional. I was sure there wasn’t one person soaking in those waters who was completely whole.

When this finally sank in, I couldn’t contain myself and began to cry softly for my own loss. The grief I had never allowed myself to feel for eight years came gurgling out of me as I sat in the warm waters of Harbin, under a clear blue February sky.

We left the next day after enjoying another long soak. The young man with the prosthetic leg wasn’t there. I had only seen him that one time and then he was gone. But someone somewhere wanted me to know this fundamental truth, which was presented so literally for me to see – every one of us, one way or another, is missing a part. No one is truly whole.

I left Harbin feeling lighter than when I arrived, as if this had been a healing – a psychic laying on of hands or of the waters, if you will. I think we’ll be going back again, before another eight years go by.

Of course, there were more signs to come. As I'll be writing in the next post.

A Valentine for Dora and Anna . . .

2010-02-15T09:26:00.000-08:00

through time and imagination.

Is it possible to fall in love with the subjects of a piece of art you on which you are working? I never knew Dora or Anna, the grandmothers of my friend’s husband and my friend, who asked me to create this collage. And even though Judith has shared a few good stories and many pictures of them taken over the years, it is the women of these two pictures, who have captivated my heart. The more I work with them, the more I look into their young eyes, I find myself wishing I “knew them when.”

My own inner workings, my own aesthetic sensibilities have taken these women and put them into unfamiliar surroundings – more Persian than European or 19^th century American – and yet, with a touch of antique lace, they don’t seem at all out of place in this arched illusion. Perhaps my visual connection is creating not merely a 2 dimensional home for these women to share but rather a deeper place, a place they now share in my world, my imagination, my heart.

Dora and Anna, this Valentine is for you.

"April Is The Cruellest Month" . . .

2010-02-03T12:10:00.000-08:00

Or Is It?

Thank god it's finally February. February, for me, is the month of birthdays. Beginning with the 1^st and on until the very end, my calendar is jammed packed with B-day reminders of friends and family who were born this month, including both myself and my husband. In a normal year, I look forward to February on so many levels – the birthday celebrations, the fact that days are becoming incrementally longer, and, thank god, baseball season is just around the corner. But this year the yearning was deeper. February couldn’t get here fast enough.

T. S. Eliot once wrote, “April is the cruellest month,” but not this year. Not for me. And not for many of my nearest and dearest. From major and minor disappointments in the workaday world, to being diagnosed with diseases to deaths in the family to anniversaries of dear ones’ deaths, January was rough. Has there ever been a study about more people dying in January than any other month? It would be no surprise to me if this was the finding. And then, just yesterday I found out my nephew’s dog died on January 24. My dear dog, Bisquit left her 13 year earthly life in January some years ago. Even our furry friends succumb.

But here I am, a ‘year older’ when, in fact, I’m really just a day older than yesterday. Greetings from all over have come via snail mail and cyberspace, text messages and phone calls, to wish me the best for this next year of my life. All I truly hope for is what my dear mom-in-law likes to say when asked how she’s doing – “I only wish I could stay just as I am.” I know what she means, that life would go on and we could stay as healthy, alert, engaged, and enthusiastic about living as we are right now.

Today, I can say I feel thusly blessed. I have begun work in earnest on the new piece, a 2D commission I call ‘Dora and Anna’ – using old pictures, material and lace from the era of these two remarkable women, the grandmothers of my friend and her husband.

It compels me into the studio and keeps me there often later than I should what with a dog waiting to be walked and a husband who enjoys my company at dinnertime. Yesterday, I didn’t notice until I was almost out the door that my jeans were covered in paint at the sit line! In my excitement to get started, I didn’t throw on the huge old shirt I wear as a smock and just went at it unprotected in my street clothes. Luckily, the paint was acrylic and washed right off.

A week into it, February already feels good to me. No matter that Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow and predicted another 6 weeks of winter. Bring it on. Winter is merely a weather prediction and most of us will manage to survive till spring. Then come May let’s see if, indeed, T.S. Eliot was right about April or if January holds onto that depressing distinction for 2010. One can only hope we’ve been through the worst.

You Win Some and You Lose Some . . .

2010-01-31T21:33:00.000-08:00

and Sometimes It Takes Awhile To Figure Out Which It Is.

Just before Christmas, I had a phone conversation with my client Jim about the progress I’d made on the 2D commission we’ve been working on since August, 2009. With the preliminary sketch finished, I needed his written approval to continue. I was thrilled to hear he liked it. He had a couple of suggestions for small tweaks with which I agreed, and said he would send along the paperwork giving his OK. I floated into the Holidays with such a lift in my spirits. It was one of the best Christmas gifts of the year.

By January 5, I still had nothing in writing. So I called. I could tell from Jim’s voice it was not one of his better days. He said he had little if any sleep the night before. The physical pain was not relieved by the minor surgery he had just before Thanksgiving. We discussed the paperwork I needed and I asked him if he could please just put something in the mail the next day so I could get started.

Which he did.

But the ‘something’ wasn’t what I was expecting. In essence, he wrote he couldn’t go on with the project as he wasn’t ready ‘yet’ to deal with the painting and what it represented. The fact that these images would remind him on a daily basis what he had lost would simply add to the pain he was already feeling, both physically and psychologically.

It was like a punch in the gut. I felt as if I’d somehow let him down. What I had hoped (and thought he had hoped) would be a catharsis turned out to be more like drilling deeper into a wound that had never really healed after five years.

So all the frustrating ‘start/stop’, ‘he’s here/he isn’t’ over the past 6 months was mostly about his own pain and hesitation at continuing, something that took him months to finally articulate. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. But was it a total surprise? Knowing what I know about what he has been through and what he’s still going through? No, not really.

I have since written Jim, letting him know that I took his ‘yet’ as his not wanting to shelve the work permanently. I told him I’ve put the preliminary sketch safely aside along with all the images we collected together and the materials already purchased. My hope is that sometime in the future, he will, in fact, be pain free and be ready to continue on with the project.

So the gift I thought I was getting at Christmas time – the go ahead to continue and finish up a huge commission which was taking up a good deal of studio space as well as a large part of my creative focus – was really another gift altogether, the gift of clearing the way for new work – a smaller 2D commission I had put aside until after I finished with Jim’s and getting back into clay.

Yep, you win some and you lose some as my dear old dad used to say. It's been two weeks since I got Jim's letter. Today, it feels more like I've won some.

A Look Forward . . . A Glance Back . . .

2010-01-12T23:34:00.000-08:00

and Thoughts Which Ensue.

A new year begins with so much fanfare and hope for the future. Mine was no different. Thoughts of how to make significant changes, better known as ‘resolutions’, swirled around in my head: Go to the gym regularly. Schedule specific studio times. Look for the right venues to exhibit or even lend work out in order to get it seen, rather than just have it stashed away in crates. Begin the huge task of ‘downsizing’ at home or at least get rid of the extraneous flotsam and jetsam piling up all around to make it easier when the time comes. Find time to write more often and post to this blog.

All seems possible when you look at the calendar and it’s January 1^st. Even twelve days into the new year, I can still imagine these things can and will come to pass. Already, I am on a fairly regular gym schedule, today feeling upper body muscle aches of overdoing the free weights yesterday. Tomorrow, I plan to take a yoga class hoping to relieve the chronic pain my arthritic back now delivers daily to remind me I’m not getting any younger. The studio is my second stop after the gym. As for the rest, I have to admit, I’m taking my usual Scarlett O’Hara posture: “Tomorrow is another day.”

Today, I’m thinking about how creative I’ve been these past weeks, even though not doing much in the studio. Decorating the house for the Holidays. Wrapping presents for the young German nieces and nephew. Baking and redecorating for the New Year celebration. It’s in my bones. It’s who I am and what I’ve always done and (realizing more and more) was always meant to do – to create beauty in my personal environment as well as create beautiful objects for others to have in theirs.

It was a full over-the-top busy Holiday season which started off by my getting the bug that everyone I know either has had, is experiencing now, or will get if not careful. I had to cancel one dinner party and while recuperating, plan my participation in a flurry of family events packed into the short span of a four day Christmas visit from our niece, Anna Sophie, who is currently living in Green Bay Wisconsin as a foreign exchange student from Berlin, Germany.

Then, a glorious Christmas was shared, one which I doubt any of us will ever forget. Another emphatic reminder that being in the moment is all we have, all there really is to our lives and those memories are what make being an old geezer, if we manage to live that long, worthwhile.

For many years, we have hosted an Open House on New Year’s day, inviting old and new friends to ring in the new year with mulled wine, mulled cider and a plethora of baked goods I lovingly and enthusiastically create. (Full disclosure: I have been known to stress out before this event making life in the household less than celebratory.)
This year was different because we pushed the event to the 3^rd instead of the 1^st, giving me a couple extra days to bake my little heart out and do it stress free. It was a splendid day. Shirtsleeve weather took many out on the deck while light poured into an already lighthearted home. A terrific group of people filled the house with such good vibes I can only say I floated on those vibes for several days after. It didn’t hurt that we had cookies leftover – sugar highs are good for floating, too.

But now I’m back down to earth facing those pesky new and renewed plans for 2010. Can I give myself a small pat on the back for what looks to be my new schedule of gym/studio? Will I get to the rest of the list eventually? Will you be able to read about it here?

Only time will tell. And at this point, time isn’t saying much.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like - Thanksgiving . . .

2009-11-19T18:48:00.000-08:00

From Where I'm Sitting.

It’s a good day in the studio when I can work non-stop for less than an hour and find I’ve moved a piece along to a point where I can almost see the final vision emerging. It was one of those days last week.

Knowing I had less than an hour between meetings, doing errands and taking the dog to the dog park before dark descended, I rushed over to my studio, put on my coveralls, got out my acrylic paints, oil paint sticks, brushes, water and went at it. 45 minutes later, I stood back and took photos to share with Jim.

Here is a short slide show of the progression of the third panel of his commission. You can stop at any point by clicking on the pause button.

This preliminary sketching is all done on very cheap white butcher paper. The real piece will be done on sturdy Ampersand Claybord where I can layer, scrape, paint, scrape again, layer again and not worry about the undercoating disintegrating. Because they are oversized panels, 24”x36”, I couldn’t find them in any of my local art supply stores. So I ordered them online from Dick Blick’s and hope they’ll arrive next week.

It’s beginning to look a lot like . . .well, no, not Christmas . . . more like Thanksgiving. I have so much to be thankful for this year – all the new art associations made via Leah Virsik/Alyson Stanfield's Art Marketing Salon, especially Egmont van Dyck, my blog mentor; my new artist buddy at the studio, Tyrell Collins who is part cheerleader, part mother confessor; the new collectors and admirers of my work who keep me both buoyed and motivated; my new cyberspace connections via friend @fritinancy (a.k.a. Nancy Friedman) who keep me smiling and involved in this amazing new world; and most importantly, my dearest partner in life, my husband who continues to have faith and supports me in my artistic endeavors, and who can smooth over the worst day with the best homemade tuna tartare and the most loving, empathetic listening.

At the moment, however, I am most grateful for the growing anticipation of getting to work on new, clean, smooth, all white surfaces, which always has a way of stirring my creative juices.

So here's to Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday, and the coming week, when life will be all about the continued appreciation of good friends, good food and more good days in the studio. And if all goes as planned, I'll be giving thanks well into 2010. Here's hoping you will, too.

A Studio of One's Own . . .

2009-11-10T17:15:00.001-08:00

Or What Happens When You Come Down with 'Commission-itis' . . .

It was not one of my best days in the studio. No client and a client I unwittingly stood up. Still, when I left for the day and looked back, I saw the space was mine once again. My work table was cleared of all the materials which covered it since the middle of August – materials I had put there to work with my client Jim.

I closed the door and smiled. Tomorrow will be a better day.

As of last Thursday, our collaboration moved from one on one in the studio to checking in once a week via phone or email. Jim called me last Wednesday to say he wouldn’t be coming to our regular meeting the next day as he had a doctor’s appointment. He was going in to schedule another minor surgery sometime this week to repair a malfunctioning wire, which is inserted in his back to alleviate pain.

It was obvious, at least to me, his studio visits had come to an end.

We spoke about the next steps, the images I needed for him to send me to complete the 3^rd section of the triptych; the pictures of my preliminary sketches which I would send him for his perusal; and the type of artists’ wood panels I plan to use. I promised to email all the information and call him to let him know I’ve emailed. He doesn’t check his email all that often I found out.

I sent the email Friday. I called yesterday. No reply yet.

Now, knowing Jim’s as I do, his MO so to speak, I won’t worry or take this personally. I’m prepared to get on with the project, hoping to have it completed before the first of the year.

OK - so I have to admit it (although not news – see August’s post ‘The Shades Are Up Here in the Cyberstudio’): No matter what the project, it helps to have the studio all to myself to do the work.

In the mean time, I think I’ve come down with a serious case of ‘commission-itis’. After working non-stop on ceramic and now 2D commissions since June, (for which, I am totally grateful, don’t get me wrong) I think unconsciously, I must be yearning for a B. Altman Art fix – ideas, images, forms, content, all pumped up from my own creative well. Even though my husband sometimes mocks my attempt to ‘multitask’ at home, I can’t seem to do this in the studio. I have to work one project at a time. Jim’s piece first. Next, the lovely little two-dimensional piece I’ll be doing for a friend, using her and her husband’s dear grandmothers’ photos. This will take me into 2010 for sure.

So in my ‘commission-itis’ frame of mind yesterday, I completely forgot I had made an appointment to meet a possible client at the studio. He wanted a ceramic artist to create a base for his tabletop fountain. I only remembered this after I arrived at the studio over an hour and a half late. I was briefly mortified. Then, somehow relieved. I realized I really didn’t want to do this project. Still, feeling fairly guilty, I called and apologized, left the message that I was in the studio and told him he could come by. But to be honest, I was secretly glad that he hadn’t by the time I closed the door to leave - when I looked back and smiled . . .

once again, knowing the blessing of having a studio of one’s own.

One Gal's Brush Off is Another Gal's Kick in the Butt . . .

2009-10-24T10:55:00.000-07:00

After my last session with Jim two weeks ago, I was so encouraged, I continued working on the preliminary sketch, trying to flesh it out with color, adding a few of the images and the words so it would be ready for his collage once he completed it.

But Jim didn’t show up at our schedule meeting this week, even after I called to make sure he was going to make it and even after he said absolutely he was. And then he didn’t. (See previous post: Maybe He Just Isn’t That Into Me . . .)

In the past, when I’ve been ‘stood up’ by Jim, I’ve been so deflated, I’ve either just stayed there in the studio puttering around doing a lot of nothing, feeling sorry for myself; or I’ve taken photos of old work to remind myself that I am a successful artist and have been creative in the past; or I’ve organized the mess which sometimes but not often makes me feel better; or as a last resort, I’ve munched on stale energy bars waiting to see if that would get my creative engine revved up. Mostly, that never happens.

Yesterday, surprisingly, I spent only five minutes feeling like crap – feeling rejected once again. I went to that psychological place for only five minutes and then I just said to myself, “F--- it. I don’t need this guy to get this project going. I have enough to work with right here.”

And that’s exactly what I did. For three hours. Uninterrupted.

It was creative bliss.

Instead of waiting for Jim to make his collage, I took the images he would have used and put them in the preliminary sketch as I saw fit.

I don’t know if this will be the final configuration, but I’m beginning to like how it’s shaping up. To be honest, when I do my own 2D work, I rarely if ever do preliminary sketches. I take images I want to use and begin working right there on the good paper or canvas, creating as I go. But this project seems to need a first draft, so to speak.

What I did in the studio yesterday may not be anything like the final draft. But today, it feels like a good start.

Maybe He's Just Not That Into Me . . .

2009-10-23T15:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, after trying since August to get this project up and running with energy, enthusiasm, and genuine interest from my client, Jim, I was brushed off the second week in a row. Jim called the studio five minutes before he was to arrive to say that he had tripped over something on his way out the door and now his knee was hurting and he didn’t think he could make it. OK, does that sound like a legitimate excuse or one you would make up if you really didn’t want to be somewhere you promised to be? He didn’t show up a week ago either because he had a bad night with no sleep. That’s an excuse he’s used before and one I can certainly understand, being that he’s still going through physical therapy and does have residual pain.

Maybe I should have read the book “He’s Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys” before I started this collaboration? Maybe I could have bypassed all the emotional ups and downs I’ve had in the past couple of weeks if I had realized from the start, I needed to understand this, in fact, may not be just a client/student relationship. Maybe this is a guy/gal relationship with all its vagaries?

Or maybe not.

The beginning of October was truly exciting for me as the project began to take shape. Jim came that first week with more images for us to use and seemed to be really taking great interest, after not showing up the week before due to physical problems. I commended him on how well he looked, using only his cane and not the crutches he had used the last time I saw him.

But since our meetings were not as regular as I had hoped they would be (we hadn’t met twice in a row yet), I was wondering if maybe he had just lost interest in being so involved in the project? Or even though he was four and a half years out from the accident, maybe all of this reliving his life –what he was, what he’s lost and what he’s gained - was becoming too psychologically painful for him? Maybe his sleepless nights before our meetings were more about this than his physical pain?

So I asked him point blank if he really wanted to continue working toward creating his own personal collages to be used in the piece. I assured him that I didn’t want him to feel pressured into doing this and that I felt confident enough to work with the images he’d collected to finish this on my own. He assured me this was a wonderful project for him and absolutely, he wanted to continue.

Taking that at face value, I decided to try and hook him even further by starting work on a compositional preliminary sketch of the ideas we had bantered about verbally. That was a wonderful day in the studio for me - getting out my prisma colors, acrylic paints and just having at it on a 6’ x 3’ piece of white butcher paper. It always gets my creative juices flowing to start drawing and especially drawing large.

When Jim arrived the next week and saw this sketch up on the wall he seemed not just pleased but even more enthused. We talked about my vision and how it would manifest into a finished piece. We looked again at the pictures and words he had collected, the ones I had put on the handmade paper I plan to use to, in order to imagine how we'll place them in this new composition.

And as he was leaving, I said to him, “OK, next week we’re going to start on your collage. I think we’ll only need a couple more sessions to get your part done.” He agreed, with a smile and a handshake. As he left, I was already looking forward to our meeting the next week.

I haven't seen him since.

The Good, The Bad and the Iffy About Commissions . . .

2009-10-04T14:22:00.000-07:00

It’s not that I’ve never been commissioned to do work before. After all, I just finished a number of clay commissions recently, the biggest being the porcelain vessel for Scarlett. One of my first was when my dear neighbor who had 6 kids asked me to do a set of bowls for her family. I was delighted to oblige. She picked the clay body – porcelain - and left it up to me to do my signature glazing. She was so pleased she then asked for plates and then mugs. No problem, especially when I explained she shouldn’t expect them to be exactly the same. My favorite line has always been, “If you want perfect, you can buy it at K-Mart.” To me, the beauty of being ‘handmade’ is being able to see the hand of the artist.

This is also not my first 2D commission. One of my favorites was when I was given an old photo of my friend Deborah Harding’s grandparents and created a very beautiful, somewhat mysterious piece, which she loved. Then, I made two different pieces and let her choose the one she like the best. Of course, the piece was only 10” x 12” so this was not a problem. And because I was left to create the work using my own aesthetic sensibilities, again this project was never riddle with anxieties I’m feeling now.

This is a new ballgame. And it seems like I’m making up the rules as we go along. I’m working with Jim on a very large piece – a triptych which will end up being 6’ w x 3’ h – and not only using his images but also trying to work with his limited visual concepts. He is certain he wants to have a phoenix as a symbol in this piece, not once but twice. Can I manage to take two phoenixes, one spilling out his old life into a horrific motorcycle accident and then the other, rising up into his new life holding all that is and might be, without it seeming too cliché? I certainly hope so.

My idea of having him create collages to be used in the piece at first seemed like a good one. And I have to admit the time we're spending together, sitting side-by-side, collecting images and words and talking about this life that we’re working to visualize into a cohesive art piece, is incredibly important for each of us. I’m learning so much about this young man and what it means for him to be alive after being given little chance to live out the night when they brought him into the hospital after scraping him off the highway. And each time he comes to the studio with other pictures from “before” and tells me the stories behind the pictures, I can see him relaxing into the process and getting more and more comfortable with me.

But this comfort comes with a price. The price is his becoming more involved and little by little taking ownership in the making of the piece. So where do I draw the line between his vision and mine? I’m in uncharted waters now and can only hope in time, I’ll find a compass.

When words are worth more than a thousand pictures. . .

2009-09-30T23:56:00.000-07:00

This may be the one time words are worth more than a thousand pictures.

It came to me after I hung the three pieces of handmade paper I plan to use for Jim’s triptych and then began to tack on the images and the words he and I have been collecting in our sessions in the studio.

It was the first truly inspired moment I’ve had in weeks.

After Scarlett’s porcelain vessel was completed, I cleaned up the studio getting ready to jump right into my next two commissions, both mixed media works on paper. The first and more involved of the two is the triptych I am doing with the input from Jim (see previous August post “And So It Begins. . .") At the beginning of any project, there is usually all kinds of energy, excitement, free flowing exchange of ideas between artist and client. But this can be easily derailed if one or the other is not ‘present’ – that can be either physically or psychically. . . or both.

That first August meeting in my studio where we began to discuss and then collect images for this piece was a good beginning. I felt very encouraged and was looking forward to our weekly meetings. By the end of five or six weeks, I was hoping to help Jim take those images which are most significant for him and create one or more small collages which would then be incorporated into the final piece.

That was the hope and the plan.

But the next week, Jim didn’t show up. Apparently, he totally forgot, which could actually have been a consequence of the residual memory loss from his accident. So I decided to both email and call before our next meeting as a reminder. He called me the morning of that meeting and apologized but couldn’t make it because he hadn’t slept much the night before and had some pain in his legs. What could I say? Whatever air had been filling my creative balloon for this project was escaping . . . fast.

Between Jim missing for whatever reasons, and my missing a week being in Los Angeles, we’ve only had 3 sessions since August 13. It felt to me that Jim was coming when he could but wasn’t really invested or engaged. That left me feeling at a loss. What was happening to this project? Just before our session last week, not being really sure he would show up, I decided maybe I’d just better get going on my own; take what we had done so far and start.

That’s when, after putting up the paper, the images and the words, I had my epiphany.

On the blue paper for Jim’s life before the accident – the one when he was a policeman, the job of his dreams - I tacked on mostly images he had brought in and a few words we collected. On the silver/gray paper, which will depict the accident, I put just the series of words he and I had found. And for the last piece of bronze paper, where he wants a phoenix to symbolize his life today, I put a few phrases. But as I looked at the whole, it became very clear to me that perhaps the center piece shouldn’t have any images at all, but be a series of layered words, words that describe what it was like for Jim to be in this horrific accident, 3 months in a coma, with a number of major surgeries and years of rehabilitation behind him.

When I told Jim my idea last week in the studio and asked him what he thought about this ‘imageless’ word-filled center piece, he sat there almost speechless. And then he said, almost not able to get the words out fast enough, “Oh, my gosh, that’s perfect. . . that’s it. The whole time I was in a coma I had no images. Even when I came out of the coma, and I could speak, I had no recollection of what was visually going on around me.”

My inspiration had hooked him. And no surprise, then I was hooked as well. This was the first real creative connection of our collaboration. I think I’ll be seeing him this week in the studio.

The Unintended Drip. . .

2009-09-07T16:21:00.000-07:00

or the Kiln Kiss as Life Lesson.

If you plan to work in clay, you better be prepared to accept the ‘slap-yourself-upside-the-head’ life lesson – “You are NOT in control.” The lesson can come at any one of the many steps you take as a potter. To get the piece that you’ve imagined in your mind, through your hands, from the wheel or work table, and into and out of the kiln to be exactly what you imagined when you began is never a given. Ever.

And really, when I think about it, this life lesson which is always with me in my studio, is life’s main lesson, one of the hardest to learn and one I end up learning over and over again not just in my studio.

That said, these days, I rarely approach an unopened kiln with anything other than enthusiastic anticipation. Will the pieces I carefully stacked the day before, come out as I envisioned? Since I am so familiar with the clays and the glazes I’m using, I’m rarely astonished. Still, there is always one brief moment when I open the lid, where I think – OK, where’s the Kiln Kiss? The Kiln Kiss is what I call the one place on a piece that is unexpected – unintended – always carrying along with it a life lesson I’m not necessarily wanting to learn. The Kiss can be a beautiful surprise, something that I wish I had done intentionally, wish I knew how to reproduce such as a soft ‘bleed’ from an interior glaze to the outside wall.

Or the Kiss can be the ‘Kiss of Death’ – a crack not seen before firing, a glob of glaze stuck to the bottom of the piece, a hard bleed that renders the entire outside an ugly drab mess. These pieces invariably end up thrown into the bottom of the garbage bin.

So when I opened the kiln the other day to see how Scarlett’s big, delicate, carefully glazed porcelain vessel had survived the fire, I literally gasped. All I could see was this most amazing floating, shimmering, sky/ocean blue – looking all the while like waves - like clouds - covering the interior. Had I planned this glaze to look exactly as it looked, it couldn’t have been more perfect. This was a Kiln Kiss extraordinaire!

But then I pulled the piece out and saw the ‘drip.’ The unintended blue drip, a drip right there where it should have been pure soft matt white. It was the not so nice, not so planned Kiln Kiss. Not the ‘Kiss of Death,’ mind you, but a Kiss I didn’t ask for and just for that moment, my heart sank a little. This wasn’t what I had envisioned – a blue drip right there. The ‘perfect’ piece was now somehow no longer 'perfect.' Here was the Kiln Kiss passing along the life lesson of acceptance, of going with what is and not with what was hoped for or planned. The larger lesson: We are not in control.

But now the worry, would this 'imperfect' pot be acceptable to its new owner, Scarlett?

When I took it out of the packing box, I was secretly hoping the drip had somehow transformed itself into a pleasing drip, a drip that could be almost intended, a drip we could all happily live with.

Scarlett’s reaction to the piece when she saw it said it all – “Breathtaking! I’m at a loss for words it’s so beautiful. And when I saw the ‘dot’ (she had already given the drip a new name – taking it on as her own),” she said almost hesitantly, “ it spoke to me and to a moment in my life which was so unexpected – but one I knew would be a part of me and I would have to accept.” She choked up and couldn’t say much more except that she loved her new piece.

Life lessons are presented to us in many guises. And maybe that old saying ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ is one to keep in mind, especially when opening a kiln, looking for a Kiss.

The Shades are Up Here in the Cyberstudio . . .

2009-08-26T00:36:00.001-07:00

I wasn’t going to do this. . . keep such a regular journal about my work in the studio. But I have to admit, I am so excited to see this piece progress that I’m bursting to share it outside the walls of the studio.

Being an artist is, for most, a very solitary endeavor. I could never be a performance artist although I love to sing and have performed on stage. But that's a different life altogether. No, my studio is my sanctuary, the place I enter alone, spend hours on my own. The only sounds breaking the creative moments come from the radio – either classical music or an Oakland A’s baseball game.

One of the first conversations about my life in the studio with the man who would become my husband was about just this. We were sitting at dinner, discussing the possibility of moving in together and he began imagining aloud what he thought it would be like living with me. “Oh, I’m looking forward to coming in to your studio, sitting down on a sofa or other soft seat with a beer and watching you work.”

I can’t remember my exact words but it was some version of “over my dead body.”

It was then and there I made it known, NO ONE watches me work. OK, for awhile I had a studio mate but the studio was in my garage; she came and left and I could work hours into the night on my own. No, I burst this man’s dream bubble early on. After we married, we built a studio on our property in Berkeley. I had specific orders that if the shades on the French doors were down, no matter if the doors were open, do NOT enter.

This cybersharing, this opening up of my solitary world to a world I’m not even sure is looking, is quite a new experience for me. But here I am giving you another peek of a piece in progress - a view of Scarlett's porcelain piece partially dressed with Oasis blue glaze covering the inside. More will be done before the final fire.

But don’t look for an invitation to pull up a chair with a beer and watch me work in my studio. The shades there are down.

An Invitation to 'Cop a Feel' . . .

2009-08-24T11:13:00.000-07:00

For me, one of the benefits of working in clay is the wide range of tactile experiences it allows, from squeezing soft butter-like porcelain between your figures when you take it right out of the bag, to forming it as it begins to harden but is still malleable, to carving it when it’s already ‘leather hard’ and still keeps its shape. There’s a point when it’s been carved, is leather hard but hasn’t yet been bisque fired when it’s so fine to just take the piece in your hands and ‘cop a feel.’ Since it still has some residual moisture in the body of the clay, it’s almost always cool to the touch. And so very smooth. And if you have sensitive fingertips, you can feel the slightly raised, almost imperceptible ripples from the carving. Yes, I’ll admit it’s a very sensual pleasure.

So when I mentioned to Scarlett that she might like to ‘cop a feel’ of the piece I’m working on for her, she didn’t hesitate. She and her partner, Marilyn, came by the studio to do just that. To be perfectly honest, this is the first time I’ve ever issued an invitation to ‘cop a feel.’ And to be perfectly honest, Scarlett and Marilyn were the perfect ‘feelers.’

The piece has been bisque fired so it didn’t have the coolness that a greenware piece would. But what makes feeling it ‘naked’ or without any glaze so special is just that – it’s naked. It is just the clay, its form and only its form – the wall and the void that the wall describes – is what’s you have. There is nothing to distract you from the delicate feel of the wall of the bowl, how it gently curves, how it comes up and greets the first of the coils, which sit so unconsciously on its rim and then moves on upward, unevenly to the ragged edged lip. There is no color – no shiny texture – to disturb the immediacy of the form’s beauty.

I remember an instructor once saying to me that if the piece I’d thrown didn’t have ‘life’ right off the wheel, no matter with what or how I glazed it, the surface treatment wouldn’t breathe life into that piece. I spend a lot of time carving and ‘altering’ the pieces I throw. But I understand this statement. I think it’s why I tend not to glaze the outside walls of my work these days – I want the clay to stand for itself – it’s unglazed, inherently beautiful self.

I think Marilyn and Scarlett both enjoyed having an intimate ‘feel’ of their piece in its naked glory. It was Scarlett who said, “There’s something musical in touching this. It’s so delicate, so fragile . . .” And then there were no more words, just hands taking in the wall and the void the wall described as a sightless person might.

Tomorrow, it will be glazed inside with Oasis Blue chosen by Scarlett and this piece of porcelain will be transformed once again. I hope it will still hold its unglazed, ‘cop a feel’ appeal.

Taste - Can YOU Account for it? . . .

2009-08-19T18:18:00.000-07:00

Can ‘taste’ change? What IS ‘taste’ anyway? And is it really true, as I was brought up to believe – ‘there’s no accounting for taste' - ?

I’m not sure I can answer any but the first question because clearly my own aesthetic taste has changed over the years. It hit me recently when I stopped to look a display shelf, which holds ‘special items’ – photos, books, baskets collected from travels, etc. - and I saw this particular pot, one of the first thrown in my only college ceramics class and one that I have come not to just like, but to cherish.

That isn’t how I felt about it at the time it was made.

I had for the first time, managed to pull a lump of white stoneware up to almost 5 inches tall, and I was thrilled. When I went to show it to the instructor hoping he would be pleased at my creation, he looked at it, smiled and then took it. And then, along with other student pieces, put it in a raku kiln while still wet. Much to our horror, he lighted the gas burner and turned it up. Fast.

Before we could muster a protest, he assured us this was a great idea. But hadn’t he already told us any piece fired in a kiln before it was totally dry had the potential to explode?

Explode? My smooth walled, 5 inch pot came out a pocked, cracked, smoked at the bottom ragged mess of a piece. I was sick that it was so ugly, especially since I had spent so much time on the exterior, trying to make it ‘perfect.’ To this day, even though I can’t remember his name, I remember him saying to me, “One day you are going to love this piece,” as he handed me what looked like something found at the bottom of rubble left by a bomb blast.

I’ve packed and moved this piece from home to home, all across the country. I never thought to throw it out although for years, I didn’t really see it as one of my treasures. And I can’t really tell you when that happened or why – when or why my taste changed. All I know is that today, this piece sits prominently on the shelf. I see it every day when I get up. And it makes me smile.

And So It Begins. . .

2009-08-14T14:52:00.001-07:00

He didn’t exactly show up on time. Jim, my newest client, got lost driving to my studio from Dublin yesterday, and we had to do the “Where are you now?” “Can you find your way to 880 and then 980 from E.14th?” “Now turn right onto W. Grand.” connecting via cell phones, Jim, hands free, of course.

Eventually, he pulled into the off-street parking lot of my building in West Oakland. We were both smiling as he maneuvered himself out of the driver’s seat, first placing his newfangled cane against his new black Audi, then swinging his legs out in order to gain balance and then up he stood, putting on his back pack and walking with only that cane up to the freight entrance of 2200 Adeline.

I was stunned.

The last time we saw each other, not even a month ago, he came to my studio to discuss our working together on a 2 D project to depict his life, and he was on two crutches, walking very slowly and deliberately - what most would label ‘disabled.’ After his life threatening motorcycle accident when his leg was almost completely torn off, the doctors who reattached it weren’t sure he’d ever walk again. But Jim apparently is out to prove them wrong. Now he walks with a slight limp using this new cane – a huge stride ahead in his recovery.

Yesterday we began our work together – looking through old magazines to find images that somehow resonate with Jim, illustrate something about his life before the accident, about the accident itself and his life as it is now. This will be the theme of the 2D triptych I plan to create for him, which will eventually hang in his bedroom. He said at our first meeting several months ago, he wanted a piece of art he would see first thing when he woke up which would remind him of where he’d been and how far he’s come.

By the way, Jim was a police officer before the accident.

Surprised?

Having worked and taught in so many varied settings over the years, from an all male secondary school in Uganda, East Africa to art centers for disabled adults in Stockton and Richmond, CA, to inside the state prison in San Quentin, nothing much surprises me these days about how art can nourish, can nurture, can inspire, can heal a wounded body or soul.

And me? I am all at once jazzed, humbled, excited, delighted, and inspired about this new project – and not surprisingly. More as it happens.

My Life as a Vessel. . .

2009-08-13T19:41:00.000-07:00

It was a bit of a shock, really, when I recently hung this older two dimensional work of mine, Protector/Betrayer: The Myth of the Cure, and took a closer look.

There it was – the torn paper – showing all too graphically how I felt after my first bout with breast cancer. I honestly didn’t remember using the ‘tear’ as an expressive technique much before my newest clay series.

But then, much to my surprise, I saw torn clay in an even earlier piece, Bridal Veil Mirage, which I made well before my diagnosis but after what was an idyllic trip to Bridal Veil Falls in Yosemite. The tears were used more literally here – water falling into an uneven end.

So what is it about the tearing of paper, of clay that apparently has always been part of my creative tool bag but all of a sudden has become such an integral part of my work in clay?

This is how I explained it a few months ago when I had to write a statement about my most recent work which can be seen in the slide show on the right:

I began to create these new works in clay after what seemed to be a very long, fallow time. It took moving my studio from the one we built at our house on 8th Street in Berkeley to one half the size in a commercial building in Oakland to shake the cobwebs from my hands and get my creative juices flowing once again.

These pieces seemed to explode from an unconscious place, without much effort or thought. One finished vessel implored me to begin the next, trying to go beyond what I had just done aesthetically – make the pinch pots thinner, larger, smaller. Start tearing the clay. Now carve into the clay. Now throw and alter the clay. Tear. Carve. Throw. Alter. It became a physical mantra for me, and before I knew it, my shelves were bulging with this new work.

It wasn’t until I began to look at the pieces as a “body of work” that I saw what I had created – it was my life as a vessel. These were manifestations of my bout with breast cancer – the body torn, scarred, but still aching to be sensual. Then the train trip two summer’s ago, back to Iowa – the landscape of my youth so indelibly seared into my soul, worked its way out onto the clay’s surface. And of course, some of the pieces so very delicately balanced remind me just how unsteady life can be unless I let myself find that sweet spot of stability.

Many think potters are “craftsmen” and forming the clay is a craft. I think when you have something to say, when you have found your voice, you can speak through your hands by working in the mud.

An Artistic Balancing Act Attempted Without a Net. . .

2009-08-04T17:20:00.000-07:00

or a Reasonable Explanation of the Media Dichotomy Seen Here.

From the beginning, my focus as an artist was in two dimensional media. I studied drawing, painting and printmaking almost exclusively while in college. I loved all three and enjoyed each for what the process allowed me to express. But one semester while in graduate school, I had no classes on Fridays so I signed up for a ceramics class at the Student Union. I spent endless hours on Fridays along with mostly professors’ wives, trying to get a lumpy ball of clay centered on a kick wheel. I vividly remember the day I spent 10 hours bent over that lump, refusing to let it get the better of me. I still have the very first ‘pot’ I made on that kick wheel, a pot which has fairly even walls all the way around even though it’s only 3” tall, a real success at the time.

It was that semester in that clay class when I got hooked on working in the mud. I think partly it was because I was free of being graded, of being labeled a ‘potter’ and I could just make whatever I wanted, no outside or inside critic telling me ‘not good enough’, which kept me coming back to the clay, especially when inspiration had run its course in my two dimensional work.

At one point I began to combine my two seemingly divergent creative media by drawing on porcelain slabs. It turned out to be a very successful series of wall pieces. This is one of the few remaining - part of a larger work which met its unfortunate demise from an encounter with an unwieldy broom handle unconsciously wielded by an unobservant house cleaner (sheepishly) - me!

Then came a series of slabs evocative of my travels; large thrown and altered vessels glazed only on the inside; larger coiled vessels stained with oxides to emphasize the coil patterns; intricately carved mirror frames both glazed and drawn into - my Zanzibar Door series - and so on.

But when I think about my relationship with clay, I realize how clay affords me a place to just do ‘zen’ work. I almost always start with the pinch pot, so effortless, but so fulfilling, seeing just how thin and round I can make it before the clay says ‘enough’ and cracks or implodes in my hands. Up till the final fire, clay consistently has the last word, which is “you are not in control”, as if I have to be reminded.

Recently I became aware that the clay work I’ve done over the years and especially the work just recently finished is all part of a continuum. Just as my two dimensional series have always reflected my own personal story, so too has my work in clay – now torn, altered, carved and delicately balanced - which I can say truly reflect my life as a vessel. More on this theme later.

My Work as Meditation. . .

2009-07-24T23:13:00.000-07:00

It has just occurred to me, after all these years doing of doing art in the studio, that my work is like a meditation. It makes sense now why I never took to doing production pottery. Not that I couldn’t sit down at the wheel and throw a set of bowls or plates or almost identical cups for someone. But it was never all that satisfying. Maybe it was too easy for me – throwing bowls or cups off the hump (taking a larger piece of clay and only centering the top part to make a bowl or cup) went pretty fast –too fast.

My MO is (and has always been) that I like to take my time with a piece. The piece I recently threw as a base for Scarlett’s towel/cloth holder (see my earlier post -Porcelain, the Diva of Clays) took about an hour total from wedging to forming on the wheel. But that was just the beginning. I spent the next couple of days shaping the foot and then carving the outside of the bowl to get just the right curvature and then carving my signature design onto one side.

Why it’s taking longer than usual is the size of the bowl. I’ve been working on much smaller diameter bowls – thrown or pinched – which I could just hand hold for carving. But this piece needs to be turned not in hand but sandwiched between two bats, and then flipped over. Then I have to have it placed at just the right height and angle for carving. A piece that can be held in hand is much easier.

I go to the studio almost daily, usually after noon, and after three hours, I’m just getting into the rhythm – carve, look from all angles, flip, look again, then carve again. It’s a rhythm, which, in its own way, is the meditation. Time has stopped and time seems to fly by. I’m rarely ready to leave when I must. But there’s always tomorrow when I can begin again.

A Note on My Banner. . .

2009-07-20T12:01:00.000-07:00

I want to write a few words about the image I’ve chosen for my banner. It’s a piece I created a few years ago when I was finishing one series and wanted to begin anew. I thought it would be perfect for this blog as it speaks not only to my process but also to the image I’d like to think I project - with a wink and a nod. . .

The Palimpsest series started with my penchant for recycling, using what I had at hand to inspire new work. At one point, I had done a series of abstract watercolors with intense, saturated watercolor inks on very expensive hot press watercolor paper. Some had sold. Others were languishing in frames waiting for what - new home? . . . a possible new exhibit? . . . a chance at being rotated onto a prominent place on one of my walls when I decided to re-hang my work? None of that was happening.

This piece, Studio Reverie, came at a time when I needed a push to move in a new direction. I took a few of the old watercolors out of the frames and decided to work with what was on the page to create something new, not by just covering over it, but using what was there, the colors, the shapes, the lines, to inspire new visions, new images, a new story.

I was doing a lot of collage work at the time, and this was a chance to use it in a new way, taking the collage, making a color Xerox copy which could then be placed strategically onto the watercolor, then blending it into the background with prisma color pencils, craypas and oil pastels. Here I actually took another watercolor, cut it and collaged in onto the first watercolor and then continued its patterns by drawing them into the background watercolor.

This is one of my favorites in the Palimpsest Series – it’s a little joke about just how an artist spends her time in the studio. . . lying naked on a chaise lounge, eating Godiva chocolates and dreaming of armadillos with a lucky gecko as her muse. . . well, we can always dream.

Porcelain, the Diva of Clays . . .

2009-07-16T23:16:00.000-07:00

Or When White Isn't White

I have been commissioned to do a large vessel for holding wash cloths and perhaps even small hand towels by my good friend and vocal instructor, Scarlett Hepworth (www.singwithscarlett.com). She was hoping I could do this in porcelain or if not, then in the black stoneware which I like to use. I mentioned porcelain can be very finicky and often doesn’t lend itself to larger pieces. According to the clay and glaze guru, the late Daniel Rhodes, the more pure the porcelain (using mostly kaolins, the white burning clays), the more difficult it is to make anything out of it.

I love working in porcelain. But I can tell you from my own personal experience, working in porcelain is a lot like trying to form pieces out of butter. It’s because there is little if any grog in porcelain. Grog is clay which has been fired, then ground into various degrees of fineness and added to clay to make it more forgiving when forming large, thick walled vessels or sculptures. Even if you are able to create a magnificent bowl or vessel in porcelain and get it from table or wheel to kiln in one piece, there is no guarantee it will make it out of either the bisque or glaze fire in tact. Porcelain is truly the diva of clays.

I have been using a couple of mid high fire porcelains for the past year or so and only recently did I realize while they both fire at the same temp. (∆5 – 1180 degrees Centigrade) they are NOT the same shade of white. How is that possible? Well, it has to do with which of the many different kaolin clays are used. It became all too apparent to me that I was mixing my porcelains when I threw a small vessel for a commission and began to carve it while it was leather hard. All of a sudden the outer wall looked like a white snow leopard –very soft white white spots all imbedded in a slightly more grey white. I know you can go to any paint store and find 10 different shades of whites with all kinds of designery names like Sea Pearl, Soft Shoulders, Swiss Coffee (yes, white!) or for those who might not be really sure of using white, Timid White, but I was a little taken aback when I finally noticed the discrepancy in the 2 porcelains’ whites. Would I have to redo this piece, which was almost finished and ready for the bisque fire or would I be lucky enough that when fired this wouldn’t be noticeable? Now that the piece is dry and ready for the bisque, I can’t see the spots so I’m hoping this won’t be an issue.

On Monday I was looking through my half used and reconstituted bags of porcelain hoping I would find enough to make the large thrown bowl portion of Scarlett’s piece. I did find about 6 lbs of the grey white, a bit hard but still wedgeable and enough of the soft white which I’ll use for the hand built part. I threw the bowl yesterday – I left it on the wheel 11 ¼ ” w x 7” h. Today, now that it is slightly dry, I was able to nudge it about ½” wider, making the bowl shape more graceful and now a bit over 5” h. Yes, you have to take your time with porcelain – patience is ever the virtue with this clay. And really, when isn’t it when you work in the mud?