Art and Life

Crucifixion, stoneware clay with cone 10 reduction glaze and resist corpus, 25" by 6", 2009, Blackwater Bluff Pottery



Whenever I do a pottery exhibition of artwork, I try to center it around a theme. This show was around a series of sketches I had done at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England where there are some lovely examples of classical and brittish pots. I chose shapes and colors which spoke to the inner landscape of my own experience here at Blackwater Bluff. They had a decidedly asian bent and yet the overall effect was more diverse than simply asian forms.

As I look back on the exhibitions I wonder how my internal life as a Christian and my art are intertwined. I wonder at how God made us so that we would be so in God's image that we too could create - could be generative even if not female. Pottery and hospitality are my generativity. The pots I make with my hands and the friendships I make with my love and my hospitality are the two most important aspects of my life.

I am often stunned at how much our culture produces - how much money and how many services and how many things. But when you look at art and craft, there seems to be so much less of it than when times were slowere and people were less wealthy.

I notice the lives of those I know who have no creative outlet and I want to lean over and whisper "live!" To make things simply for the love of the making is an act of self-offering - risky, hard, scary and rewarding.

making sabbath rest

It seems like God had America in mind when God assigned a day of rest as one of the ten commandments. In all three listings in Exodus (two of them) and Deuteronomy, God is so very clear about the Sabbath day. And in the creation myth God names the Sabbath day as the first "Holy thing" which is a big deal for God because calling something Holy is just not done lightly in scripture.

This little pottery studio on the edge of the pond by the forest is my icon for sabbath rest. I go there to be alone and though I love to invite friends into it, I do so rarely. The building is surrounded by windows and flooded from inside with industrial lights. It is warmed by a wood stove and has cathedral ceilings (well, perhaps not "cathedral"...perhaps more like "sort-oflarge vaulted church ceilings).

When people say to me "Oh I wish I could meditate every day" and "I wish I could be an artist" my response is simple: :"Set aside a place for it and it will happen."

If you want to pray daily, find a comfortable chair away from the center of the action and place next to it a prayer book. Go there daily - even when you don't feel like it. If you want to do some creative act like knitting or painting or poetry or calligraphy or jewelry making - just set a small place aside, keep the materials there - never move them - and it will call to you. The place itself will actually call you over to it. I can't explain it but it is true. The "place" will come alive and it will summon you , woo you, coax you, call to you, whisper to you, seduce you.

I believe creativity is one of the most powerful forces for good in the world. And anything that cuts at creativity, the most damaging.

Sabbath rest is not just sitting there covered in Cheeto dust in front of a television or a computer. Sabbath rest is ideally infused with creativity - making things happen - generativity.

As we look around us at this creation, it is constantly giving birth to itself. The creation is constantly creating new species and new life within those species. God is constantly creating new life from death. If we are - and we indeed are- made in God's image, well then we are made to create. And not creating is not living into our fullest humanity.

The creativity of raising children well, the creativity of reinventing vocations and marriages rather than simply casting them off in exchange for some new bauble, the creativity of making a good soup and inviting two friends over for conversation and the creativity of a potter or a painter or a writer are all a response to Gods gentle whisper:"Take what I have given you and MAKE something wonderful!"

And the weird thing is that the "work" of creativity seems to me to be more restful and more fulfilling than just "spending time" on things unworthy of being the artists we all naturally are made to be and to become.

One never knows 'till one tries

As I move into middle age, I find that the more I begin to understand myself and the more I am patient and gentle and loving towards myself, the more likely I am to be able to stand up for myself. Our society tends to so encourage us to push ourselves! Succeed, win, strive, acheive! Our society demostrates who it is in its television - now largely reality television , news, ads and sports. In each, the goal is to say one person or one thing is the best and is better than another person or thing or team or way of being.

When I was a small child I was told by vocational counsellors and doctors that I would never be good at hand-eye coordination. Anything that required my hands to work with my eyes was, I was told, going to be an activity at which I could expect to fail.

Then one day I was in a pottery studio and gave pottery a try. My first pot was humble to be sure, but it was a success! And I found that, as with most things, the more I tried, the better I became at making pots from clay and water.

And so now, in my forties, I am wondering what else I have been told that I too quickly believed. I am also wondering what I have been telling myself that I have too quickly believed. Like the man in his teenage years, this man in his middle age is trying new things he thought he could not accomplish and lo and behold, I can do still more things I thought impossible.

I recently stood up to a bully and won the day. I was stunned! It made me feel strong in a way I had never felt strong before. It was no longer the school yard but sadly, bullies move out of school yards and into adulthood just like the skinny guys who got sand kicked in their face. And like the shadows in the darness of a room at night, once you stand up to a bully, he or she all of a sudden looks rediculously small and sad.

The pots I make remind me that we never know what we can accomplish in life until we stand up, throw our shoulders back and live honest, powerful lives around which God whirls in the winds and laughs in the thunders and loves in the generativity.

An artistic decision

Here is an example of the addition of a slice of agate to the lid of a large clay vessel in oxidation glaze fired to cone 6. By installing the slice atop the piece, I can let the light show off the stone so that the work holds the stone up to the light. This way I am able to celebrate not only my manipulation of the clay body, the silica and the other natural oxieds which make the piece a "pot" but I can also acknowledge that God has made the earth from which the elements come and God has made the hands which have made the pot.

Some church musicians will sign their work "deo gloria" or some other term which celebrates that the glory goes not to the artist but to the God who made the artist, his or her tools, his or her elements and his or her hands and brain. Am I an artist who "made these things" or am I an artist who simply took materilas and re-ordered them - thereby celebrating the CREATOR, the elements of the creation and the creator or "artist"? I think the latter.

artist (from etymology on line)
1580s, "one who cultivates one of the fine arts," from M.Fr. artiste (14c.), from It. artista, from M.L. artista, from L. ars (see art (n.)). Originally used especially of the arts presided over by the Muses (history, poetry, comedy, tragedy, music, dancing, astronomy), but also used 17c. for "one skilled in any art or craft" (including professors, surgeons, craftsmen, cooks). Now especially of "one who practices the arts of design or visual arts" (a sense first attested 1747).

co-creativity

This is Blackwater Bluff, an 1848 farmhouse(left) and pottery studio (above) on a bluff over the Blackwater River. I have begun this blog in order to have a wider conversation with friends and family as well as other potters and artists. I do not expect to tell you what I am doing as much as how I am choosing to live. This blog comes out of the enjoyment I get from writing an article of the same name in the New Hampshire Episcopal News - an article the subject of which I would call "rural, domestic spirituality."

Today, I have made a decision about my pottery! The theme of using a stone on the top of lidded vessels is going to be my signature for art vessels. It allows me to be creative with my use of the elements of the earth - chemicals, clay bodies, etc. while at the same time letting "The Creator" be the final word on each pot by taking a "creation" from the earth and mounting it atop the work. It seems a good way to express the theology of co-creativity in my pottery. here is an example.