The Spirit of the Piece

 I love the Arts. I have always loved looking at art, watching theatre and dance performances, reading, and more. I have a deep connection toward the feeling to create. I just want to be making things all the time. In contrast to my need to create, I have little artistic talent.

When I was in high school, I was drawn to take a Ceramics class. My high school had a wonderful arts program, and the art rooms were so calming - true artistic, creative spaces. I wanted to go in there for one 45-minute period every day and make shit. I am a terrible drawer so the basic drawing course was going to drag down my grade point average. But I thought Ceramics would be a good fit. I was sure I could throw a bowl, as they say.

But Ceramics was a lot more than just sitting at the pottery wheel and letting it spin. There were sketches of what we intended to make (I still had to draw!), there was learning about clay maintenance, wedging the clay to get air bubbles out so our art did not explode in the kiln, and then there were about a million beginner projects we had to do before the teacher would let us anywhere near a pottery wheel.

An early beginner's project was something called a soft slab. The basics are you roll a piece of clay into a thin slab. Then you use that slab as the walls of a vase or bowl. You can use multiple slabs and "glue" the slabs together using water along the edges. Voila, you have your soft slab ceramics piece of art.

Before we were allowed to start, we had to sketch our creation. Most of my fellow students were drawing a vase-type structure that was square or circular. But I wanted to be different (i.e. I wanted to make my life more difficult) and so I selected to do a triangular base with 3 slab sides that were also triangles. 

Construction of the vases began the day after sketching. We rolled out our clay into large slabs of a specific thickness. Then we cut out our shapes and began to constrcut the soft slab form. 

As soon as I started building my triangular walls, I knew I had an issue (i.e. flaw) with my design. The wall pieces moved in towards each other leaving almost no opening at the top of the vase. I kept trying to move the pieces around to combat this to no avail. To make matters worse the empty space at the bottom of the vase was caving in leaving large droopy dents in the clay. The slabs were flopping around like flags in the wind. I sealed my seams together so at least I had 3 walls. Then I took bunched up newspaper to stuff down the middle of the vase to keep the walls from sinking in. 

I looked around and noticed that everyone else's perfect quadrilateral and ellipse shapes were standing up as they should. Mine was a mess with its sloppy, dented sides. It looked like a mountain whose base had the air sucked out of it. But - this is also my very first piece of ceramics ever! And I tried something different than the others! So, maybe I was doing great?

My teacher, Mrs. S., walked by my table to take a look. I bemoaned, "Mine is caving in and kind of falling apart." 

She looked at the art quizically and replied, "It really goes with the spirit of the piece." 

That simple observation became the tagline of my life. Not everything I create looks good. In fact, a lot of it looks janky. But, I complete the art and feel proud of myself. There is space in this world for the spirit of the piece.