Here on my web site, I update montly.
"The best pots...sometimes seem simple, unremarkable in their achievement."
"...sheet music all marked up and creased..."
"Suddenly the bowl you bought...reveals itself as necessary."
This Month at Green River Pottery: May 2010
That Looks Easy!
Now I’m living out here on the beach
But those seagulls are still out of reach.
- Neil Young
Sometimes when I finish up in the studio, before going to sleep, to wind down, I play the piano. Or if things aren’t going well in the studio and I feel stuck, I’ll get out of there, dry my hands off, and play for a while. I’m working on this set of pieces by Schumann called Forest Scenes—one day about five years ago I heard them on the radio while I was throwing pots on the wheel, and I lifted my hands off the clay, listening. “Wow,” I thought. “That’s it! I absolutely have to learn to play those.” I was transfixed by their limpid, dreamy, profundity. They seemed so simple and straightforward, like a Neil Young song. Robert Schumann is the Neil Young of the classical world.
Now it’s been five years, and my Forest Scenes sheet music is all marked up and creased; fingerings have been written in, erased, then written back in and underlined and circled. Turns out—just like that song On the Beach—these pieces are not as easy to play as they sound.
Sometimes when I’m stuck, at the piano, I’ll leave it for a while and play the guitar instead—which is funny, since half the time I’m at the piano I’m there because I’m stuck temporarily with clay. That feeling of being blocked, of not quite connecting—I chase it from place to place. It’s like an air bubble you chase around the wall of a vase you’re throwing. I had years of piano lessons as a kid, but at a certain point I dropped it and got a guitar instead, an instrument I’d never had a lesson on. This made playing it easy—I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing and didn’t have many expectations. I felt free and unselfconscious. I’d sit on my bed for hours picking out the chords to my favorite songs, and I strummed along happily for a decade before I was ready to return to the piano, an instrument I had come to see as work—a part-time job I wanted to quit. (The pay was lousy!)
Art was about work, I grew up thinking. When it gets hard, I was taught, just try harder. The more work you do, the better your art will be, and the more you struggle, the more you will be rewarded. But these days I take the opposite approach when possible. Things aren’t going well in the studio? Stop, play the piano, don’t go back there till you have to. Forest Scenes seem impossible to play? Skip it, sit on the bed with the guitar, don’t open the music again until you really want to. The urge to be creative has to come from the inside—it has to feel necessary. Actually, the way it really feels is that the piano itself pulls me to its keys. The clay leads my hands into it, inevitably.
I’m always trying to give my pieces that limpid profundity, that feeling of effortless simplicity, that I first heard in the Forest Scenes. One of the things I love most about being a potter is that clay lends itself better than other media to this goal. The best pots—like a Neil Young song—might seem pleasing at first, but sometimes can seem simple, unremarkable in their achievement, their art almost completely hidden. It’s only with time (about five years? a decade?) that you begin to feel the power of some works in clay, their depth, their clarity. Suddenly the bowl you bought because it seemed like a useful addition to your life reveals itself as necessary to you on an inner level—it pulls you. You turn to the vase that’s been on the shelf there for years and suddenly it’s very arresting, very deep and beautiful—like a favorite song.