Here on my web site, I update montly.
"Never think of a surface
except as the extremity
of a volume.
"
"A heavy, spring snow."
detail: jar with green glaze
This Month at Green River Pottery: March 2010
Last night, a few weeks out from a big trip and a big show, after a long day of making teapots and little things with lids (why am I doing this? I should be making sculpture), after watching what might be the last winter storm of the year fill the afternoon sky with heavy clouds, after overnighting a check someplace an hour before Pack Mail closes (what if they cash it right away?) I couldn’t sleep.
At two, I picked up Donald Hall’s The Old Life and read most of it—one of those books of poetry that siezes your attention at the start, and holds it. Insomnia’s ideal choice. In a long autobiographical piece Hall recounts conversations with Henry Moore, whom he interviewed over a period of years:
He liked to repeat
Advice that Rodin gave to young sculptors:
“If you’re working
on a maquette, and it doesn’t go right, don’t
keep picking at the clay,
making little changes here and there.
Drop it on the floor.
See what it looks like then.” And he liked it
that Rodin remembered
tips from the craftsman who counseled him
when they labored
together in an artisan’s shop. “Rodin,”
said Adolph Constant
to the apprentice, “your leaves are too flat.
Make some with edges pointing
straight up at you. Never think of
a surface except
as the extremity of a volume.”
The last time I saw him
he was eighty. I asked him, “Henry,
what is the secret
of life?” He didn’t hesitate; he said:
“The secret is to devote
your whole life to one ambition.
Concentrate everything
you know, everything you can summon,
to accomplish this
one desire. But remember: Choose something
you can’t do!” He laughed
and coughed, shifting his weight in the wheelchair.
Ah, those three thoughts! Any one of them alone would have been worth a night awake. At quarter to five I stop reading and eat a bowl of cereal. Out the kitchen window it’s still dark, but the empty city is luminous, orange, under new-fallen snow. My truck is covered but I can tell from where I stand, barefoot on the kitchen floor, that it’s dripping wet, too—a heavy, spring snow. Probably as soon as the sun rises, everything will melt.