Couple of Bits N Pieces

Friday, October 26, 2007
Transcribed from Spritely Spoofs

When there's a quick moment of time, i usually zip over to Cynthia Guajardo's pottery blogspot. ( http://cmguajardo.blogspot.com/ ) Her columns are full of useful information, tips and ideas on newly acquired throwing, glazing, etc. techniques, plus links she's found that are always intriguing to follow.

After a family get-together last night, i followed one such link ( http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=302550256698394321 ) to Pete Pinnell's video titled: "Thoughts On Cups".
(Since my computor has taken a streak lately of shutting itself off midway thru even short videos, it was highly probable that i wouln't catch the whole presentation yet was more than pleasantly surprized when i was able to watch it thru to completion.)

Besides giving the aesthetics of cups (composition, dissonance, texture, form, color, pattern, shape, balance, handles and rims), Pete mentions the progression of art from the 20th century's concept of "art for art's sake", to the 1960's era of the post-modern art movement where art talks about life's big issues, but is not an active participant in life.
Fine Art's voyeurism vs it's taboo on creative functionability.
Fascinating!
Well worth viewing.
And thank you, Cynthia for putting the link "out there" for the rest of us.

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Have i mentioned that i've "mastered" a lovely - lavender with splatters of purple and blue in it - glaze? After a year's effort, it is one of my first successes. "Clay and Glazes For The Potter" by Daniel Rhodes, revised and expanded by Robin Hopper has helped me enormously.
However, there's still much work to be done on applying glazes aesthetically, especially if one is determined to create functional art with an intense desire to stimulate imaginative responses in the viewer/user of say . . . . a cup.
Hence, the face-cups in previous posts.

Many years ago, i observed that American's desire for uniformity robbed them of the the independence to be a wee bit "different". Being average was touted as the modicum of success and all that was not "average" was pushed to the wayside in a discarded heap. A classic example of this is -- the nose.

While cutting and reshaping the nose is great for the economy and plastic surgeons, it is a disaster for the concept of originality. The world would not be quite the same without Jimmy Duranti's humor, and would there, could there, be a Jimmy Duranti produced in today's culture which promotes only sterile perfection?

Art is a means of communication. And shouldn't we somehow put imagination back into that conversation?
Alice In Wonderland type of imagination. Mary Poppins type of imagination. Fun, slightly out-of-step imagination which stimulates the mind (and soul) to create beauty.
Children growing up in this day-and-age of crime and rat-a-tat-tat shows, in a sterile world of perfectly formed McDonald's cups, are in desparate need of mentally stimulating, creatively functional, everyday items to put the "magic" back in their universe.

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Speaking of "magic" how many of you have viewed the spinning lady? Right-brained vs left-brained article at http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22556281-661,00.html Response to this seems to be all over the internet. Pro's and con's on what viewers believe they have seen. A lot of discussion.And isn't that exactly what the world needs? A lot more discussion on the possibilities of life . . . .
Chae