"There are few people who think what they think they think. [...] The artists' warehouse is not a store full of successful phrases ready to use, but is a store of raw material." John Cage said, and I paraphrase, that Brahms always sounds the same, but traffic always sounds different. This moves the locus of creativity from the composer, the maker, the artisan, the craftsman, to the consumer. It undermines - or should do - the grandiosity of the artsmith.
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"Through art, mysterious bonds of understanding and knowledge are established among people. They are the bonds of a great community. Those who belong know each other and time and space cannot separate them." I visited my friend T. yesterday. We had a long chat fuelled by coffee, enthusiasm and trust. How nice that is! How rare! She said, "I am a craftsman; I don't call myself an artist, but a craftsman". Grayson Perry, that great street philosopher of our times, put on that exhibition in the British Museum called "Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman". For me, the whole exhibition was an adventure in discovery. The tile itself explained to me that, though I have been trying to be an artist, I have a long way before I can aspire to become a craftsman. Put this way round, it makes perfect sense; it explains perfectly what I see happening when I work. Conceptualising and taking risks is what we all can do; expressing innermost spaces of our soul is what we can do on a good day. But finding a way of expressing this and making it happen is a much taller order. It is not just about having the dexterity and the experience of your materials; not just of knowing tricks and secrets; not just overcoming the obstacles of time and space and self and knowledge and fear. It is about having the talent and then having the forbearance and then giving it the entire attention and time it takes. In the bringing of it all together, in stopping at the right moment, in excluding what should not be there; that is what a craftsman is: the complete artist, the complete maker and the complete person poured into a simple object. Art, when really understood is the province of every human being. It is simply a question of doing things, anything, well. It is not an outside, extra thing. The work of the art student is no light matter. Few have the courage and stamina to see it through. You have to make up your mind to be alone in many ways. We like company and we like to be in company. It is easier than going it alone. But alone one gets acquainted with the self, one grows up and on, not stopping with the crowd. It costs to do this. If you succeed somewhat, you may have to pay for it, as well as enjoy it, This is one of many remarkable letters in "Letters of Note" - a hefty volume of facsimile letters of all kinds sent by famous and not so famous people. Maybe you can't see too well, but the little drawing is of Charlotte Braun being axed by Schultz. Charlotte was loud, brash and opinionated. The readership of Peanuts didn't take to her at all and Charles M. Schulz had to terminate her (as above) after only ten sightings. I have never seen her but would love to find out more about this unacceptable personality. I mean, displeasing Peanuts readers is something to The full letter reads: Jan. 5, 1955 Dear Miss Swaim, I am taking your suggestion regarding Charlotte Braun and will eventually discard her. If as he appears anymore it will be in strips that were already completed before I got your letter or because someone writes in saying that they like her. Remember, however, that you and your friends will have the death of an innocent child on your conscience. Are you prepared to accept such responsibility? Thanks for writing, and I hope future releases will please you. Sincerely, Charles M. Schulz (copied from Letter of Note, Unbound Edition. You can find out more about the book here: http://www.lettersofnote.com/p/the-book.html And so it is: there are days like this, when a word in the wrong place makes it all go awry. I mean, yesterday, my toothbrush ran out of charge; the bottom element of my kiln gave up the ghost; the rabbits have gobbled my favourite plant; and I appear to have gone from tonic to toxic in someone's life overnight. Today, none of it matters; but for a while, yesterday, I was disconcerted. Let me take you down to a place by the river: my river, seen here in full spate in late spring, will sweep you away like a dry leaf, helpless and endangered. As the fury subsides, however, a much more mellow flow reveals the alluvial muds below, deposited in the lea of tree roots and assorted obstacles placed there by hand of man or by nature. In more clement times, the potter puts her wellies on, and thermals, dons woollen gloves inside the marigolds, ties up her hair, rolls up her sleeves and, floating down the path amid the limes and the celandine, archaeological trowel in hand, she approaches the river in the expectation of seducing it into yielding its treasure of clay. Ritual is important to potters. Something primeval tugs at them when they touch the wet plastic clay and they know that, if there is to be an act of creation, that will only be possible with the assent of the auguri. Well, whatever it may be; you could just get a digger, I suppose, and rape the countryside - it has been done! But Suzanna wears a bandana and treads lightly. Only a small amount of clay is needed, to make a kiln god. Reading Jim Malone on the need to appease the gods when firing touched a chord in me. Shamefacedly, I gave in to this deep sense of needing the making of pots to have some meaning outside just producing a flawed artefact, just because. It is not mystical, it is not spiritual, it is all of life and it is nothing. Creation myths have always existed, they seemingly are essential furniture for the mind of sensing man. Why would that be? I feel that the hypnotic need to make pots comes from the same root as the need to establish where you came from. There is a link there, perhaps because, prosaically, we in Judeo-Christian tradition, have this idea of the human being created from clay? Hitherto, we have always blamed someone for this evolving and gyrating world. Traditional religions have gods and superior beings sat up in heaven watching us and having a laugh... Scientists are now stripping away the mechanisms of Big Bang, its consequences and development, but have not come up with the answer to "Why the H--l? Who done this?" So you see, there you were thinking potters were just diligently shaping drying and cooking one form after another, according to the laws of useless activity, when all the time they are in fact the watchers of what cannot be explained; and they know - mostly - to have proper respect and pay proper attention, bandana and all. Today, I am told, is Raphael's birthday. But all the rumpus online is about a man called Hasan Niyazi. He was an admirer of the work of Raphael, a serious student of his painting and life, who loved above all the Madonna of the Goldfinch and had an ambitious project to put all available Raphael scholarship online: a work of great beauty and importance - a work he called a three-pipe problem. He hoped to live long enough to see it through - he didn't. He died from a crisis related to epilepsy in October last year. His passion and determination clearly inspired and awed many friends online and elsewhere. It is not that he knew so much about Raphael; it is more that the beauty of the paintings was a healing to his broken heart and a hope to is fretful mind. He desperately wanted to hand on this legacy, improved and accessible. For some reason, I pick on Longfellow's Hiawatha (Picture-Writing): Nor forgotten was the Love-Song, The most subtle of all medicines, the most potent spell of magic, Dangerous more than war or hunting; Thus the Love-Song was recorded, Symbol and interpretation. First a human figure standing, Painted in the brightest scarlet; 'Tis the lover, the musician, And the meaning is, "My painting makes me powerful over others." Then the figure seated, singing, Playing on a drum of magic, And the interpretation, "Listen! 'Tis my voice you hear, my singing!" Then the same red figure seated In the shelter of a wigwam, And the meaning of the symbol, "I will come and sit beside you In the mystery of my passion!" I guess that grasping the symbols is the best way to praise this life. In every physical process, a certain amount of energy is irretrievably lost in the form of heat and the consequent loss of order. This process, known as entropy, will lead to the death of our universe. "In an age when violence and peace faced each other more fatefully than ever before, Ghandi's name became, in the middle of the 20th century, the counterpoise to those of Stalin and Hitler. The achievement for which the world credited this man (who weighed less than a hundred pounds and whose worldly possessions when he died were worth less than two dollars) was the British withdrawal from India in peace, but what is less known is that among his own people he lowered a barrier more formidable than that of race in America.He renamed India's untouchables harridan, "God's people", and raised them to human stature. And in doing so he provided the nonviolent strategy as well as the inspiration for Martin Luther King Jr.'s comparable civil rights movement in the United States." (from Houston Smith, The World's Religions). Surely the footsteps of the giant champions of peace follow to Nelson Mandela. As Easter approaches, my Holy water containers progress through the stages of fire and accretion. And step by step, through suffering and humiliation the risen tale will be told and the softened outline of passion will be fired up, set and frozen into finality. Much energy is spent in passion and in firing and in keeping the peace in people's turbulent hearts. Remember the second law of thermodynamics. |
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