Why Am I Making This? Issue 1 - an introduction, ceramics, forming creative habits
Hey there! I’m Julien, an artist and dabbler from Maine, USA, and you’re reading the first newsletter in “Why Am I Making This?”, a monthly letter about crafts, creativity, and why we bother making things. In this (first!) installment, I will introduce myself, talk about my recent experiments making ceramics, and think a little bit about creative obsessions and forming habits.
In general in this newsletter I will be talking about the crafts and art I’ve been up to over the past month, but it will be neither a comprehensive update on my personal projects, nor merely an update on what I have been doing. I usually have a lot of thoughts rattling around about whether whatever art I’m pursuing is “worth it”, what I’m learning from it, why I like it, what it’s for - and I want to try to condense some of those random thoughts here. Ideally, after reading this, you might feel a bit more meaning making whatever it is you may be making, too. Thanks for joining me.
An introduction
I’m Julien! If you are family or an old friend reading this, you may also know me as Elizabeth - this is also fine. I am from (and currently live in) Maine, by way of England, Australia, and quite a bit of time in Slovenia. Since I’m spending all my time (and all my time for the foreseeable future) in Maine right now, I’ve thrown a few photos of summer life here into this newsletter. It’s not a bad place to be. All these photos were taken at a lake a weekend or two ago.
In identifying myself, I am most likely to call myself an artist, although neither my day job (software) nor my education (physics) make me an artist. I describe myself that way because the other things I do feel more circumstantial, but being an artist is something I’m invested in.
I do all kinds of art - the constants in my artistic life so far have been drawing and painting, but I have been throwing other things - printmaking, textiles, ceramics - into the mix with increasing seriousness over the last few years. I think I might be honing in on some kind of focus - maybe not. More about that in the last section of this letter.
Ceramics
Towards the end of May, I saw an illustrator I follow, Britt Wilson, post some photos of her new ceramics. They were absolutely adorable, tiny bud vases painted with perfectly proportioned cartoon rainbows, storm clouds, and worms. They sparked a familiar feeling in me - I must make something like that.
In fact I had had a passing interest in ceramics for over a year, beginning, I think, when I saw a gif of a banding wheel with tens of tiny, adorable ceramic animals, corgis and otters and leopards and unicorns. They were made by an illustrator called kness. Those tiny animals inspired me to visit my local community pottery shop just about a year ago, knowing nothing, and ask about clay for a beginner to make small animals with. I went home with some basic white earthenware and made a few assorted objects - a bowl with a dragon curling around the top, a tiny Pokémon, some abstract mountains...
But my interest quickly passed, and the unfired clay sat in a box underneath my TV for 11 months, until I saw Britt Wilson’s new bud vases. I still had close to 25 pounds of unused clay, so I set to work making ring dishes and vases to paint in my own illustrative style. But I did still have those old pieces I had made...
I took them back to the community studio where I had initially bought the clay (which was open for drop-offs and curbside pickups, but not work or classes, during the pandemic) to see about having them fired. A week later the studio manager called me to let me know they were ready to pick up. I went back, bringing along a new batch of unfired ceramics to drop off. Those were the ones I had made in the previous weeks - the ring dishes and vases. When I saw my fired pieces, brighter white and sturdier feeling than they had been all the time they had been dormant, I felt a little swell of pride. They were becoming what they were born to be! Here they are, the afternoon I picked them up:
For those unfamiliar with the process of ceramics, there are three basic steps:
- You make whatever it is you’re making and you let it dry for a week or more. Optionally, you can paint it with underglaze at this stage. At this point, the clay is still water soluble and, when dry, very brittle. This kind of pottery, before any firing in a kiln, is called greenware.
- You bisque fire it. This makes the clay into a solid object that can’t be melted with water and won’t break if you give it a stern look. It has become bisqueware, or just bisque. At this stage, you can paint it with underglaze if you haven’t already or think it needs more, and then also paint glaze-glaze on it.
- You fire it again (“glaze fire”) after the glaze has been painted on, and the glaze melts on the surface, resulting in a nice, shiny ceramic. (Hopefully.)
Here’s a picture showing my cheap white earthenware in every stage of life - from gray, unfired greenware, to white bisque, to painted-but-unglazed bisque, to finished piece:
Each of these steps has waiting involved, so even if you’re trying to get something out as fast as possible, if you’re using a community kiln it’s going to probably be 5-6 weeks, and 4 trips to the studio (1. drop it off as greenware, 2. pick it up as bisque, 3. drop it off with decoration and glaze, 4. pick it up as glazed ceramic) from making something out of clay to seeing it come out shiny and finished.
In the case of my old ceramics, I painted them after getting them back from bisque (amazed at how the colors gave them more life), dropped them off for glaze firing when my first batch of ring dishes were done with their bisque firing, and anxiously awaited their completion over the next week (while also compulsively painting the 18 tiny dishes I had just got back).
A few days ago, I picked them up (and dropped off still more knickknacks to be bisque fired and glaze fired). I knew that all kinds of things can go wrong in the glaze firing, so I was trying to harden my heart in case they had all come out badly. They hadn’t! They also weren’t perfect, but that is only to be expected. Here they all are, standing proud.
I had the foresight to take photos of them before being glazed, and I’m glad I did. Possibly my favorite pre-glaze, a strange dish/bowl shaped like a loon, was a bit disappointing - the dark paint swallowed up all the detail that had been painted on top. Live and learn.
Much the same story for the stars at the bottom of the bowl with the dragon curling around it.
But my little Bulbasaur came out almost perfect, except for the little scuff on its nose.
Ceramics learning is slow, with delayed feedback. I could have waited to paint and glaze anything until I had gotten these guys back, at which point I might have decided not to try to paint yellow stars over like, half of my ring dishes, which I now know will disappear. Unfortunately, they have already been dropped off to be fired. That’s fine. I’ll learn even more from them, and I have more little dishes and vases to paint now with lessons learned. One thing that’s nice about this long, back-and-forth process: at first it felt like I had to wait ages for anything to happen, but now I should have a steady influx of finished pieces every time I go to drop off/pick up from the studio. (At least as long as I keep slowly making, painting, and glazing new pieces at home!) I am looking forward to seeing the fruits of my efforts weeks prior become real. Maybe this is what it feels like to garden.
Obsessions and Habits
I have cycled through a number of creative fixations over the past year or so. I started out with painting, which I have done, halfheartedly, for many many years. Last year was just when I started to get more serious about it. After a few months, I got tired of being serious and was in a creative rut until I took a class in punch needle embroidery, which I did fiendishly for another few months, until I got tired of that too. Thinking about textiles, I made a few small rugs with a tufting gun. Quarantine began around the beginning of my tufting adventures, and my newfound free time caused my time making rugs to burn short and bright. Same goes for my month-or-so of painting again, where I think I made around 15 finished paintings. Now I’m thinking I might paint a little more casually while working, slowly, through the process of making ceramics.
I have always had these kinds of creative fixations - past interests, sometimes recurring and sometimes not, have included sewing plushies, printmaking, film photography, paper-flower-making... and I have always felt that this tendency toward creative obsessions made me an eternal hobbyist. Not A Serious Artist.
In the past few years as I tried to start seeing myself as a Serious Artist, I occasionally made plans to really buckle down and become a master of some art or other, really stick with it and build a professional portfolio I could be proud of and use to become... a professional. I tried with digital art, painting, and my recent punchneedle embroidery phase. I always got bored, and making a goal/grand plan always led me to self-sabotage and move on to the next thing.
I think it has only been in the last few months that I have decided/realized my tendency toward bursts of creative fixations isn’t bad. It’s not good, either. It’s just how I tend to work. I don’t need to have One Big Project to be a serious artist. I spent less than two months making rugs, but one of the ones I made is the first piece of art I’ve ever had accepted into a juried art show (it was a two-part rug of a bird flying with a rainbow trail behind it, and the show will be the - alas, inevitably virtual - 2020 Vision show put on by Creative Portland). I can make better and better art even if I’m doing different things all the time. I was able to make a rug good enough for a show because I had just spent months refining my rug-textile design skills through punchneedle. I had any idea what to do there because I have loved illustration and stylized art, and doodled in that style, for years. And now I’m better at that kind of doodling because of my punchneedle designs. And because of that I can come up with cute designs for tiny ceramic plates. And on and on.
Once I decided not to worry about whether I was doing the right thing, or working towards some kind of big goal, I found it much easier to do something art-related most days. Over the last year I've been slowly figuring out how to make art a habit, something that doesn't require me to drag myself to my sketchbook/easel/block of clay/box of yarn, something that's easy to do. It shouldn't be hard - I've done art all my life because I like making art. But letting go of the guilt surrounding lack of focus has been the latest key toward making it easy to do art. Taking away the pressure to focus has made me able to focus better. I just needed to get out of my own way.
Thanks!
Still here? Thank you! If you haven't subscribed yet, think about doing so? If you read all of this, you'll probably like whatever I write next. If, actually, you found this extremely boring and don't want me darkening your inbox again, you can unsubscribe easily at the bottom of this email!
I have no plans to stop with the ceramics - even if I don't make anything else, I have a lot more in the queue for the community kiln as I write this, so the time-delayed nature of ceramics means I'll have more to show you in a few weeks no matter what. So you can look forward to that sometime in July.
If you have any feedback about this newsletter - things you liked, things you didn't like, things you'd like to see more of - please reply and let me know! Hearing a response and knowing I'm not just thinking aloud into the void keeps me going.
Talk to you soon!
-Julien
