am I an artist?
on ceramics, hobbies, Kawabata, and 'the gap.'
Someone called me an artist recently and I insisted it was a misnomer, but, when I take stock of how I’ve spent the last few weeks, perhaps it’s more accurate than I am allowing space for.
I am in week four of my five week handbuilding class and, spending three focused hours a week on learning something new has certainly elevated my artistic capabilities. The other day, I was talking to a fellow clay novitiate and she said she found it helpful to pick one form you like and try to replicate it six times. In accordance with this advice, I’ve been trying to make pinch pot mugs with handles. I am terrible at handles and actually pulling a handle is an embarrassingly sexual act that I am simply not prepared to do in public, so I cut mine from rolled out pieces of clay. I’ve made two that look decent and I’ve made three that I had to smush back into the clay balls from whence they came. Hopefully, one day, I will have six to line up next to each other.
Something I enjoy about clay is that I can’t take it too seriously. There is no great loss in my failure. I am simply not good enough to bang out an impressive series of impeccably thrown bowls and, more often than not, my ideas and sketches are tossed aside when I realize my taste has once again exceeded my skill.
It consistently brings me back to Ira Glass’s famous comments about ‘the gap’ most creatives experience when they try something new.
“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
When you’re just beginning, you can’t always look inside yourself for inspiration. I have these grand visions of what I could create, and yet I am stuck making a pinch pot mug because I don’t have the skill to begin the journey into my own imagination. Having ‘taste’ (and I mean this in the creative way, not the bourgeois way) means I know what I like: certain colors and textures move me, certain turns of phrase raise goosebumps on my arms, the strummed chord of a guitar will send a shiver up my spine. And yet, I cannot play guitar. But I am steadfast in my own taste.
I’ve learned in recent years that having creative taste in movies, music, writing, art is intimidating to some people — mostly people who have not taken the time to develop their own taste and really think about what they enjoy and why. But I think this is one of the most essential things a person can do! To have diverse experiences and realize what you actually like is so essential to being human. And yet, so few embark on that journey of the senses.
I often think about the exhibit I saw at the Nezu Museum in Tokyo — it was a celebration of tea ceremony ceramics set against the backdrop of the changing seasons. The delicately made pottery calls to mind the tea ceremony pieces Yasunari Kawabata references in his work.
“He saw his escape in the Shino water jar. He knelt before it and looked at it appraisingly, as one looks at tea vessels. / A faint red floated up from the white glaze. Kikuji reached to touch the voluptuous and warmly cool surface. / “Soft, like a dream. Even when you know as little as I do you can appreciate Shino.” — Kawabata, Thousand Cranes.
Kawabata writes about ceramics repeatedly in Thousand Cranes, both in ekphrasis and in metaphor, creating subtle visions in the reader’s mind. But there is no questioning whether or not his characters have their own clearly defined taste — they disagree over the use of a particular jar for “foreign flowers” and pair their tea pottery with the seasons, just like the Nezu exhibit that lives so largely in my memory.
Even the New York Times’ description of Kawabata in 1969 conveys his particular taste: “He is dressed in a black kimono with large sleeves and rests his elbow on the table, briskly encircles his fingers around his tea-cup (no handle, the most sensible pottery), sips his tea…”
Barring my own currently inaccessible taste in ceramics, being a novice at something at my age is also incredibly humbling. I have to remind myself constantly that the only person judging me is myself and the push to return to the challenge is an intrinsic one.
As I’ve mentioned, I decided this year that I was going to put my all into my hobbies and challenging myself to try new things. So, I am making pinch pots and writing ten-minute plays and sweating my way through hot yoga classes, the likes of which I haven’t taken consistently since my early 20’s. The payoff is the incremental progress. One day I go to yoga class and I can do a pose I couldn’t do three months ago. My play unexpectedly makes someone laugh. My pottery is ever so slightly better than it was in December.
In a world of immediate gratification, there is something almost ascetic about struggling through 60-minutes of punishingly hot yoga, ignoring my phone in my bag, or standing outside on a moody morning hike long enough to hear a quail call, or giving up on the notion that I might look foolish at something, so I shouldn’t even try. My great hope is that, in a world of ChatGPT and outsourcing our creativity, other people may heed the call of their aesthetic sensibilities and take a step back into the tangible world, even if it’s just one step. I’d love to hear about all the things that you think are beautiful.