The Potter's Notebook

Travel Journal: San Francisco, February 2012

The Blur

I work in the same building where I sleep, where I live, cook soup on Sundays, play the piano. I wake up at two o’clock and head to the studio in slippers to turn up the kiln – two in the morning, maybe, or two in the afternoon – either way. At the start of the day I brush the breakfast crumbs from the table in the gallery, the table I also use to write up sales, and flip the sign on the door to ‘open.’ Like an old mattress, in my life, by morning everything has moved to the middle.

Also like an old mattress, my life is hard to get out of. Away from. My studio is hard to leave. Up-coming travel plans make me anxious – and paradoxically, the more I’m looking forward to going someplace the more likely it is that I’ll undertake a big new project the night before-hand, delay packing, get just an hour or two of sleep before heading out the door. Often before a trip I’m seized by the urge to put things at home in order – to archive, to print out, take down old photos and put up something new. Update my web site. Get to the bottom of my mail pile, which sits in a great stoneware platter whose form I haven’t seen in several years – there’s always a few more pieces of unopened mail at the bottom, unfinished business, a letter with someone’s card paperclipped to it, a printed-out email I wanted to read more slowly, a card from an old friend. A show prospectus whose deadline passed a quarter-year back. My in-box, like my driveway/parking lot, like the table in the gallery, sits at the intersection of the professional and the personal. The blur. The nexus at which ‘normal’ life goes fuzzy and creative concentration appears in sharp focus, with its oh-so-shallow depth of field.

The night before leaving for San Francisco for a couple days, I decided to get all the way to the bottom of my mail. There was satisfaction in emptying that platter completely and seeing the whole shape of it again: sixteen inches wide, hand-formed, with a wheel-thrown base. I picked the platter up and examined it. Sometimes I look at pieces from five years back and note my progress – I’m throwing lighter, my touch more direct, the glazes richer, deeper – other times – I’ve written about this before – I encounter an old piece and notice a kind of freedom and facility, a naive, purposeful, inner-knowing, that I can’t find in my current work. Maybe it’s there and I just can’t see it.

I didn’t glaze this platter – five years ago I worried less about smoothness than I do now – ah, I worried less about surface overall then, than I do now, I’m afraid. I worried less. But this platter’s surface is beautiful. I stretched the clay like pizza dough as I brought the form out to its final width and the coarser particles in the claybody stand out in relief, raised blips that the smoother clay pulls away from, giving the surface a taught, membrane-like quality. Like many of the early works I still have, I kept this one because of a flaw: during the firing a crack opened up, splitting from the edge toward the center. Clay starts to get soft in the kiln, as the temperature approaches 2350 degrees, and the two halves of the crack moved apart from each other like the two sides of a canyon, giving the piece a geologic feel. “I must get back to this,” I thought. “I must work this way again.” I had the urge – it was midnight by then – to head to the studio right away but instead I nervously packed, and the following morning was seated on a plane to San Francisco. “Don’t I have…work to do? Shouldn’t I be in the studio?”

My first stop, when I arrived, was the Museum of Modern Art, and I headed to the third floor to see the photos by Francesca Woodman. I started at the beginning, slowly approaching the first photo in the exhibit, a small, square, black & white image, and suddenly I knew that it was going to take me hours make my way through the seven small rooms of the show. Riveting, profoundly affecting. There are photos from among her earliest works, when she was a teenager – she had a brief career that ended when she was 22 – and from the first, Woodman’s themes and her way of working are evident, unchanging. Or, slowly changing in a way that you can really track. What was that special quality these photos have? I recognized it. That…sense of freedom and facility, that naive, purposeful, inner knowing. Also a sense of the photo as a way of feeling, as a way of locating the body or the spirit of the body against the blur of the world it’s supposed to live in. She used a few dilapidated backgrounds repeatedly – corners in an old house, a doorway – returning again and again to work – “it must be almost lunchtime,” she scrawled under one print, of spoons on an old wood windowsill. “Then at one point I did not need to translate the notes,” she wrote below another, referring to sight reading at the piano but also, maybe, to the way things start to click when you’re working hard enough – “they went directly to my hands.”

In the museum cafe everyone was talking about the Woodman photos. I had to move to another table to keep from hearing. “Do not read anything about this exhibit,” I admonished myself, putting my tray down at a deserted stretch of tables outside, along 3rd Street. “Do not look Francesca Woodman up online, don’t even write about this exhibit for at least a couple weeks.” I wanted to let the images swim around in my awareness for a while undisturbed. And I better keep doing that. Already I’ve said too much.

A couple days later I had a morning alone and I rode through Golden Gate Park. “What…is happening with my work, now?” I was asking myself. “Where…is it going next?” I like that – not knowing – the feeling of an undiscovered world, a landscape of imagination up ahead. I like the reminder that I get, from a museum visit, that there are plenty of other people, on any given day, with their own undiscovered worlds to feel, to imagine. We’re all alone together. The morning was warm and sunny and as if to confirm these thoughts, when I stopped at the Japanese Tea Garden, to walk for a while, I stumbled on the little Zen Garden that Nagao Sakurai made there in 1953. A little enclave protected by boulders, with combed light-colored sand and carefully – though not symmetrically – placed rocks of various textures and colors. This was a ‘dry landscape scene,’ a kare sansui, I read on the nearby placard. The little stones are used in these scenes to symbolize mountains, islands, or waterfalls; sand or gravel could be the sea, or a river. I gazed at the tranquil scene for a while, imagining a vertically-placed dark volcanic rock that I saw before me to be a tumbling waterfall. What could be better? For a potter. These stones evoking the features of the earth, the movement of water.

I unlocked my bike and kept riding. It was my last day before returning to work, and from the map it looked like if I kept going, to the far edge of the park, I’d be able to see the ocean.