bob's thoughts, images, feelings
and then some
As with many things natural, this blog’s coming to be arose within me from an inner push, an impulse embedded in the setting of a co-nesting world—my lived life: understood, intimately felt and often reflected upon, yet frequently just beyond my deeper comprehension. Facets of my regular, daily existence encompass a diverse array of actions…
This pot is as hard as rock. I take its structure to be somewhat ethereal because it just happened to come to be. It didn’t exist and then it did. I made it as this particular thing-form, with my manipulative hands immersed in clay on the potter’s wheel in my studio. It could have been…
A bowl is such a simple object: open, balanced, a spatially-structured circle, a foot, a lip, a receptacle. But to make a bowl is an adventure and a loving challenge. It is difficult to visualize labourers whose artistry is more immediately sensuous than that of potters shaping supple, moist and plastic clay as it spins…
metamorphosis: plastic molecules? From the rocky mountains clay has flowed—time beyond imagining, and when fired in the potters’ kilns, clay re-transforms to stone. Clay is occasionally called a hydrated alumino-silicate. Calm down, this will be brief and may actually be informative. To place these words into context one could say that clay is an earth…
“However, no one has hitherto laid down the limits to the powers of the body, that is, no one has as yet been taught by experience (emphasis mine) what the body can accomplish solely by the laws of nature, in so far as she is regarded as extension. No one hitherto has gained such an…
big bang. Eden. great mystery: human life on earth Pre-dawn light in the Land of Nodfirst breath in the Land of Nodwhen the ground is lost,its blood speaksall order gone.The dam’s fissure leaks.Neither yes nor no,not even, if-then.To be or not – forgotten,all therein beyond our ken. At the edge, not there,the centre, ephemeral at…
(meandering from a to b, and so on…) This post is longish and wanders—not without purpose. Forewarned is forearmed! My queries in this post are about neither the deeper evolution of human beings—their coming into existence at all— nor about the astonishing array of all the living entities within the envelope of the inanimate, dynamic…
When I think of the notion of creative drift, I imagine several broad, orienting categories of ideas, directional impressions, cohering undercurrent flow patterns and the like. Although my intentional interests in this blog will naturally slant perspective toward the subjects of my posts and pages, I do habitually keep in sight, my big picture grasp…
What are you making? What are you doing? What is going on here? Such simple questions which are asked in one form or another by almost all visitors to a potter/clay artist’s studio when the artist is at work. It is a question which appears ready for a straightforward answer: hold your breath, congestion is…
Process and Product: Imagine a potter gracefully caressing clay as it spins on the potter’s wheel. Just off to one side of the potter are the many balls of clay about to fall beneath the fascinating spell of those masterful hands. The clay passes through a lengthy working process which begins with the round moist…