bob's thoughts, images, feelings
and then some
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…
In the current era, we contemporary humans consider ourselves fortunate to have a much richer and more realistic understanding of what things are, what reality is, and what the natural world is about, than any of our forebears. Most of this new and developed understanding is generally attributed to the development of science, scientific methodologies,…
Although this section post appears as a review of making and imagining in clay and ceramic art, much of its underbelly is present in an array of creative activity and in our ordinary, regular lives just because we are human beings. It is difficult, if not beyond our capacity for understanding, to grasp the when/how/why…
natural/supernatural :: feet/gods a few simple statements: i can do no other There is no god: there is no spiritual hierarchy or apparatchiks, no minor gods, no angels, demons, devils, hell, or any of the other hidden ghost-like apparatus, usually invoked as regulating the affairs and consequences of human action. Incidentally, there is no heaven….
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…
One goal, many paths. If only this aphorism were as true as its popularity suggests, or perchance, if only it were as clear as its simplicity suggests. Perhaps, then, this — or any — life would surely be simpler and more manageable! As if our life were actually only a mountain for which there were…
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…
It seems fairly clear every morning when I awake and start my day, that I am lying in my bed and getting out of it to get going. Some days, this is a bit blurry, but really, I never lose my way. I am not my bed. It does not take very long (nanoseconds?) as…
Doubt is only doubt when it is actually doubt. (iff). Imagining doubt and perceived uncertainty for a purpose, is a ploy — the first cousin to bad faith. There are no evil demons deceiving us, no matter what public intellectuals might tell us, or philosophers, or actual scientists, or theologians, or politicians, and other false…
Beginnings of things are not always evident when we look only at the thing about which we have uncertainty, a query or an inclination to explain or somehow make clear. Quite often in human affairs, our attempts to account for and explain a current state, takes into account a limited version of the entity, skipping…