bob's thoughts, images, feelings
and then some
It is an often and easy, slippery, and facile slope, to forgetting the deep, physical, visual, emotional, and spiritual pleasure that comes to the heart of potters in the creative making of pots.Of course, potters are usually thought of as craftspeople who make pots in order to make a living, and that is somewhat true…
The creative miracle is really simple. There is no detailed plan in the receptacle of the mind, which the practiced body replicates in the physical world, the world of clay, the world of things.The miracle is very common. Our individual and collective and interwoven lived experiences, permit us to garner strength, some order, a fair…
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…
During the first few years of throwing pots, finishing them, drying, bisqueing, glazing, firing — almost praying, everything is so unknown, finding a pot at the end of the process is a wonder beyond excitement. Much thanks to everything that made it possible. I loved it deeply!
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,…
Nests: Creative drift As we move fall along and get ready for winter, the garden becomes more than tranquil. When we walk into it (it’s actually Ursula’s garden), there is a white-ish, pale extrusion on the left : I call it part of the creative drift of life. On the right-hand side of the garden,…
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…
Generally speaking, when human beings investigate something, looking for evidence, we accept that they are looking in the world which is more or less available to most people to look at, see and understand. Of course, by the 21st century, we know that in some of the sciences, in some medical domains, in some areas…
Water, Earth, Air, Fire: elements all In the beginning life was hidden. In the beginning life was latent. In the beginning it was possible but not yet actual. The waters are moving and giving energy in many forms, in many ways and in many directions —currents, trickles, ocean waves. Water is the earth’s primary gift…