March 01, 2009

I am a bit of a spastic perfectionist....and creative dichotomy.













So... I have these place settings ready to glaze and fire but I am a bit of a spaz when it comes to deciding what a customer will consider "part of the hand-made process" and what is shoddy workmanship...Now, mind you, there is no "CRANKING OUT" of work hapening here... I'd love to say I can do that but truthfully, I cannot. I have a very hard time looking at the pieces of the set as a whole as opposed to inspecting each piece as though it would be sold on it's own.(which is actually easier as it doesn't have to MATCH the other pieces). It reminds me of the struggle developing a line of clothing....back to my "fashion design days of old"...only different.... Each piece/style needed to stand on it's own as something someone would buy off the rack just because they wanted that piece...However...It needed to make sense as part of an outfit, as well as part of the story being told in the collection...

I digress.

Meanwhile... on a slightly different note...Rachel Power who wrote the awesome book The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood WHICH I LOVED and any mother artist(writer,dancer,visual,creative type...) should read,
posted a link to this talk on TED (but I was able to access the same talk on my blackberry through You Tube...)
I thought it was great. YOU can see it HERE.

A while ago I read Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert...Loved it... some love it...some don't. I loved it... What's not to love?
Someone told me they thought she was whining through out the book...I have no problem with whining(I whine all of the time, I guess)...I don't think it's really whining... It's struggling... struggling with our place in this world in our body that we have on loan until we leave it...
For those of us possessed by a "creative drive", the road can be a bit tough... Not that it's necessarily tougher than other human existance...just,well, different.
She gave a great talk and didn't sound like WHINING at all.
Leave that for me to do, Elizabeth.