Pots and Books.. and a little bit of pot pie.

In my life i have gone often back and forth between considering myself an avid reader to not picking up a book in three months. Sadly the second state of reader-dom is where i find myself currently.Last Christmas I received every last Tom Robbins book that exists in this world, and three months ago i read the second to last in my collection. I think i've simply been avoiding an in-avoidable end to an engagement that i have been so pleased to be a part of. Many people complain that Robbins while wholely absurd ,is altogether unimaginative. They say that each book ends up telling the same story. Too much similarity from one character to the next. If this is true, I can say that I have fallen for his tricks,( been seduced and tickeled by his language and prose.)Because I just cant get Enough of this guy. I dont mistake him for any super-valid resource( referencing fact and swearing by his name) but appreciate him at face value for providing a valuable source of stimulation and entertainment.
In an attempt to re-engage the books that ive already read, perhaps in preperation to take on the final novel, I began documenting things that stood out in my memory from each book and drawing these iconic images onto mugs. From Sailor the Naked Parrot,to the turkey leg airstream, the drawings came to life, as singular epithets, and plural scripts.
These drawings have provided quite a bit of practice in identifying images and designing them in a more simple ( basic and trimmed down) way. seeing these line drawings so successfully reference much more involved realities has spurred myinterest in graphic representations.I am currently just in the beginning stage of documenting other more personal relationships in teh same way.

And to fulfill my promise.
"a little bit of pot pie"

an active inactivity

ACTIVE INACTIVITY.
its been just over four months since ive committed to sitting down, and writing. And today still is not the day, but i've felt rather negligent, thinking about how i should just sit down and write something. herein lies my problem, i dont have to do anything, I shouldnt feel obligated to commit my time or thoughts to an equally non-commital interweb audience.
Today i finally acted to check out the blog, and i am happy to report that while i have not written it also has not disappeared.
Anyways, my absence on the web does not account for my activity in life, clearly. Ive been doing lots, seeing lots, making lots and dont we all need a repreieve once in a while. Just the other day i was having a conversation about making. ( after all writing is making) short version it went like this. ANyone who struggles to sustain a practice based totally on the practice, within the practice will do just that. struggle. if i sat in my studio all day, and made pot after pot after pot, my pots would be pots about pots, which may sound appealing now, but reallly it woudl just make me an ass. So i excuse my inactivity by defining it as a refueling, revamping period.
next post coming soon.
APF coming soon.
other things to come.

missed exactly one month by a day

busy as a bee. i have been keeping busy, and id like to share with you some fruits of my labor. Today i submitted materials for some residency applications and therefore i have some finished works to share.

AND here. they . are.

its still going

Exclamation!

Free internet in my living room right now! woot woot.

So, i will take this chance to act quickly and directly. i just finished Tom Robbins"Fierce Invalids Home from Hot climates". And shall i re-iterate that i love love love tom robbins. me makes me laugh and cry, smile and gasp.I just cant get over him. Hes got me. he gets me. He gettin' MEs. ( had to complete the series) anywho. I will share..... heh.hemmmm

how could anything as commonplace- and in their pink, fatty, babyish way, dumb- as human lips produce such mysterious pleasure? Their kiss was like a paper airplane landing on the moon.

this guy, is just too damn vivid. crystal clear and opaque as whole milk , not in tandem, but at the same time simultaneously, the same words and same meanings spanning millenia.


Now and again, one could detect in a childless woman of a certain age the various characteristics of all the children she had never issued. Her body was haunted by the ghosts of souls who hadn't lived yet.Premature ghosts, half-ghosts. Y's without X's... Like tiny ectoplasmic gophers they hunkered in her tear ducts. They shone through her sighs.- yet they no more bore her resentment than a seed resents the uneaten fruit... like a phosphorescence, like sighs on a string, they would follow her into eternity.

celebrate it or ignore it.

when and how . and to what degree.
I think about making pots well into the foreseeable future. maybe forever but forever is a long time.

I wonder about becoming an artist, or coming into being an artist, or having been an artist all along.

This weekend i went and heard a panel of "seasoned" (as they were on multiple occasions referred) ceramic artists talk candidly and casually about each of their careers, spawning from one similar undergraduate experience that they all shared together. Classmates . while their stories were inspiring, they remained un-inclusive seemingly unattainable through the contemporary lense. paying thirty dollars for rent, to save money for making is just simply impossible. nonetheless we try, try and try again to live where we want, work where we want and make what we want. but for me this is just the beginning. I'm gaining new experiences in new places to make new work and ultimately have more to offer as a graduate student in a few years. I hope to attain my terminal degree by the time im ... say 30 and then make my own work. with the hopes of becoming an instructor in higher education.
imagine as this discussion comes to an end, one of the artists unhappily reports that by recent polling of his students, each and every one imagines themselves to become a teacher at some point in their future. He says that this proves a severely overlooked shortcoming of arts education and the art community in general. If no one can imagine a career beside that of a college educator, than no one can pursue anything else. And the reality of the situation is that the field can not support or sustain the volume of students out-coming, to eventually feed back in as educators themselves. daunting. upsetting, but true. although we are all led whether right or wrong, to understand and believe it nearly impossible to survive solely as a maker. And only a handful of the hundred plus classmates we graduated with will even begin to come close to this sort of reality.
I haven't the thoughts to conclude one way or the other on the issues at hand. while i found the weekend enriching i also found it a hard pill to swallow. I just don't know.

HaeJung Lee

just absolutely gorgeous.