I often hear this from students or new potters:
"Oh, I could never make the same thing over and over, how boring! Where is
the creativity?" When I hear this, I think, well, you do you, but my
friend, you are missing out.
Repetition, especially on the wheel, is not what it looks
like. For me there are two modes: design, and production (a term I use loosely,
because I am not really a production potter; they sometimes throw 500 mugs a
day!) In my designing mode, to a casual observer, I might appear to be making
the same thing over and over again, but I am making small changes each time:
the shoulder on this one is a little higher, or the foot is a little wider, or
there's an accent line at the neck, maybe the next one gets spiral throwing
ridge. I am very mentally engaged, making dozens of small decisions about which
version best approximates the one in my head. I do occasionally sketch forms,
but I tend to do my sketching on the wheel. That's the creativity bit, and it's
deeply satisfying.
The other mode, though: that is one of the true joys of
pottery. I do return to the same forms often; so often that my hands can do it
on their own, with little attention from my brain. Once I sit down, I let my
hands do their thing and my mind can wander, or rest. It's work, in the sense
of physical effort, to be sure, but like many other forms of physical effort -
hiking, say, or yoga - it's mentally restorative. The serenity found there is
the reward for the long months - years, if I'm honest - of frustration as you
climb the long, steep learning curve of the potters wheel.
I was back at the wheel today, basking in the serenity.
It's been a while since I posted here! Sorry, and thanks
for being here to read this one. I post more regularly at Patreon, where you can subscribe
for free (or just pop in to read, without subscribing.) If you enjoy the
posts & would like to see more, subscriptions start as low as $1.50 a
month.
I get a lot of questions about how soda firing works. It's pretty simple, really: when the kiln reaches ^9, I spray a mixture of baking soda, washing soda, and water through ports built into the kiln wall for that purpose. The sodium in those compounds turns into a glaze on the ware (and everything else in the kiln.) I use draw rings - little loops of clay - to determine when I have sprayed enough soda into the kiln. Pulling the draw ring out through the spyhole is my favorite part of the process! Well, except for unloading.
After drying & firing, there will still be a raised texture, but the ridges will be much lower than they appear here. Still, this technique is best on a serving platter rather than, say, a dinner plate.
When I tell people I'm a potter, they usually think of the wheel (more specifically, they usually think of that scene from Ghost!) In fact, throwing on the wheel is only about 10-15% of what I do. Even for each individual piece, the throwing part is less than half of the making. For these berry bowls, throwing takes about 6 minutes each; finishing is more like 20 minutes. You can see the whole process in the video at this link.
My pottery friends often say of their messy hobby: "It's cheaper than therapy." It's meant as a joke, of course, but like the best jokes, it contains a grain of truth. Neuroscience has some possible explanations for why your pottery hobby can help prevent or ease depression.
The Effort-Driven Reward Circuit
Dr. Kelly Lambert, a neuroscientist at the University of Richmond, has written on the subject of behavior-induced neuroplasticity Lambert believes that human brains are innately wired to induce well-being when performing certain physical tasks. She calls this the Effort-Driven Reward Circuit, involving brain regions connected to emotion, reason, and creativity, and it could be key to a happy brain. Lamberts notes that in the 19th century doctors sometimes prescribed knitting to address anxiety. It makes sense to her: "Repetitive movement, increasing certain neurochemicals, and then if you produce something - a hat, or a scarf - there's the reward."
Work has changed since the environment our brains evolved in! For many of us our work tasks are almost exclusively intellectual, with very little physical activity. A hands-on hobby with a creative aspect can help spark up that neglected brain circuitry & generate some of those happy-making brain chemicals.
This must be what inspires me to say I am a dopamine queen. (I sometimes think I've never been interested in recreational drugs, because I sort for employ brain chemicals for a similar purpose. I used to be an oxytocin queen - yeah, don't do that. Lotta bad decisions came out of that.) Anyway: tl;dr: get into your studio & make stuff! You'll be happier for it.
Often the limiting factor of how large you can throw is, how much can you center? I have a new (free!) video on my Patreon page demonstrating a method of centering for larger pieces that will help you get around that limitation! Check out the preview clip here, then head over to Patreon to watch the whole thing (again - this one is free &available to everyone!) If you find it helpful, you can subscribe (free, or starting at $1.50/month) while you are there. :)
Proud of myself - I've been very busy making in the studio, even though I have no external pressure to do so. It's the oddest thing - I think I can honestly say that there's nothing I like better than working in clay, but sometimes it takes some extrinsic force to motivate me to do so. Maybe my mental work on discipline is having some effect.
These pieces will be in the January firing; they will have glaze on the flat portion of the interior bottom, with contrasting glaze dots on the wide rims. The smaller ovals will be the February reward for Pot of the Month Club, the $60 level on Patreon.
I've got a feeling I'm gonna hit the ground running in 2025.
I learned this super-easy slab technique at the Kansas City NCECA conference. The conference used to feature a space they called the Process Room, in which artists would do quick, half-hour demonstrations of a specific process. (Fun fact! I demonstrated oval stretched butter dishes in that space, at the same conference.) The Process Room was wildly popular; it required an overflow room, and many conference participants parked themselves in the front rows for two solid days. It has not been a feature of recent conferences. I don't know why but if I had to guess, I'd say it's because it was a boatload of work & we didn't get paid? Just a guess.
But I digress.
In the video I use a repurposed hump mold made of fiberboard from GR Pottery Forms. They are intended for potters to drape slabs over top, then pop the clay off after it's leatherhard, and they do work well for that purpose, but I find the platters made that way to be quite static. The Plate-o-matic process allows for some post-forming manipulation, so the resulting piece can be more dynamic and fluid. If you prefer, you can make your own plate-o-matic dies out of 1/2" slabs of clay, cut to shape & bisqued.
I've got a new video for paid subscribers at my Patreon page, demonstrating this technique! Check it out at this link.
I've been enjoying a new (to me) decorating technique: a heavy slip applications textured by hand. For some shapes this means throwing on a bat, even for small things, because there's nowhere to touch the pot that wouldn't mar the slippy surface. Bats take up a lot of space on my limited shelving, and I only have maybe 12? I needed a different solution. Enter the Bat System! The small, pop-out bat in the center allows me to use shelf space more efficiently while still not touching the pot when I remove it from the wheel. Here's a little video I made, or the slip technique & using the bat system to get the pot off the wheel:
I've been doing demos for my class of a fun & spontaneous way to work with trailing slip, by applying it directly by hand. The vase above was decorated using a hand-application method. I've been having so much fun with it that I decided to created a limited line: mugs, bowls, plates, tumblers...maybe a sugar jar & butter dish. I want to keep it limited, because it sometimes happens that I get fascinated with a technique for a few months and then suddenly, abruptly lose interest in it - so I don't want to offer this to my accounts only to discover in idk March that I'm painfully bored of it!
I've started working on how the mugs & plates will look, and I need to think about an interior glaze...maybe a periwinkle color I've gotten in the past by adding Mason stain to my basic white.
In other news, the firing I unloaded last Tuesday was very good! The draw rings have really evened out my game; no more over-glazed, pitted work & no more dry, gritty pots. Most of those will go to stores - I just packed up inventory for the Maine Potters Market & the gallery at Portland Pottery - but I expect to have an update to the online store this weekend.
We've been having a stretch of amazing weather this autumn here in Maine, so I'll probably take Wednesday to enjoy it with Doug. Photography Thursday, shop update maybe Friday.
Today will be the last day of wetwork for this cycle...I'll try to get a live wheelcam event going on Patreon, unless I can't get out of my own way, which regular readers know is all too likely! In hte meantime, enjoy this video! After trimming my leatherhard jar, I attached a little ball of clay & threw a knob.
It's a throwing week - my favorite! Although I am kind of like a dog that way, every week is my favorite. Tonight I hosted - if you want to call it that - a live wheel cam event on YouTube, making mugs. It's not live anymore, but you can still watch the video:
If you'd like to get an invite when I'll be live at the wheel, become a paid subscriber on Patreon! (I feel like I should create a macro that just types "Blah, blah, blah, Patreon." Sorry to keep banging on about it! I've got this idea that it could be an income stream, call me crazy. 🤪)
One Weird Trick is a recurring feature at my Patreon page, usually for paid subscribers; this particular trick is so useful I wanted to make sure as many potters as possible saw it. The newspaper traps a pocket of air inside the pot, and also lends stiffness to the rim, allowing you to get it off the wheel without creating a distortion that the clay might later "remember," even if you re-round the rim.
The video is here in its entirety, but if you liked it or found it helpful, subscribe at Patreon for free, or paid options start at $1.50/month. Thanks for being here!
I've been doing a new thing over on Patreon: trying out the tricks I see potters using in Instagram reels. they are - naturally! - harder than they look. It's one thing to see someone who has done it hundreds of times, & quite another to see someone try it for the first time. It gives you an idea how difficult it would be to learn. Anyway, I've got a new one! Posting it here for you to check it out. If you enjoy it, please follow me on patreon. Lots of free content, & even more for paid subscribers.
I bought some pajama shorts today - 3 pair. With pockets! I didn't really need them but I only had one pair, which I wear often enough that 's annoying when they are in the laundry. The 3 pair cost about $25 altogether.
Lol wut - right? What do my pajama bottoms have to do with clay? Well, nothing, really, except indirectly.
When I started writing this blog in 2007, I was making pots, teaching 3 classes a week, & working part time as a receptionist at an insurance agency (I quit that gig in 2011.) Reader, I was poor. Not broke - that implies a status that might soon change - but outright poor. If I wanted a new pair of shorts I went to Goodwill and chose from whatever they had. I actually still shop at Goodwill, because it's fun, & because re-using is environmentally friendly, but the big change is, then I had to. I couldn't just notice that I could use a thing, then hop online & purchase it. Everything had to be budgeted. But yesterday? Needed some pajama shorts, ordered some pajama shorts, end of story.
This is not a rah-rah, follow-your-dreams post. I can think of a hundred things that would have changed this journey from "difficult" to "impossible:" if I'd had any physical condition limiting the amount of hours I could work. If the unusual circumstances that allowed me to purchase a house in 2005 hadn't occurred. Even if I had had children! There were a lot of rice-&-eggs weeks along the way; it's one thing to choose that for myself, along with the skipped dental care, the shaky vehicles that stranded me more than once, the 55-degree house to save on heating oil. It's a whole 'nother thing to choose that for a child, and frankly, had there been a child, I wouldn't have chosen those things.
But there wasn't, and I did.
I don't even know why I'm writing this post. I guess because it struck me this morning how much easier my life has become, with even a little bit more money. Anyone who tells you money can't buy happiness has never not had enough.
This has always, among other things, been a blog about the business of art, a topic of great interest to me for obvious reasons, and also because...idk, it seems like a puzzle to solve. And as with a jigsaw puzzle, you're gonna try some pieces that don't fit.
I'm still jigsawing an income together. Along the way, I've identified some of those pieces that don't fit:
Art fairs. I used to love them! In the 90s I was all about the art fairs. But I was younger then, and I lived in St. Paul, which is half a day's drive from at least 25 top-shelf art fairs. Living way up here in Maine, travel & lodging makes those prohibitive. Not to mention, fairs themselves have gotten so saturated that where we might reasonably expect to make 10x the booth fee, we're now thrilled to get half that. The smaller fairs that I could travel to locally are the same amount of hard physical work, for far less money.
Co-ops. This one is not absolute. (Actually none of them are!) But, in my experience, the 4-6 days a month you'll be expected to work in the store would be better spent making work or listing/promoting online. Your time is worth money! Don't discount that. Again, not absolute; but at a minimum do the math! They will tell you what their yearly or seasonal intake is; keep in mind that potters tend to be on the low end of average sales, with the jewelers clustered at the top. If they make 36k a season & carry 20 artists, you're going to make lower than 1800 for the whole season. That's <$450 a month for 4-6 8-hour days of work; days that you could be spending making stuff. Doesn't sound so great when you do the math.
Some consignment. I'm very choosy about consignment. Any shop on its first year (first 3 years really), or any shop that takes less than 40% commission, or any shop that expects me to pay upfront for the privilege of doing business with them, dismal experience has taught me to stay away.
Similarly, those stores where you "rent" a stall. Nope.
What works has been wholesale; larger, well established consignment stores; studio events; and online sales. I have a few little firewalls: income threads that put a (pretty low!) floor under me in case of dry spell from the other sources: the pottery stairs, sales of the Fine Mess Glaze Notebook & a few tools, my classes, and now Patreon subscribers. I have high hopes for Patreon although it has proven to be a Herculean task to get subscribers there. I don't even know how to do that! But as evidenced by 17 years of posts here, I have a lot of clay related thoughts, I'm probably gonna type em up, and I might as well get paid for them.
Anyway! Time to finish loading the kiln. I didn't get as much done as I hope yesterday, because it was like 90° and 84% humidity. Today's much better! Hoping to fire tomorrow.
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Wishlist
Art tools & materials I'd love to try. Watch for posts about how these worked out.
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Lori Keenan Watts (aka me) is a potter, gardener, and avid reader from Augusta, Maine. Though I started my university education in surface design for fabric, clay quickly grabbed me by the heart and redirected my creative impulses. I have been a potter for over 25 years -- hard to believe. The most valuable years of my ceramic education were spent in graduate study at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, under the tutalage of Dan Anderson and Paul Dresang.
My aesthetic is guided by my love of the material itself. What fascinates me and makes a pot compelling for me is the clay-ness of clay: the squooshiness that becomes the adamantine solidity. I also like patterns, unexpected proportions, and when the flame comes along and dissolves part of my careful decorating efforts! I am obstinate about this aesthetic, to a point which might be called pig-headed, but hey, if you don't like what you make, why bother?
My happy little family also includes my husband, musician and photographer (and author of the book Alewife) Doug Watts; five cats; and a turtle, all foundlings and rescues of one stripe or another.
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