October 2011
16 posts
Going in again to the pottery studio.
Today will be my third day in there. The second trip in was only an hour after work. Still planning on writing more about this later. I’ve been busy but now things are settling down a bit and I should have more time to post more interesting things.
The woman to introduced me to this studio is coming to pick me up and drive me in again. It’s really nice of here, but I think that...
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Making your own local clay →
Again, I got distracted from reading the basics of clay making, haha. I’ve started to look into the process of digging and processing local clay. I love the idea of using all local materials to make ceramics.
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The trip to the Friendship Pottery Party
It was so much fun! The teacher/leader is 86 years old and he’s so nice. He came in to show me around and he had the oldest Japanese/English dictionary I’ve ever seen. He had marked some key words in it to show me as he was talking.
They (The leader, the woman who invited me and drove me in, and a few other members who stopped by to check me out) showed me around and then got me...
Off I go to the "Kurobe Friendship Party of the...
Haha, I still love that name. I imagine that they will all welcome me, call me friend and give me a hug, and then we’ll all start dancing and throwing confetti in the air.
The reality will be that I’ll give them some money, they’ll tell me a bunch of rules about the place… and I don’t know what else. Japan always manages to astound me with it’s quirks and...
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A little distraction
After posting yesterday about having to learn the basics of ceramics again and then watching a few video on Youtube about making cups and throwing clay, I got distracted. It’s very easy to click on one video after another.
But the good news about that is I started thinking about making beautiful, individual sink basins. I guess they’re called vessel sinks? Anyway, I’ve seen...
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A student showed me some pictures today...
Of his grandfather’s pottery studio! He had told me about it, but it was a lot larger than I thought (and before you say anything, “grandfather’s pottery studio” is not a euphemism for something else). His grandfather had a large brick kiln and a giant room full of some nice looking stuff. I asked him if his grandfather had a store or a showroom (didn’t want to...
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I read something the other day and I can't stop...
I also can’t remember exactly what it was. Some sort of quote. The gist of it was:
Every artist needs to give themselves 3 or 4 years of making bad art. There’s a time when there’s a great divide between what the artist wants to create, that vision in their mind, and what they are able to create. They know that something they made is not good art. They know what good art...
“Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its...”
– ~Isaac Bashevis Singer
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to...”
– ~Scott Adams
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The first studio date is set!
This Sunday I’ll be picked up at 9:40 am and whisked off to the next town. In said town is a community center that happens to have a section to make ceramics in! I found out about this center through one of my husband’s adult students. She sent me a very nice letter telling me about Kurobe Friendship Party of The Pottery (The exact English translation of the…. let’s call...
