first days

I am living in unimaginable luxury here at Rioji Matsumiya studio/compound with some of the most amazing artists I have ever met. I will post more later about the setup here, but I’ll just share with you now what I have been doing. The first few days… not much. The jetlag was difficult and my brain was not fully operational. I was also coming down off all the stress from the last orders I shipped before leaving the States. I finally made a vase, a very typical vase for me, the cherry blossom branch one you see here. I hated it. It was so boring, but I made it and put it aside. That night, after drinking too much whiskey with my new pals, I went to bed thinking about how much I didn’t like this vase I made. It seemed like a fussy old lady. I laid in bed and couldn’t get to sleep, imagining cutting up this vase into pieces. Finally I realized I could get up and go to the studio (it’s open 24 hours) and cut it up if I wanted to. After all, that’s what I’m here for and I have nothing else to do but stay up all night cutting up vases if that’s my thing! So I went down to the studio, cranked up some Led Zeppelin, and went at the vase with a razor blade. The vase was already to too hard and dry to cut up much, so this is what I did, and I love it now!