why we suffer

I had a terribly unfulfilled day at the studio today. Sara had the day off, and it was a Thursday, my favorite day of the week. I love Thursdays, because it holds all the promise of my next favorite days: Friday and Saturday. There is something very cool and swingy about a Thursday, and I try to not schedule anything on Thursdays so I can enjoy it to the max without interruption. So I was mentally rubbing my hands together, thinking, "A day to make new work and have some fun!" And my husband is out of town at the moment, so I could drink a gallon of coffee for breakfast without anyone nattering to me about my unhealthy level of caffeine intake, which makes me extra extra happy.

This has been my assignment for months: Let Sara take care of production orders so me can work on art. Say that in a robotic voice: Me make aaaaarrrrtttt. The system is in place to make that happen, and we've worked so hard to create a system that works. And yet. And yet...

Nothing is happening. I bounced, literally bounced, into the studio. I started to trim up a bunch of cake plates, (thankyouthankyou etsy for featuring me this week and pouring a ton of orders into my pay pal account) and then I thought, "Wait! I'm not gonna trim plates today! This is my day! I'm gonna make what I wanna make!" I immediately covered up my plates and wedged up some porcelain. I started throwing with no ideas in mind, and unfortunately, no ideas came. Throw throw. Crap. Crap. Suffer.

I called up Rae and complained. She snorted and said, "Join the club". She was not unsympathetic, but merely voicing the truth: to be an artist means you are going to suffer. Why? Because to create takes time, and we want it now. Pulling those ideas down out of the ether or out of the universe or wherever the hell they come from is so damn time-consuming. And we want-- no we expect the idea now.

When an artist is not yet in the flow of creation, it's like waiting in a long line, pushing and shoving your way to the front. And what we can't see is that the pushing and shoving is getting us closer to the front of the line; all we can see are the annoying people in front of us, not the distance we traveled.

And so. We suffer. I suffered. I thought about it for a while, and I thought about what I would say to a friend about my predicament, assuming this friend was not as annoying and deserving of punishment as I am. And I thought, "You should not be in the studio, you should be out in the world and looking at some real art". Then I took out the "real" part, because I would never say that to a friend and I would never even think it. Thank god it's almost Friday, my real favorite day, cause I'm taking the day off to go and look at some art.

one day

Today was another typical day at the studio. My assistant, Sara, showed up promptly at 9 AM and we sat down for a short meditation session to set our intention for the day. Our intention is the same every day: Experience the joy of clay!

Sara then immediately opened the kilns to unload a glaze firing. It really makes my heart sing to watch her unload a kiln of perfectly fired pots. As she unloads each piece, I wrap it in beautifully colored tissue paper and tie it off with a silk ribbon blessed by the Dalai Lama. We then attach the order to it for afternoon shipping to the happy new owner!

The mailman usually stops by around this time to drop off checks from my various clients. I take them to the bank on my afternoon walk. Today there were so many it actually required two trips. Sigh. Running errands are probably my least favorite thing to do but necessary to keep the studio running!

Fortunately my intern Philip was here today to help relieve the tension I was feeling after two trips to the bank to make deposits. Philip is studying to be a ceramicist AND a massage therapist. He has to practice his massage technique a certain number of hours every week, so when he is finished with his studio duties every day he gives me a 60 minute massage. I must say he is getting quite good at the massage thing!

After I woke up from my massage-induced nap, Sara and I sat down to afternoon tea. Of course we drink only out of cups made by Christa Assad. It just makes tea taste better! While we drink tea and relax we chat about various ways she can improve her performance in the studio and increase overall efficiency. I like to push my employees to be the best workers they can be! When they slack off I make a sad face at them and that usually puts them back on track. They hate to disappoint me.

After tea we brainstormed ideas for my next collection. I will usually close my eyes and go into a deep meditative state. I then toss out words that inspire me, like “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” or “dendrobium” or “bacon”. Bacon is a word that always inspires me. Sara, who is very good with her hands, will interpret my words into a drawing of a ceramic piece. Today I dreamed up the entire collection in one sitting! Then Sara sat down at the wheel and threw samples of each piece for my approval. I usually have her make at least ten of each piece so I can pick out the very best one. Really, that is our slogan around here, "Only the best!" I have everybody repeat that phrase at least 100 times a day so they don't forget it.

Since Sara obviously had a long evening ahead of her I decided to let her have the studio to herself so she could concentrate. And it was cocktail hour back at home anyway! The husband likes to start drinking the second I walk through the door, and today was no exception. I hope you all had as great and April Fool's Day as I did!

more shameless self-promotion

Check me out on Etsy, I'm the featured seller and they wrote up a little interview too!

the rules of wholesale: part 1

Many ceramic artists face the dilemma or whether or not to wholesale. In some ways, it seems that getting your goods into a store is the goal. It's exposure, it's validation. When I did my first ACC wholesale show in Baltimore back in 2001, I couldn't imagine anything more exciting than having a store carry my work. But I didn't have a clue what I was getting myself into. My work back then was incredibly labor intensive and unique. I knew how to throw in a production schedule, but the finishing work was impossible to fit into a production mode without losing my mind from the repetition. But I didn't know this yet. I went to the show, was happy to come home with $5,000 worth of orders, and promptly burned myself down to a tiny little crisp in the following months as I filled the orders. I quickly realized my precious pots, priced to move, weren't going to begin to compensate me for the amount of time I was putting into creating them, nor would they cover my costs at the loony bin where my husband was threatening to send me.

First rule of wholesale: never wholesale anything you can't reproduce quickly and consistently. If you love making your labored artworks, believe me: the joy will be sapped right out of it when you are forced to make them over and over again at the rate of about $3 an hour. Consistency is also very important. If you are making work in a production mode, your studio will get overwhelmed with seconds if you cannot make a consistent product. I'm sorry to call your artwork a product, but if you are wholesaling, that's what it is.

So, where do you start with the fast and the easy when your work is neither? My hang up for a long time is that I did not want to work with molds or any other kind of reproduction method. I thought it zapped the magic out of my work. And there is some truth to that idea; the hand infuses an energy into your work that simply cannot be replicated by anything other than a human. At the same time, your idea also contains magic, and challenging your brain to figure out how to get that idea onto 200 pots in one week-- as opposed to 6 months-- also creates its own magic.

To answer the question for myself I created my Seed & Pod line alongside my more intense Flower line. It was simple to throw, easy to finish. And I loved giving myself something else to work on that reflected a different style. When I jumped back into serious wholesale again in 2006, I only took my Seed & Pod line. Simple, easy. In time the orders jumped over what I could realistically make by hand, and that's where Hector came in. Hector makes molds from all of my the work I want to wholesale. Over the past two years I've even been able to add my best-selling items from the Flower line and have them molded to expand my line and keep it interesting.

So if you are thinking about wholesale, you really have to answer "yes" to these two questions of efficiency and consistency. If you're saying "yeeeees", kind of slowly, or "most of the time", or "I don't mind working 60 hours a week!" then you are not ready for wholesale on a large scale yet. And by large scale I mean 50% or more of your income.

How you get to efficiency and consistency is up to you. I say listen to everyone, and listen to no one. The way I do it works for me, but it's not the answer. I've cobbled together my solution over the years by following only what I am comfortable with. I look at some people's work who want to wholesale and I think, "You make a mold of that bowl, a decal of that design, and you are good to go". But that person may not like decals. Or molds. They may need to come up with a new design that echoes the original idea so they don't feel they have to sacrifice some aspect of originality. Or they may just have to totally burn themselves out to realize molds and decals ain't so bad.

I am going to continue to write on this subject of wholesale, so if there is a particular aspect that you would like to have addressed, please email me or post a comment.

some eye candy

resolved

Remember back in January when I said I thought making resolutions in the deepest depths of winter was ridiculous, and it should be saved for the first day of spring when one may actually feel motivated to make some changes? Well guess what people? The Vernal Equinox is upon us in two days!

I have several resolutions. The first one is to start posting ceramic websites and blogs of people beside my immediate circle of friends. I've been very non-reciprocal in that area. I recently put a site meter on my blog to monitor how many people actually read this thing, and was surprised to learn how many beautiful fantastic awesome people have me bookmarked, and how many people come to me through other blogs websites. I found some very cool artists whose work I'd never seen before, and I thought I knew everybody. Well, apparently I do not, and god knows what else I'm missing. So if you are a ceramic person, please put your blog and/or website in my comments or email them to me and I will post it.

Second resolution is to start working my retail angle a lot harder. Last week I was all bunged up because I was considering doing the Las Vegas wholesale craft show (a relatively new show on the wholesale circuit) with Rae Dunn and a couple of other people. In the end, we couldn't pull it together and I found I was relieved. Why? Because I hate frickin' wholesale. I've started shipping my spring orders and these collections I send off are so beautiful. I mean really, it makes a momma proud. But I'm sending these babies off for less than half of what I could sell it for out of my studio or on Etsy. And that kinda hurts. Could I sell it all off myself for retail is the question.

Someone asked me a few weeks ago about how I developed my wholesale. I've been thinking a lot about that question because I want to answer it in an intelligent way that is helpful to people. I'm not going to do that right now other than to say I never wanted to do wholesale, but the retail shows were drying up in the sales department and I needed to do something to keep things going, hence the New York Gift show and Philadelphia Rosen. But if you read those posts you know I never come back all happy and stoked, I come back feeling depressed and used.

So my resolution now is to take that dough I was going to pour into Las Vegas and pour it into my marketing instead. I just uploaded a new website-- check it out-- and I'm going to take out some online ads and push etsy as hard as I can. Now the question is, what is your spring resolution?

staying sane

People always ask me how I work full-time earning a living as an artist and remain such a happy, healthy, balanced and sane person. Actually, nobody asks me that. But in my world, staying sane is a part-time job, and by that I mean I probably spend 20 hours a week working on not losing my mind.

During the first part of my art career, I worked part-time for other artists and full-time for myself, which meant I was working almost all of the time. Basically, anything that got in between me and my wheel was a major annoyance and something to be dealt with and put aside as quickly as possible. This included eating meals, bathing, time with my husband, and going on vacation. I was always stressed out because, dammit, life kept getting in my way when all I wanted to do was make some fuckin' pots!

I'm not sure when that changed. I think when I was in persistent physical pain from all my labor that I had to seek out a physical therapist to set it all right. Maybe it was around that time that I realized I wasn't taking very good care of myself, and it showed. It was so typical for me to run home at lunch, stuff a burrito down my gullet in like, 4 minutes, and then run back to the studio. At some point I'd be thinking, "Why does my stomach hurt?" I was also tired of being in a constant state of impatience to be in my studio when I was doing things outside my studio, like driving to the bank, a task I would put off until the whole mess was about to melt down. Here I was, living the dream, and always irritable.

This is how I take care of myself now, and I'm putting it out there for everyone to think about what they are doing to take care of themselves. It's not that interesting or magical, but here it is:
1) I stick to a regular routine of work. I'm a morning person, so I get up and go. I don't work evenings and I usually don't work in the studio for more than 6 hours a day.
2) I spend a minimum of 3 hours a week at my gym getting all sweaty, and I spend another one or two hours using their hot tub and steam room. I also go to my yoga studio at least once or twice a week.
3) I take time off regularly to get out of town and I don't waste time feeling guilty about it.
4) I borrow other people's kids instead of having my own (see picture above).
5) I battle impatience and anxiety with breathing exercises and meditation. And when I catch myself talking to myself in a nasty way, I ask myself if I would talk to my best friend that way.