perfection is torture

Lately I've been noticing how much I clench my jaw. I'm not sure that this is a new habit, or something I've always done, but every time I catch myself doing it, I unclench and try to loosen up my face. Now that I'm 40 I'm starting to worry about losing my youthful freshness and I don't want to be one of those people with a permanent scowl. While I'm working on my clenching, I'm also starting to change my attitude toward perfection. Somehow these two things go together in my mind, so stay with me.

Artists are tortured souls because we torture ourselves, in very specific ways that cut us the most deeply. I have many ways of torturing myself, but one of my favorite ways is by pushing myself to create "perfect" pieces. No cracks, no glaze crawls, no pinholes, no runs, no awkward lines, no bumps, no uneveness... you get the picture. It is a severe kind of torture, punishing and unsympathetic.

When I buy pottery, I'm not looking for "perfection" in the terms I've enumerated above, I'm looking for a piece I love. The things I may consider imperfections were it my own work is stuff that I may not even notice on other people's work. One of my favorite Diana Fayt pieces in my collection is a vase where some of the glaze popped off, creating a chipped looking surface around the bottom. Do I care? Not at all, in fact I love it. It does nothing to take away from the design, or the shape of the piece, which is perfect.

A few weeks ago I had an order for one of the dreaded bird cake stands, in all white. White is the most challenging for me because I have this big piece with a large surface area, and I want it to be smooth and perfect. The piece came out with what looked like a dirty smudge on the surface. I have no idea what it was. I took images of it, sent it to the customer who shrugged it off, took 20% off, sent it out. I heard from the customer later who said he and his wife inspected the piece for a while and could not figure out what the hell I was talking about. I was like, "I'm talking about that smudge, on the surface." It blew my mind that they could not see it.

I've started running a side experiment, where I'm marking what I would usually consider "seconds" at the usual price at my studio and shows and seeing if people bite. And they do. They pick up the piece, inspect it while I sit on my hand to prevent myself from from showing them how the piece is fucked up, and they buy it. That blows my mind too.

I'm starting to think that for me to learn anything, my head has to explode so the new information can get through my shattered skull to my brain. And when I figure something out, I tend to go to extremes with it, so if you get a piece from me with a big crack through it or a chipped foot, take solace in the fact that you are helping me get over being perfect.

no resolution

I've been an undisciplined meditator for about 4 years now. Every other week or so, I meditate with group at Shambala Meditation Center in Berkeley, and there is always a reading on Buddhist practice that we discuss after the 45 minute meditation. The last reading from Pema Chodron's Living With Uncertainty was about resolution. She wrote that as humans, we are always reaching for resolution, but resolution does not exist. This immediately caused a stir among the over-achieving Bay Area types who typically attend this meditation session, all of us quite comfortable with the idea that hard work will bring results, then resolution, quickly followed by happiness. The writer went on to say we don't even deserve resolution, but something better than that, which is mindful awareness. When it comes to mindfulness, I'm still batting in the Little League. But the concept of no resolution is something I grasped immediately.

Pottery is all about no resolution, which is why many ceramic artists are driven slowly crazy by the medium. It's difficult to accept no resolution. For me, that means nothing I make is perfect, shit is always falling apart, the work is never done, and there is always something more to learn. I have intellectually understood this about pottery for quite a while now, but practicing acceptance without resistance is exercise that gets me all sweaty. I get there every once in a while. Meditation helps. So does an ice-cold cocktail. With apologies to Pema Chodron, I've reinterpreted some of her writings to address the potter-warrior:

A potter accepts that we can never know what will come out of the kiln. We can try to control the uncontrollable by following the glaze recipe exactly or firing the kiln to the same temperature each time, always hoping to get a perfect result. But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not-knowing is part of the adventure. It's also what makes us afraid of opening the kiln and wish we majored in computer science so we could be making money writing apps for smartphones instead of spending our days alone in a dusty studio. If we find ourselves in doubt that we're up to being a potter, we can contemplate this question: "Do I prefer to grow up and accept what comes out of the kiln, or do I choose to live and die in fear of what comes out of the kiln?"

anxiety is futile

This weekend I will be selling my work at Sunset Magazine's headquarters in Menlo Park for their annual "Sunset Celebration Weekend". They are doing a special thing with Etsy and invited myself and a few other Etsy sellers to show their work, as well as giving us a free booth, which is quite generous. I wasn't too worked up or concerned about the show, I thought I would make a few special things and just bring what I have. Then, I looked at the Celebration website, watched the video they have up, and realized there will be thousands and thousands of people at this event. Tens of thousands.

So, I start to stress out. All of the sudden I'm concerned I won't have enough work, or the right kind of work. I've been playing around with a planter concept that I was going to introduce at the Clay and Glass Festival in Palo Alto in July, but I decide I have to bring it to Sunset, it's the perfect venue. I spend part of a day riding my bike out to Flora Grubb Gardens in San Francisco to buy the perfect plants for my little planters-- which haven't even been fired yet-- and wind up getting a flat tire out in the middle of nowhere and I have to walk my bike over a mile to get to a BART station. I also have been wanting to make these wall hangings-- again, the perfect Sunset customer thing-- and I spend three days trying to cut the pieces, get it to the right level of dryness to work on it, and keep missing my window or messing it up in some other way.

Meanwhile, I had plans to leave town for 5 days to go see my grandma, a two hour drive from the nearest airport and so far out that there is no nearby wifi connection or other computer access. Around the time that I was packing my bags and making a mental list of all the things I would have to accomplish before I left, and another list of all the things I would have to accomplish the second I got back, I realized I was completely insane.

1. There was no way I was going to be able to bring all the new stuff I wanted to bring, and
   
2. even if I did manage to pull it off, it wouldn't change anything anyway.
   

I would still want more: better work, the right kind of work, less of this, more of that, blah blah blah. There was no point to all of this round and round with myself in the studio, because I would never be satisfied anyway, so what was the point of all my anxiety? I went to my grandma's and (pretty much) forgot about it. When I got home, I even took Memorial Day off. And in the end, I only managed to make the few special things I planned in the first place, which are in the kiln right now. And if you see me at the Sunset thing this weekend, be sure to tell me that everything I managed to bring is beautiful, and buy something while you are at it!

what I really wanted to say

You have a message From randomblogger on Etsy.

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Subject: Blog Review

Hi! I am a stay at home mom and I have a blog that I frequently update at called RandomBlog. My blog has over 800 followers and a Google page rank of 3. I do a feature on my blog called the “Etsy Shops I Love”. I just found your shop, and I was wondering if you would be interested in sending me one of your adorable products, and then I will post pictures and a review of it on my blog. I can also do a giveaway of your work! I'm sure you would get some new business from it!! Please let me know if you are interested and what information you would need from me.
Thank you!!!

RandomBlogger

I get these emails on a semi-regular basis. I don't know why, but they are mostly from women who have blogs dedicated to raising children in aesthetically pleasing environments. Somebody, tell me why this is. And don't tell me it's because these are former corporate sharks who gave it up to be a stay at home mom, and now they're broke and want free cupcake stands.

Mostly, I ignore these emails, because it seems to me a transparent trolling for free stuff. Bloggers who have opinions that actually matter-- and by that I mean bloggers who can write about someone and that someone will immediately be slammed by overwhelming business-- not only never ask for free product, they will usually not accept it if you offer it up. I know of one exception, and I would love to write about this person, but since he did not try to hit me up for free pottery but a good friend of mine, I have to hold back.

This last email I received was particularly annoying to me, which is no big deal since I get annoyed very easily. And all the time. Perhaps, I should do more yoga, or stop drinking so much coffee. If I have a minute I want to burn, I will take a quick peek at the blog just to see what I'm dealing with. This particular Randomblogger gathers followers by offering giveaways to people who become a follower and post a comment. I guess the majority of followers are people who want free stuff. Not my demographic. Most posts had zero comments. Not surprising, because the posts were in depth discourse about family trips, baby milestones, and free-ranging opinions regarding the pluses and minuses of stuff that I don't care about. Which is fine, bloggers are free to write about whatever they want, but don't use your blog with a google pageRank of 3-- which is not very good-- as a quid pro quo.

This email itched at me. I think it's unethical to ask for free stuff that you will then write a "review" on. It's intrinsically biased, and I would not be very happy at all if I discovered a blogger I liked to read for opinion and recommendations were going around asking for free product from the people they were giving glowing reviews to. I really wanted to nail this person with a scathing email, but then I realized I was losing my mind again over something stupid. But I had to say something. I managed to write back a non-scathing email that I saved for all future trollings:

Dear RandomBlogger,

Thank you for your email. As a policy, I never give away my artwork in exchange for a review, a blog write-up, or as a giveaway. Bloggers write about my work all the time because they want to spread the word to their readers and support what I do for a living. I have found that giving away my work does not generate meaningful business. Thank you for thinking of me and good luck with your blog.

Whitney

I did not hear back, thanking me for my subtle slap in the face. And my blog has a pageRank of 4.

be a bad worker

Lately, I've been getting fed up with the stress of being me. Being me means my mood is almost solely tied to how well my work is going. If my clients are happy, work is shipping on time, orders are fast and furious, kilns are firing the way they are supposed to fire, production is snappy, new work is in the pipeline, then happiness is mine. From that list, the convergence of all of them happening is about once a month for approximately 3 minutes. Basically, I have it all set up so satisfaction is almost impossible and I'm always wrestling with this demon who is telling me if I just work harder, try harder, maybe everything will finally come together in the way I think it should.

I've had to admit to myself that I am a workaholic. I resist that word because it seems like a word that would apply to somebody else doing different kind of work. But if I take some of the classic symptoms of alcoholism and apply them to work, it's hard to deny that I have a work problem. For example:

• I minimize how much time I actually spend working, the way an alcoholic minimizes how much he drinks.
  
• I don't count certain types of work as work, like listing stuff on etsy or cleaning my studio, the way an alcoholic may say that beer isn't really alcohol.
  
• I hide work, like snapping my computer shut and pretend like I was in the middle of doing something else when my husband walks into the room, and we all know alcoholics hide booze.
  
• And then the classic: does work make your home life unhappy? Yes, yes, and yes. My husband is an independent soul who doesn't allow me to dictate the mood at home, but there's no doubt I undermine his pleasure in life when I come home and whine about work, or worse, cry because the stress is getting to me.

It was suggested to me by my friend Jack, who is similarly driven-- actually, I am surrounded by these types, now that I think about it--is rather than work so hard at being good, apply myself to being bad. Be a slacker. Say "no" to clients. Be late to meetings. Blow off emails. Spend all day making something ridiculous instead of filling orders. And do it all without a single apology. I was laughing so hysterically when he was making these suggestions to me, tears were rolling out of my eyes. He was making a larger point about Americans working too hard in general, and how the culture of being "busy" and driven all the time is killing us and making life difficult to enjoy. "We all need to learn how to be bad workers." is how he summed up his theory.

It's an indication of how deeply ingrained the American hard work ethic is in me when these suggestions make me almost hysterical with laughter and seem about as realistic as walking on water or setting myself on fire. However, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that these measures could actually be therapeutic, and maybe being a bad worker would be like taking some vitamins. Maybe I don't have to do all of them at once, but I could try a few of them and see if the studio collapses or my head explodes. So if you are wondering where your order is or why I haven't responded to your email, you'll know I'm taking my medicine!

this weekend, and next

Here in the Bay Area, we are spoiled. We have the best weather (at least in the East Bay), the best food, the best views, and frankly, some of the best ceramic artists. When you are spoiled, you forget how good you have it. You start thinking that the rare, beautiful things you have ready access to will always be there, and in fact, you often fail to notice how awesome these things are. That is the nature of life, taking for granted the things that come easy.

I still count myself one of the luckiest gals in the world that my favorite ceramic artists are also my best friends and live within 15 minutes of my own studio. And at this time of year, we get together, have show celebrating the moms of the world, and sell off our seconds at prices you will never see anywhere else. It's true that sometimes we smash our seconds, and sometimes we sell them. My home is decorated with "seconds" from my gals, and there is nothing lovelier, in the Bay Area, in stores, or in life.

The opening party for our Vase Show is May 6 (that's tomorrow!) at 6 pm over at the Fourth and Clay Studio + Gallery. There will be food, there will be booze, and there will be me, drinking the wine as fast as I can. You will be able to check out our vases and shop seconds. The show will continue on Saturday and Sunday from 11-5. For those of you who can't make it this weekend, I will be having a follow-up sale at my own studio next Saturday, the 14th, from 11-4. Be there!

buy a vase, support japan

Whenever a big earthquake happens in the world, I feel a special connection to the event because of my own experience of a devastating earthquake. I came through the Loma Prieta earthquake totally unscathed--I'm nothing if not lucky-- but it was still an event that changed my life. It made me realize how fragile life is, and how my own life is so small. It was a very good lesson for a 19-year old, and I am always grateful for the experience.

The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan was even more relevant to me because of my Japan connection. Some of you may remember that back in the summer of 2007 I went to Kanayama, Japan for a month to do a residency. It was, and remains, one of the highlights of my career. I was not overly concerned for the people who hosted me because they were far enough away from the epicenter, but I knew immediately that I must do something to help. My former hosts are doing something: they have pledged to make 15,000 cups to donate to the survivors of the earthquake and tsunami. Many people are homeless and have lost everything, and this is how they are helping people re-stock their cupboards. Cups are everything in Japan, daily tea drinking is part of the everyday culture, so this is not a small gesture.

By the way, 15,000 cups may seem like an impossible number, but the staff at Kanayama has been making 700 cups a day, and at last check they had completed 6,000 cups 12 days ago. This is between 5 people. They are probably done by now. I learned so much about production while I was working there.

I am sending my own donation of cups to Kanayama this week as a token gesture of support. I will also be sending straight cash from sales from a collection cherry blossom vases I made just for this effort. Cherry blossoms are a special symbol in Japanese culture. They also represent the relationship between the United States and Japan. The famous cherry blossom trees in Washington, DC were a gift from Japan in the early 20th century to symbolize the friendship between Japan and the United States. This is particularly poignant to me when I think about World War II, but I will save these thoughts for another day.

In case you have not figured it out yet, I want you to go buy one of my vases right now. 50% of the retail price will go to the Japan cause. They will only be available online until May 6, so don't sit around saying to yourself, "So pretty...!" because then they will be gone and you will lose your chance to get a gorgeous vase AND donate to people who need your money. And when I say "people" I mean myself, too. I need your money. So I can send it to Japan! The vases are moderately priced so they are affordable, not to mention beautiful, one-of-a-kind, and perfect for spring flowers.