Rough Ideas

daffodil days

By Catherine White on April 9, 2013 9:24 PM | No Comments

This morning driving through Upperville, Virginia I noticed it was time for the daffodil show. I asked a friend who is a member of the garden club if she had entered an arrangement. She said no, she loves the daffodils in her garden too much and can not bring herself to cut them. If she wants them in a vase she buys them at the grocery store.

Daffodils are one of my favorite flowers to cut and put in vases. What I love about the ones I grow is the variety. There are the tiny ones that come up first, blooming on stems no more than a couple of inches tall. The mid-season ones are white and yellow, while the late season ones are on tall stems with short cups and delicate petals. I remember as a child visiting my aunt Betty in Long Island and picking daffodils in her garden with great abandon. When I lived in Columbia, Maryland in a rented apartment one of my students let my friend and I pick pitchers full of daffodils from her garden. That experience of abundance without having the perfect vase has ignited a cycle in my life. I find each year as the daffodils bloom I am designing new volumes and shapes for next year's blossoms.

Bringing the blossoms into the house in a vase lets the vase collaborate with the garden. Putting a flower in a vase creates a visual pause for the eye and in the best of moments gets me to look at my garden more carefully.

"It's like this ... All your life you're yellow. Then one day you brush up against something blue, the barest touch, and voila, the rest of your life you're green."
--Tess Callahan

slip decoration workshop

By Catherine White on April 1, 2013 3:27 PM | No Comments

I will be teaching a slip decoration workshop this month at The Little Pottery
Shop and Center for Clay Art and Design in Frederick, Maryland [117 N. East Street]:

April 20 - 21, Saturday and Sunday
[10am - 4pm each day]

This weekend workshop will focus on a vocabulary and kinetic grammar for applying slips to diverse clay forms. We will explore the poetic potential of texture, line, and pattern. The workshop will include demonstrations, discussion, and hands-on explorations. I will show how large scale drawings with natural materials can be transferred to a related series of clay forms. We will experiment with finger painting, brushwork, sgraffito, and inlay.

Please bring leather-hard slabs or plates, bowls, and vases along with clay to roll out slabs for applying slip. [Clay may also be purchased through the studio.]

The two-day workshop is $275. Even if you are not attending the workshop, please join us for a potluck dinner on Saturday night, which will be followed by a concise image talk. To sign up or for more information please call (301) 620-7501 or email: tmpottery@aol.com

table/painting

By Catherine White on March 22, 2013 6:05 PM | No Comments

I often jokingly tell people that growing up in a household of artists all the wall space was spoken for. The only room left for art was on the table. I was reminded of that family history as I worked on a painted panel yesterday. Thinking of an 18" by 79" rectangle as a painting stopped me in my tracks, but when I imagined it as a table surface I knew how to proceed. As I started a fire in the studio's wood stove, I set my coffee for a moment on the painting, imagining it as my morning table. Today's efforts softened layers and deepened the colors.

a table in the morning

By Catherine White on March 21, 2013 9:37 AM | No Comments

After having a beautiful Japanese breakfast in New York City on Tuesday I drove home inspired by the beauty of a table in the morning. It had been a cold, slushy, gritty day. Our host was at ease and his attention to balance, health, natural ingredients, pots and simplicity was a testament to an old friendship. The experience became incredibly inspiring. In my own house I am not a natural breakfast poet. I wake from the sea of sleep and grab what has floated by in my dreams. The choices I make in the morning arise out of habit, an almost accidental rescuing of ingredients, containers and memory.

"I'm not a poet. I'm a person far out at sea, and the poem is a raft made of whatever floats past in the water. Those almost accidental rescuing pieces are words, rhythms, musics, ideas, the memory that is mine and the memory that is all of ours and the memory that is held in language itself."
--Jane Hirshfield, in an interview with Kim Rosen

spring equinox

By Catherine White on March 20, 2013 6:42 PM | No Comments

"A Light exists in Spring 
Not present on the Year
 At any other period- 
When March is scarcely here
A Color stands abroad 
On Solitary Fields
 That Science cannot overtake
 But Human Nature feels."
--
Emily Dickinson,

running into a new year

By Catherine White on January 2, 2013 10:54 AM | 2 Comments

Running into the new year I scanned back through the photos I took in 2012. Images catch in my hair like strong fingers and memories of objects I have wanted to make since I was 16, 26, 36 and 46. It has been a year of revisiting ideas through bowls and plates. I am looking forward to 2013 and how it brings new twists turns to projects and ideas.

"i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty six and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me"
--
Lucille Clifton

#21 winter solstice 2012

By Catherine White on December 21, 2012 10:54 PM | No Comments

I had hoped to go to the roof to watch the sunset tonight, but it was grey and windy. I looked out the window at the sky and know I can look forward to the shift of longer days. I'll clean the wax out of the candle holders on my Dad's table and light more candles, cook more dinners, and say thank you with a full mouth.

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

From Thanks by W.S. Merwin

#20 winter solstice 2012

By Catherine White on December 20, 2012 5:31 PM | 1 Comment

I met a friend I have known since I was ten in Tribeca today. We walked through the neighborhood we rarely visit. One stop was at the reincarnation of Zona a Soho store that my family loved in the 80s. The original store seemed to get our family aesthetic of weathered wood, Italian and Mexican travels and the handmade object with an interesting narrative. The new store reminded me of how my own eye has shifted and refocused over the years. E and I lunched in a dark cafe a few blocks south and compared the bookmarks of our lives, children, siblings, and current directions. The afternoon flew by too fast. The dark came too swiftly on the busy holiday city streets.

I walk through my life as though I were a bookmark,
a holder of place, 
An overnight interruption  in somebody else's narrative.

--Charles Wright, from Nine-Panel Yaak River Screen in A Short History of the Shadow (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2002)

#19 winter solstice 2012

By Catherine White on December 19, 2012 10:46 PM | 1 Comment

Nothing's so beautiful as the memory of it 
Gathering light as glass does, 
As glass does when the sundown is on it 
and darkness is still a thousand miles away.

--Charles Wright, from "A Journal of the Year of the Ox" in Zone Journals (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988)

#18 winter solstice 2012

By Catherine White on December 18, 2012 11:30 PM | 3 Comments

I started my day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the last room of the Matisse show. My brother, a friend and I studied how the canvas had been re-stretched. We noted drips and choices of red and quality of line. I was struck by Matisse's assurance in brush stroke and variation in color. Still there are huge mysteries in how he captures light. I walked back to the subway in the grey mist of December, and when I arrived back downtown talked about the shape of cups on a table with a writer. I told the story of how I came to make pots. I described fluid nature when using wet clay and the angles of use when fired. I look for clarity in pale light and find answers by putting stems in a vase. When the sun sets I try to remember to catch the colors in the evening clouds.

"Every thought had a long meaning; every motive had angles and corners, and could be measured. And yet whatever she saw and thought and attempted was still fluid and vague. The shape of a table against afternoon light still held a mystery, awaited a final explanation. You looked for clarity, she wrote, and the answer you had was paleness, the flat white cast that a snowy sky throws across a room."
--Mavis Gallant (Irina from Paris Stories, 2002)

Rough Ideas

daffodil days

slip decoration workshop

table/painting

a table in the morning

spring equinox

running into a new year

#21 winter solstice 2012

#20 winter solstice 2012

#19 winter solstice 2012

#18 winter solstice 2012

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