Author: Catherine White

#13 summer summit 2021

In the studio today I made dust prints on teacups. This involves sifting wood ash on my table surface and scribbling through it then pressing/rolling the cups into the words on the table. I work from a specific text, a poem that I have recently read or one written by my mother and found in my archive of her words. The process feels like a mix of a meditation on a poem and a form of time travel that allows me to visit the mind of my mother. Whether it’s a poem about walking in Greenwich Village on a Sunday or her worries about what her children would do with her collection of books, when I get going with the transcription it’s as if the words come so fast I cannot stop for spelling; sometimes the words come out as squiggles or straight lines or like the bitter sweet vines that tangle with the milkweed. The more I dig in my mother’s work and play with asemic text I think the line between poems and drawing is very thin.

“I’m working as fast as I can I can’t stop to use periods / sometimes I draw straight lines on the page because the words are too slow.”

-C. K. Williams, from Yours, in “Poems 1963-1983,” Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988

calendula solstice

#12 summer summit 2021

Last summer’s woodfiring had a lot of experiments. In January 2020 at STARworks in North Carolina I had spent three weeks making small clay body batches based on wild North Carolina clays in different combinations. As I made pots with each mix I not only numbered them so I could trace back to my notes, but I made them different scales and shapes so that they were easily identifiable. In this year of staying home I am working with one clay body, using a few different materials for surface prints.

In the spring the New York Times asked 75 artists, “Did you make anything that mattered?” “Who and what comforted you?” “Which moments will you remember?” “Which ideas would you like to forget?” “What would a do-over look like?” “What’s still on your to-do list as ‘normal’ comes into focus?”

If they asked me I would say I don’t know yet if what I made this year mattered, but I am grateful for the habit of the studio. I have thought of yellow as my color of protection. I bought a pot of yellow pansies at the grocery store. I loved having them on the porch and gained strength as I glimpsed them out of the corner of my eye. Now as they fade in the heat I am studying the Calendula each day as I make my way to the studio, gaining strength and commitment from the power of the yellow blossoms.

Sean Scully (artist)
“Lately, I have fallen in love with yellow. At the moment, I seem to be using it in every painting. I’m not sure I understand why, though maybe it offers a kind of protection against the cold, or against the sorrows of Covid. One of my new paintings is called “Yellow Yellow.” Another is called “Wall Orange” and has blurs of yellow and orange seeping into each other. Yellow is complicated.”

From The New York Times:
75 Artists, 7 Questions, One Very Bad Year [Linked]
Musicians, authors, directors, comedians, painters and playwrights open up about trying to be creative, and sometimes failing, in quarantine.

poppies solstice

#11 summer summit 2021

When I went to France in 1977 I did not take a camera. I wanted to experience things without the framing by a lens. Focused on being a painter I thought a camera would interfere. Three years later when I went back for a summer I brought a camera and took photos of all the things that had stuck in my mind–the mountain, Mont Sainte-Victoire, the Chateau Noir, a camping trip, and my roommates. A friend recently reminded me of a hitchhiked car ride. She spoke much better French than I did. Our ride was with an angry man who hated the Arabs and spewed spit on his windshield as he vented. He dropped us off far from our destination. I remember the look of the trees and she remembers the angry words. I think about how sometimes foreign traveling without speaking the language allows you to experience a place in more childlike ways. You cannot adopt another person’s attitudes–you have to trust the visuals and your instincts.

When I work in the studio I try to work in that childlike way– working with my visual instinctive language. I don’t worry about the rules, but follow my nose, pursuing the energy and charting the tactile clues. It’s like working in a different language, one that resides below the radar that a camera can capture.

Now I live my life through my camera. I take photos of the wildflowers on my walks, progress in the garden, forms in process, and the pots as I imagine than to be used: the bud before the blossom, the fallen petals after the bloom. If I wonder when something happened I scroll through my photo archive to date the event. I love the freedom of a digital camera. I can take multiples of an idea. I can shoot really bad images just as markers to later work from. I am an artist in my own home trying to see it as a traveler in a foreign place.

In the past we listened to photographs. They heard our voice speak. Alive, active. What had been distance was memory. Dusk came, Pushed us forward, emptying the laboratory each night undisturbed by Erasure.

– Barbara Guest, from Photographs [LINK]

onion grass solstice

#10 summer summit 2021

Before I had the visual language for pots I loved the raw materials. If my father was still here he might tell you about the time I tried to wash the car with mud or the times we spent making pinch pots out of clay found by the beach in Montauk. He might tell you about how he encouraged me to make a glaze out of crushed Coke bottles and Elmers glue. These experiences are like stories from another age. When we cleared out my parents loft I went through their cabinet of pottery. I could recite the history of the pitcher from Mexico, the albarello from Italy, the blue and white bowl from China, and the George Ohr from Biloxi, Mississippi. My brothers knew my parents loved these things, but they sat on the shelves like obsolete trinkets from another age. These objects spoke of my material loves, a special language moving beyond the holes in my socks and into the wild stems and flowers we picked from the roadside and put in odd vases.

RELICS

Before I knew words for it
I loved what was obsolete
crumpled at the foot of a closet
lost in the street
left out in the rain
in its wet story
from another age
in a language that was lost
like the holes in socks
I loved the rust with its steering wheel
in midair above the forbidden
chassis and the mouths of tunnels
the eyes of dust
no floor with its pedals
that I was never to touch
because all of it was
dangerous
and the touch of it
would never come off
though I could tell that no one
really believed that
as it stood there behind
the garage that had floated to us
like an ark from the days of horses
and I stood at the corner and listened

– W.S. Merwin, from The Moon Before Morning, (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). Copyright 2014 by W.S. Merwin. [LINK]

rough ideas

#9 summer summit 2021

I have been looking at a group of bottles on our dining room table, each one from a different firing, each with a different focus on form and surface. On my studio docket today was to make a new series of bottles. I often think about still lives. I remember an interrupted conversation I once had with Gwyn Hanssen Pigot. We were at the Garth Clark Gallery in New York City and I asked her if all the pots in a single still life parade came from the same firing. I wondered if pots ever hung around her studio waiting for the right mates to come along as she composed her parades. Her Australian friend interrupted us–admonishing me as if I didn’t understand how successful Gwyn was–so I never got to return to the conversation. Gwyn was inspired by Morandi’s still lives. When I take photos I often think about his painterly universe of form and structure. I imagine him looking hard at his objects as if any extra effects had been scraped away, as if the emptiness of the canvas was filled through his objects.

Over there’s the ur-photograph,
Giorgio Morandi, glasses pushed up on his forehead,
Looking hard at four objects—
Two olive oil tins, one wine bottle, one flower vase,
A universe of form and structure.

-Charles Wright, from Looking Around

garlicscape solstice

#8 summer summit 2021

The thunder feels green in the moments before a looming thunderstorm. I make a loop outside to make sure nothing was left out that can’t get wet or won’t blow away. I close barn doors to the studio and cover my work in progress for the night. These are June walking loops. They reflect the garlic I am growing–even if this year the garlic lays flat like the deer have been sleeping on it. Besides the culinary uses I grow garlic because I love these loops of the scapes . These loops resonate in my fingers and through my brush like the Music this variety is named for.

Green was the silence, wet was the light
the month of June trembled like a butterfly

-Pablo Neruda, from Sonnet XL

blueberries solstice

#7 summer summit 2021

On Monday mornings my routine is to take a walk by myself–no dog, no husband–to set the tone for the week. But this morning as I headed out I stopped to pick blueberries, then take photos, and wash tools in the studio, a different way of setting the week’s tone. Over the last 15 months we have had a few trees come down or need to be taken down. One of them was a white pine our daughter Zoë planted as a seedling brought home from preschool. When the top of it blew off in a big windstorm it caused major car damage. The good news is now that it’s gone more sun reaches the blueberries.

My friend tree
I sawed you down
but I must attend
an older friend
the sun

-Lorine Niedecker, My Friend Tree

poppies rough ideas solstice

#6 summer summit 2021

I remember after my father died when I packed up all the pots I had made that my parents had saved at their loft over the years. I was surprised to see the beginnings of forms and motifs some of which I am still trying to capture. When I think back to those early attempts at making pots it’s like being pre-literate. I didn’t have the words to describe how a pot filled space, what it’s volume was, or why it was enticing. I often wonder where did the ideas come from. In a few cases I can define a specific influence. I recollect a dinner with Robert Ellison when I was in high school. He showed my parents and I some of his George Ohr pots. My dad said “I remember the things Catherine made after I showed her Picasso’s ceramics. I can’t wait to see what she makes after seeing these twisted and inventive pots.” Today in the studio I was tired of my go-to solutions. Instead I wanted to work as if I was digging potatoes — my hands feeling in the dirt without seeing , yet finding the hard shape of the prized new potato.

“Children make up the best songs, anyway,” he [Tom Waits] says. “Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.” This openness is what every artist needs. Be ready to receive the inspiration when it comes; be ready to let it go when it vanishes. He believes that if a song “really wants to be written down, it’ll stick in my head. If it wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else’s song.” “Some songs,” he has learned, “don’t want to be recorded.” You can’t wrestle with them or you’ll only scare them off more. Trying to capture them sometimes “is trying to trap birds.” Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like “digging potatoes out of the ground.” Others are sticky and weird, like “gum found under an old table.” Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful “to cut up as bait and use ’em to catch other songs.”

-From Elizabeth Gilbert’s terrific [Link:] 2002 GQ profile of Tom Waits

rough ideas

#5 summer summit 2021

I often say I feel like making work for the wood kiln is like a collaboration. But I think working with any material is a collaboration. I begin with an intention, a scale, a feeling, a form and sometimes a drawing. The next step is getting the clay to do what I imagined and the question becomes, Does it match my preconception? Today I had tall narrow vases in mind— what I made looks like I was collaborating with Dr Seuss rather than smooth stoneware clay. In the studio there is a moment when acceptance is required— the vases aren’t exactly what I intended but they have a life of their own. They show what wet clay can be like; what gravity can do. These pots moved in a direction I did not expect. It takes courage to respond. The response is what allows the forms to come to life. I react to the shape and remain open to the way it slumps, wobbles, or cracks. I ask how can I help it along so that I realize the idea.

“It’s a collaboration, making a spoon. As it is with making a vessel out of clay or a sculpture out of steel. To impose your will and force, to demand the material do what you want, take the shape you want, bow to your preconceptions for what it should be—it will not work this way. A spoon might exist in the end, but something will be missing from it, and you will feel that lack in your hand when you stir the soup. A humility is required, a willingness, in any moment, to realize, this is moving in a direction I did not anticipate, and the courage to respond to what is coming into being. To ask and attend, what shape is being asking for, how can I help it be that? This is the way we are elevated by the process and in the process.”
–Nina MacLaughlin [Link]

solstice

#4 summer summit 2021

I have been working on shifting my attitude towards weeding, moving it from a chore to an adventure. After listing to a podcast by Margaret Roach on A Way to Garden I have been calling it treasure hunting. I am looking for seedlings instead of just pulling out unwanted plants even if that’s what’s involved. The other morning I was happily discovering Mexican sunflowers and pineapple sage when I came across what I thought was an aggressive giant weed. When I pulled it out I was pleasantly surprised to find it was a radish gone to seed.

“My idea of gardening is to discover something wild in my wood and weed around it with the utmost care until it has a chance to grow and spread.”
– Margaret Bourke-White