poppies – Rough Ideas

#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]

#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