Blogs I Love

I wanted to share some blogs with you that have had a particular impact on me in one way or another. Either a singular blog post, or the blog as a whole (or sometimes both). Just as a little thank you to some of the blogs that have really inspired me. Thank you guys for sharing your lives and your art!

Sofia's Dad's Pots
If you're a potter, maybe I don't have to tell you about this blog. He's been featured in Ceramic Arts Daily, and his blog is probably on everyone's blog roll. It's for good reason. Not only are the wax resist decorated pots he makes absolutely stunning, but his blog is such a pleasure to read. In case the title of the blog didn't tip you off, he writes a lot about his daughter, who he calls "The Bug", and his daily experiences with her as well. I don't know how long I've been following him, but when I first found him I was delighted to read about his awesome little girl, her Christmas super hero outfit, her own forays into clay, and her pink ukelele. It was encouraging to me to see a parent that was still an amazing artist. I guess I had this irrational fear that I'd have kids and completely lose myself to motherhood, becoming this Stepford Wife that drives a minivan and goes to PTA meetings. I continue to read his blog both for inspiration in ceramics and to see what I have to look forward to with Maddy.

Gary Jackson: Fire When Ready Pottery
Gary's thrown forms are just beautiful, and oh, all that lovely texture! His blog has given me inspiration for class lessons again and again. I especially appreciated this post about throwing "bowls on purpose". Anyone who's ever jumped on a potter's wheel knows how everything tends to turn into a bowl when you're starting out. I really love all those different bowls!

Jenny Mendes
Oh, her work is so lovely! The colors she uses! I love all the faces and decorative patterns on her stuff, and I like that she moves so easily between functional pottery and sculpture, something I really struggle with. I really have a soft spot for illustrative surfaces on pots:)

Peter's Pottery
I've just recently started following this blog, but I've already saved three of his blog posts to my favorites list. Considering my struggles with glaze testing recently, I found this blog post particularly helpful. Those are some lovely glaze colors!

We Swim with the Fishes
Linda Fahey is another ceramic artist I've followed for a while now. Her surfaces are gorgeous, and I love the seams and lines of those thin slabs she works with. One day, I'm going to own one of her beautiful tumblers. It's not often that you see such precision and skill in both the building and the surface, but her drawings look painstakingly precise and labor intensive, and her pieces are so well formed. Love love love her work! And I love all her whales!

A Plate a Day
I look forward to Mignon Khargie's daily plate posts with relish. She has such a great eye. Many many many of her posts end up on my Pinterest boards! It's because of this post  that I've discovered and fallen head over heels for the work of Natalie Choux and Lili Scratchy.

Pink Cheeks Studios
Finally, this last blog is not a ceramic artist, but a fabric artist. She lives here in Indiana, and I've been lucky enough to see her work in person at several craft shows, though I've always been too shy to actually introduce myself. Nichol Brinkman recently curated a plushy/stuffie artist show and gave a talk about her own work, and she published her talk in installments on her blog. It's a very personal and inspiring series of essays that I'd recommend to anyone. I especially enjoyed her post here about her time in Prague learning about puppet making, and her realization that "art doesn't have to be heavy, you can and should make things just because you can.  Joy and whimsy are important." That was something I've really needed to hear of late. You are sure to enjoy reading these essays, and you will certainly fall in love with Nichols awesome dolls. They have so much personality!


I really hope you'll check out all of these blogs. They are some of my favorites, and I think everyone should see and enjoy them. I enjoyed sharing them with you!

To all you clay bloggers: Thank you.

I hadn't really realized it, but I've had this blog for quite a while now. 3 years, more or less. I haven't looked at the exact date, but I was kind of surprised it's been that long. This blog has gotten me through a lot, both professionally and personally. When I graduated from college, I went from being surrounded by a community of artists every day, to being alone in an apartment, jobless, with no studio space. Those first few months were deeply depressing, and I spend a lot of time sitting in my bathrobe, listlessly surfing the internet. Slowly, I started looking at posts on Ceramic Arts Daily, then other pottery blogs. I got inspired. I set up a wheel and a workspace in my living room, and I started making pots. And I started blogging about it.

When I felt lonely and disconnected from everyone, I found a wonderful community of ceramic artists and their blogs. I've been lurking around many of them for longer than I've had this blog, but I never had the nerve to comment. I felt a little star struck, in awe of all the beautiful work I saw that seemed so far out of my reach. I never thought I could be as good as the potters whose work I drooled over, but I kept looking and reading. I got a twitter account, and found many of them there. Some of them were even kind enough to talk to me. Now potters seem to be on every social media platform, and it's just wonderful. I have access to a studio now, and I get to spend time with other potters in real life, but I always come back to the internet, and the artists I so admire and look up to. I think I've learned more from bloggers and youtube videos than I did in all my undergraduate classes combined. I've certainly grown a lot, and learned some amazing things! And I learn new techniques every day. It's like a dream come true for a girl who lived at the library as a child, endlessly reading. I have a lifetime of learning right here at my fingertips. And for a girl who is shy in real life, I have a community of people I can talk to, and ask questions of, who share this passion with me.

With this new year starting, I made a resolve to blog more regularly, and to keep up with my blog reader list. It takes some effort, and I don't always post every day, but it's been really great so far. Now that I know how much I appreciate that people out there occasionally read this thing, I've been going out of my way to leave comments on blogs that particularly stood out to me. I want to be sure that you guys know how much you inspire me every day. I want to be better about letting you know I appreciate you, your work, and what you choose to share on the internet with people like me who are starting out. You keep us going. Some of you have even stopped by and given me words of encouragement. That means a lot to me, you just have no idea!

So, for all you muddy bloggers out there, thank you for sharing your lives with me! Keep up the good work, and maybe one day we'll get to meet face to face.

I'm out of time for today, but tomorrow I'd like to share some of my favorite blogs and blog post with you. I hope you'll all appreciate them as much as I have.

Student projects, and blogging is a pain in the butt

I'm really not so great at this whole daily blogging thing. It's all well and good to upload a few pics from my cell phone everyday. But to actually write something, something that is thought out and is something of quality... Well, maybe i'm just shooting a bit high. With Maddy around, a lot of my typing is one handed these days, and therefore fairly rushed. Or, its done on my iPhone, which is a royal pain to type at any length with. Oh well. This is still better than posting one or two sparse blog posts a month. I just miss the days of actually enjoying the writing part of blogging. I really do love to write, and if you look at my first several blog posts on this blog (look at this wordy crap!), they were insanely lengthy with no pics at all. One day, I'll find a balance. In the mean time, it's just nice to have a record of what's going on.

My teaching session is over, so I get a week off before the new one starts. I'm hoping to get the surfaces done on all the bottle forms I've thrown recently over the break. I think I have six in all.

Check out some of the member work from this session! I've got some very talented people in my classes.

Connie's dragon. 

Mike B's pineapple vase. I had no part in helping with this project - this was all Mike!

Shonda is making a series of 3 beavers. Pretty adorable, right?

My purpose as a blog.

I've been giving this some thought, and I've decided what the focus of this blog will be (rather than aimless rambling, which is my usual tendency). I'm going to use this to document my process, both as an artist and as a small business owner. That might sound kind of stuffy, but hear me out.

I started going to school for art 8 years ago. I was first a painter, and then a ceramicist. At some point, I knew I wanted to make a living as an artist - I couldn't see myself holding a normal 9 to 5, and I'd always loved creating things, whether it was made out of paint or popsicle sticks. Towards the end of last year, I opened an Etsy store and began selling simple recycled ceramics online. I was just kind of tickled that I could take drawings of creepy bugs and octopus tentacles and whatever else I wanted, and pop them onto fancy teacups and thrift store coffee mugs. It also gave me an opportunity to draw, something I love but don't always do when I'm making stuff out of clay.

I really enjoyed being able to make some extra money with the Etsy shop, but I couldn't give it my full attention because I was focusing on my final year of art school. After graduating, I finally told myself "This is it. If you're gonna do this for a living, do it now, while you have the time. You have no classes, no job, and no kids. If you don't do it now, you never will." So, I set up my studio in the kitchen, put new stuff up on Etsy, and applied for a juried show (Oranje Indy 2009). I started researching how to make my online store better, and tips for art and craft fair displays. I started trawling thrift stores for ceramics, wheel throwing some pieces myself, and finding used objects I could fix up for my table displays at the next fair. And some of my serious art (not the thrift store stuff) actually started selling on Etsy (Woohoo! People like my work!)

I get really excited whenever I'm researching anything I'm into, so I've been a little obsessive with this whole starting a business thing. But I'm learning a lot as I go. I read up on microloans for new small business owners, and researched ways to make signs, banners, and the best place to get business cards made (my vote so far is moo.com, by the way - those mini cards are just too sweet!)

I'm looking forward to the day when I can look back on this blog's beginning and say to my husband, "Hey Nich! Remember back when you were screenprinting old t-shirts in a leaky basement, and I was wheelthrowing cups in the kitchen next to the litterbox?" (don't ask). I'll be able to see where I've been, both as an artist and as an entrepreneur. Hopefully I can find a balance between business and pleasure, and not lose my soul in the process. And hopefully I can share the things I make, what inspires me, and whatever new processes I'm playing around with as well.

And maybe someone else will come across this blog and learn from my mistakes, get inspired, and do something they love too.

So wish me luck! This is just the beginning.

So...

This is a blog. I've tried doing this many, MANY times. I've had an opendiary, a myspace, and a livejournal. I never seem to keep it up. Not that I don't love to write - I find it wholeheartedly addictive - it's just that when it seems no one is really reading, I retreat to my pen and ink hardbound journals and sketchbooks to get it all out. I have stacks and stacks of them. I actually collect cool looking journals, and anyone who knows me really well knows a gift of a blank book will never go to waste.

But then I suddenly want to share what I've written with someone. Some of the thoughts are deeply personal and private, and not to be shared. But some of them, I don't know, I just want someone else to know that I have them. So I put scanned pages in my artwork, or I hand make a book and fill it with entries and drawings and send it to a girl in Mexico as part of a swap. And I feel a bit better, but still.

I feel guilty for wanting to share every moment of my life with the world. I feel guilty for wanting the attention (I so desperately do). I feel guilty for being hopelessly addicted to the internet, checking my Facebook sometimes every hour, posting pics of my daily activities, updating my status message hoping it's clever. I'm really insecure, and I want validation. I want to be a rock star, dammit. How stupid is that? I went into the wrong profession. Potters can't be rock stars. Rock stars don't make dog bowls and coffee mugs with dinosaurs on them.

I also feel guilty because now, everything I do on the net feels like a promotion on some level. I feel like now that I have a online store, everything I do is an advertisement. I'm trying to sell not just my work, but myself. If you think I'm cool enough, if you liked that last tweet I posted, maybe you'll visit my store. Maybe you'll like my stuff. Maybe I can pay a bill or buy some new supplies. Please?

I don't know if I can do this. My brain is so split. I want to genuinely share myself with others, my experiences and ideas. If I didn't, I wouldn't have become an artist. But I've got this notion of selling out, and I've also got this habit of spending more time on the internet than I do making art, because I've always been a fabulous procrastinator, and honestly it's such a lovely waste of time. It's so EASY. I've got 13 tabs open right now just waiting for my attention. If I keep this up, I won't have to worry about selling out because I WON'T HAVE ANY NEW ART.

But the siren call of blogging is beckoning me. I can't help it. Maybe someone else will know how I feel. Maybe someone else watched that killer Amanda Palmer video and thought "Good God, if I were only 1/10th as cool as that."

Good God, if only were 1/10th as cool. Then maybe I'd be confident enough to make art, instead of just drooling over the cool stuff other people are doing.

More to come. Maybe even pictures of art, if I make any.