Listening

I listen to three people about my work. George is words. Susan is words and everything else. Sally is everything else, though if I could get her to read the words (and I have, long laborious drafts of long laborious, very important work that I've never done a thing with ((Susan got hooked into reading it, also))), she would be words.

So, when Susan said, "No more plates. The blobs are far more interesting." I listened. I need information from these three people. I like their advice. (I also like to know if someone/a friend or colleague is annoyed or angry, I think those discussions are important and interesting.)

I concentrated on the blobs after she said this. They are actually called, "For No Earthly Reason." And I think they are extremely interesting, even beautiful. They are clay with a copper oxide on the outside, glazed inside. But they are yet another installation that sits in boxes upstairs. I thought I had enough boxes with photographs, books with negatives, but no, here I am, seventy, and I've been amassing more and more boxes with clays stuff in them for the last four years.

But it's holiday time. And there's another sale at Feet of Clay, the studio where I work in Brookline. And the voice of the devil called me into making more plates with dogs on them. I'd taken a couple of months off from working with clay because being at the track, working there in the mornings was so much more important. But, in order to be in the show, in order to try to sell what I made a year or so ago in the plate department, I had to go back there and do something. So, it's been dog plates. 

I had work in a holiday sale just as the economy tanked. And sold very little. (Being in the sale involves paying real money to get in it, doing six points of somewhat work like sending out invitations ((my daughter does this for me since my body rebels)) or wrapping what's sold, setting up your display and taking it down the instant the minute of the show is over.) 

I don't imagine I'll sell much of anything this year, partly because the work there is generally practical -- nice looking plates, cups, casseroles. It's utilitarian and my work isn't. And mine is messy, built in molds with the seams showing pleasantly on the underside. 

My first time around, I made a lot of plates with nude ladies on them, a favorite subject. (When I grew up, there was a large oil paintings of a nude woman lying on a couch and a water color of her in a similar form hanging on the living room. They were done by George Constant, a Greek painter who my parents knew, and they were of his wife. I've always fancied nudes and have done many such self-portraits and lead workshop on the nude, in the nude.) 

And some of the plates had words and drawings, like a bearded man who liked like he was in the dumps with the label, 'I am not depressed' over his head. None of those sold though a few cat and dog bowls went.

At any rate, I've only made seven or eight new bowls, all with dogs, and a couple of small plates this month.

Anyway, enough of bowls and plates (like Susan said), I'm going back to the nude lady figures, an installation (in boxes) of 1,000 small clay figures that would be accompanied by a small grid of a black-and-white photographs of a nude female torso pushed this way and that as if she's clay. And I'm going to work on some odd little figures, nude figures with hands and legs that move, sort of. So, I start working on those soon. The cleanathon is on Sunday, then set-up for the show, and a lull in active work making on the part of most people. But I'll make some figures. They're small. They have no use whatsoever. And they're not plates.