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Brinson's Race Barn by Lori_Buff
During a break in a recent workshop with Ryan McKearley I started painting on one of the Rustic Buildingplates. One of the workshop participants started watching what I was doing and admired the work. Then she asked “are you an artist or a potter?” What kind of question is that?
I threw the plate, so clearly that makes me a potter, but I’m also painting on the plate which would make me an artist. Maybe I’m a ceramic artist. I know some artists don’t include pottery as art, even though it is one of the oldest art forms. For some, it loses credibility as art because it is functional. On the other hand, we do raku, which is typically not functional.
I recently read Janet McGregor Dunn’s blog post about how she was treated by a fine artists group. They excluded her because the group does not consider pottery to be art, no matter how artistic her pottery. It doesn’t make sense to me. I think potters are artists and crafts people. However, some people reason that because potters don’t necessarily know what a piece is going to look like until it’s removed from the kiln, then they aren’t artists. Because we aren’t completely in control of the final product? Where it’s true that a potter also benefits from being a chemist, testing often lets us know fairly accurately how a piece should look when it’s complete. I could argue that thought often painters have an idea of what the painting will look like, many have expressed having issues determining when a painting is “done.” I would argue that there are many types of art where the end product is different from what the artist initially envisioned.
Ceramics are included in the definition of visual arts and visual arts are included in the humanities – that makes us all humanists. I wonder what types of questions that would raise when printed on a business card or used as the answer to the question “what do you do for a living?”
I don’t imagine I will be able to solve the debate in this article, or maybe ever in my life, so maybe we should think outside the box as my friend Gary Rosenberg suggests in his video about people grouping.
This pot was inspired by a frustrating experience. It doesn’t matter what the frustration was, the important part was that it was there, and I was unhappy and having doubts about my chosen career. Artists see a good deal of these frustrations, some are financial, and some are driven by the act of trying to get ideas out of our heads and into our medium of choice. Some times the frustrations are with the silly things the government does, like funding a Bridge to Nowhere while cutting funding for the arts in schools. And sometimes it’s frustration with ourselves, breaking a pot or not having a camera available when a great picture is there in front of us waiting to be shot. The chips in the dark part of the pot are about all of these frustrations chipping away at the foundation of who I am. As the eye moves up the pot we see the chips lessening as the colors brighten. This is showing my resolve to rise above the dark and the chipping into a better place of peace and happiness.
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