Eye Training

We all learn to make pottery as a handcraft, needing training for the makers' hands. True, of course. To the extent that it is also art, or that the potter wants to make beautiful pots, it takes eye training too.

These days I am watching nature's design work to train my eyes to see form, proportion, color combination...

I see beauty, but also a kind of inevitability. This plant can grow only this way, and has to produce only this beauty.

Perhaps pottery made in a tradition also must look as it comes out traditionally, and feel inevitable.

From Traditional West African Pottery Kuli Village, by Terry deBardelaben.


 I work as a studio potter in the US, where it is all open-ended, where we can borrow from everyone who allows us to, where creativity and inventiveness are valued.  How do we come up with pots that are so right they are inevitable? We need to develop a quality of seeing that sees rightness.

By Heesoo Lee. How did she see that edge?

I'm working on it.

What a pleasure.

Kate Tremel, oh, wow!

Look at this! I just stumbled over this advertising page, in the latest Ceramics Monthly. And I stopped reading, stopped breathing, and my eyes popped. Ooh!

This is a response to art, to the pure beauty of the thing.  It's marvelous, the form, the thoughtful asymmetry, the contained looseness, the organic references, the quiet of it. Oh, and the technical quality.

Who would check if it is a functional pot? But that is what she makes, and the function matters to her. Even better.

It is in all ways to my taste, checks all my aesthetic boxes.

And then I like her attitude towards making pottery (quotes from her website):

"My interest in the vessel is rooted in its relationship to the body...getting dirty is important."

"I have always liked the connection to the history of makers that ceramics affords."

"My fascination with forms in nature and the everyday...nature of pottery provides me with the inspiration for a quiet meditation on the beauty of simple things."

Yes!! Check it out. katetremel.com