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.