These are crazy times. Crazy, inevitable times. The whole world is experiencing this time of pandemic, yet because we are isolated, I feel like I’m alone in this. Adding to this surreal feeling is the fact that we have no confirmed cases of Covid-19 in our county. We want to keep it that way.

The Arts Festival and Fisherman’s Picnic have been cancelled. It’s going to be a unique summer in Grand Marais.

I don’t see my house as a prison. I see it as an incubator.

I’m busy all day long. Fortunately, I am a nurse. An essential worker. So I get out several days a week. The rest of the time, I paint. I cook. I read. I write. I dream… of getting the boat out, and physically distancing with my son on a lake.

My friend Mike generously loaned me his extra potters wheel, and I am making a long held dream into a reality.

My pots are not light and refined, but I think they are getting better all the time. More have been broken and recycled than not, but each one is an experience. It teaches me more about how clay feels. How clay acts. How much my clumsy hands can ask of it, and how much it can teach my fingers.

I always like the less refined pots anyway. The ones that look like they have been buried for a thousand years, or have sat in a shipwreck off Sardinia since ancient times.

added1/2021: This pot came out of the kiln today, and I just thought it would fit here

Still, I want to learn how to throw proper vessels and be able to control that effect.

I think of lichen on rock, or gravel on a road and imagine ways to capture something that reminds me of that… textures to catch glaze without appearing contrived or overdone. Forms that reflect something of me and reinterpret my artistic language in a new medium.

At any moment, I may step away from the wheel and open my paints, or sit down to express my thoughts in words.

These months are filled with grief and uncertainty. We are pelleted with mixed messages and opinion. While I do what I can to protect my family and respect my community, there is so much I can’t control. I look for the gifts. The time to reflect and express. The time to learn a new skill. The time to dream of better days to come.

The Reel Hope Project

thereelhopeproject.org

I am working on this 84″ x 42″ diptych. Two 42″ x 42″ panels. Acrylic on wood.

I play. I play with paint, I play with words, I play with sounds. I try to capture something… that’s what I do. I just live, really, and I try to document the details.

When I can let go of the expectation of a product… when I can not think about impressing someone, but just be there, in that moment, expressing that thing… that’s when I feel like I do what I do.

I like to be surprised. I think it takes bravery to just be there and maybe do something unexpected. Without needing to impress anyone. Without needing to please or appeal to anyone.

But I don’t always have that bravery.

I don’t like things to be too perfect or contrived. I don’t want pottery to be too smooth or “pretty”. I don’t want photographs to be too posed. I want to see the imperfections. I want to see the human touch.

Even if this isn’t what I always do, it is what I strive for, and what I admire in art.

Today I walked along a dirt road, and I looked down at the compressed gravel. I imagined what it would look like if I threw a large pot, and then rolled it on the surface of the road. In an area without many larger pebbles. I wonder what it would do in the kiln? How would the glaze collect on the texture from the road, and whatever gravel might stick…

That’s where my mind went today.

A couple of weeks ago, I photographed lichen on an ancient rock face along a river near my house, and I wondered if you could make a glaze that looked like that.

I think about pottery a lot, but I am not a potter. Not yet, anyway.

I had an old box of slides in my garage, but no slide projector. This past week, I tried putting the slides on my Lightbox and shooting them with my phone.

My Dad shot these pictures of me by our house in Liberia when during my senior year of high school.

My first day at GRSBM, September 1979.

Today we went downtown Grand Marais, to Harbor Park, where chalk and disinfecting wipes were left out.