Saturday, June 4, 2011

Judging Our Work

I'm taking a six week pottery class. Jessie is a very talented young woman in the class. Every piece she's made both by hand and on the wheel looks like it should be on display in a museum.

Jessie comes from a family of artists. Her grandmother was a water colorist. In going through her grandmother's things after her death, Jessie said she found some wonderful paintings that her grandmother evidently didn't like. Sometimes Jessie found paintings on both sides of the paper, and sometimes the paintings had been discarded for scrap. Jessie said she went through her grandmother's discards, and she framed paintings she loved to display in her house.

After someone else in class groaned about how pitiful his work was, our instructor, Kate, said she's noticed we often don't realize how good our work is. Everyone else's work looks better, we think, than ours. We're all guilty of comparing our work to others'.

In our last class, Kate asked us to get all our pieces together to glaze. I saw one vase I thought was so beautiful I consciously thought, "I wish this were mine." I picked it up, turned it over to see whose initials were carved into the bottom, and there they were -- JD, mine. Under pressure to crank out a piece the week or so before, I'd rolled out a slab, chosen a stamp for design, and attached a bottom. It was a simple piece I'd done quickly, and after it went through the fire, I loved it. Hopefully I'll still love it after the glaze is applied.

We are not in position to evaluate our own work. Just do it. Let it sit a week. When you go back to read your manuscript, you might be surprised.

originally written 10-15-10