Drive and publicity!

Working towards goals is one of the most self empowering things you can do in your day to day life. Be they goals in fitness, education, ceramics, painting, music or competative TV staring (well maybe not so much the later) striving to better yourself is a HUGE opportinity for generating happiness. 

For my first year and a half here my work was almost 90% spontanious. I might sit down to the wheel and say, "I'm going to make a bowl", and sure enough a bowl of some type would be the result. I don't see any problem with this, however recently I have been focusing much more on creating with a designed purpose. Sketching out pots, looking through Ceramics Monthly for inspirational forms constantly, and in general being more demanding of my own creative process. The result of this is an ever growing collection of work ready to be bisqued, and the need to set goals.



Greenware ready and waiting for the bisque.



Living here in Japan I feel fairly disconnected from the pottery communities I spend most of my days reading about, and the language barrier between Japan's pottery community and myself is quite large (this is mostly my own fault for choosing gardening and pottery over studying all the time). That all being said, I've recently really been focused on finding international art competitions and calls for entry to work towards. I like having a challenge or a goal to push for, and the addition of a deadline really helps to accelerate my drive sense of purpose while in the studio. The show I'm currently working at applications for is a call for demitasse and saucer designs. So I'm expiramenting.



If you like art of all sorts, and would like to see a fantastic digital collection of up and comming artists check out artascent.com. Art Ascent is a great sight. Their goal is to create themed competitions for international artists to have a chance to share their work with a wider community. If you are an up and comming artist I can't recommend them enough. They put out a lot of different calls for work and their themes are ussually really interesting. My work is up on their web site, and later I will be featured in a paper publication as well. Can't wait to see a hard copy of that. The other featured artists are really great and totally worth checking out as well.

I think that's about all the news from the studio this week. Be on the lookout in the near future for more news, and hopefully a firing soon!

Go create something! Stop thinking about it and do it!