Tea Bowls

As I sit here inhaling my chocolate "pudding pop" (man, that just sounds ridiculous to say) at high noon, my thoughts turn to something my ceramics professor taught me in college.

---Flash back to the Moon Building at Berry College---

Skye is aged 22 years and still hopelessly grasping for the idea of perfection in art. While Bowie plays, she sits for hours in her cellar studio where there's no trace of natural lighting. Using her fingernails, she ardently tweezes renegade brush hairs out of her painting. And then she, being frustrated with that endless task, sets the painting down to pick up a stack of drawings. Then Skye proceeds to sketch, erase, sketch, erase, sketch, and approach the outer limits of seething anger.

It's time for hand building ceramics class, so she places all her pieces down and slams the studio door behind her. Walking up the stairs and into the natural-lit ceramics room, she can't let go of a disappointment all too common amongst artists. Crumpling down onto her stool, she waits for the day's lesson.

"To the Japanese, the tea bowl is most beautiful and valued. They want to see the fingerprints of the artist. Take a look at these," Professor Lykins says as he finds the right pages in a book from his own library.

The tea bowls are squat, wonky and ancient-looking. Not one looks like the other in color, shape, or mass. How could they all be the same beautiful? Or even beautiful at all?

---Today---

That moment is still yesterday. It shattered my perception of what art had to be: flawless. Up to that point, I was fed a steady diet of pictures of artwork by the likes of Rubens, Vermeer, and Caravaggio. What a mistake! Pictures are the equivalent of viewing art under water, across the room, and through a screen. The color is all wrong, actual size is lost, and the hand of the artist becomes glossed over like the page of a coffee table book.

And to that I say, go to the piece itself. Stand in the presence of the work, where the artist stood while he was creating it. I remember the first time I did that at the High Museum; I was looking at a Rothko painting. When I came close enough to see the abundant stray brush hairs, I began to cry. And the same when I saw Pollock at the MOMA in New York City. I could see his fingerprints, footprints, and even cigarette ashes. I could see that the artist had been there.

Not only did this have implications on my art, but on the way I saw people. There's a lot of hoopla surrounding fashion and beauty magazines... about the pictures of airbrushed models destroying the self-image of women. Yes, even that can be treated the same as viewing art in a book: one "raw" and the other distorted reality. I say this not to make "raw" sound shabby in comparison but to deem it more valuable. With a raw person, you can see the fingerprints and the stray brush hairs. Not mistakes, but signs that the Artist was there. Each artwork is as unique as valued.

To go even farther, the same could be said for quirks (aka- the zest of a person). For instance, my dad always wears his Vietnam Veterans hat. Everywhere. Sometimes when we go out to dinner as a family this annoys me, but there is honestly nothing wrong with it. It's just him being him. And the same could be said for one of my friends who eats chocolate pudding with shredded cheese on top. I would NEVER do that in a million years yet she does.