An inner connection between this little tea pot and making yarn from my goats:
This little tea pot came to me as a birth-day gift from the owners of my favorite little tea shop, Zen Tara Tea. Guy & Methee knew I was drooling over this tea pot for months. It became an instant treasure. Thank you Guy and Methee.
So it just came to me why I like it so much, I am really attracted to both visual and kinesthethic pleasures in one package. I think it is truly a long standing inner artist thing with me. At different periods of my life I would have called myself a painter and a potter/ceramicist (back and fourth several times), now I identify with the fiber art. However, in each period, I had a desire to create from both senses.
- The concept is pretty obvious for the pottery... people that love to create with clay must feel comfortable with both the tactile aspects of building & throwing the clay and the visual aspects of working with shapes in space and the colors of those shapes. As a matter of fact, if you are having a cup of tea in a room full of potters, you may hear them discuss this very inner leaning one way or the other - it seems for most it is not equally distributed passion. For some potters, the clay is simply an interesting canvass for what they can do with glaze and color. For others it is the opposite, its all about the joy of seeing that wet clay take shape between your own fingers.
- To understand the painter connection, I must explain a bit about myself. I have spent time learning to paint and draw realistally, but I think I hit my most interesting stride when I let go a little and did things a bit more abstractly in graduate school. I would like to revisit that some day. The point is I think I am more like Jackson Pollock than Rembrandt. Not that I made things that were unrecognizable -- its not about the subject matter at all. It is that I feel that Pollock had more of a full body physical relationship with his media while Rembrandt was an accomplishment of brain to hand. I'm sure its not exclusive either way. But, it is intuitively clear from looking at the resulting work that with Pollock, there was for him an emphasis and joy that was about how that paint felt as it left his hand and met the canvass.
- Fiber art is very much about color and how something feels -- that is what it is all about from the art part. Yes, it can also be craft. You can produce things that are not just to be observed, but also to be used, worn, knitted, felt, experienced... but it is a really perfect marriage of color and texture. The goats in my pastures are shorn, skirted, washed and dyed by me. I am working with the animals a bit like they are my living media. Then I am shaping and adding color to thier fiber like a canvas... and I throughly enjoy it.
So the direct line from tea pot to yarn is this... The perfect tea pot - one that has beautiful form, proportioned parts, visual flow of parts to body, beauty in its texture and color, and ease of use is the Holy Grail of the functional ceramic work; it is masterpiece --- so always be on your personal search for your perfect tea pot, it is a great joy. Even though I didn't make this teapot (wish I did), its my personal perfect pot. When looking at it, it told me why I love to do the art I am now doing -- making fiber art from the fiber on the goats in my own back yard. I think I owe a better understanding of myself to observations of the beautiful little teapot.
Karen
http://www.zentaratea.com/
