Art and Fear (the Ceramics Lesson)

A plug for an old fave, Bayles' and Orland's Art & Fear.

The famous anecdote from Art & Fear about the ceramics class:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A," forty pounds a "B," and so on. Those being graded on "quality," however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an "A."

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

When I first read this I was almost incredulous, like angels had been culling my life for cautionary tales.

When I was in art school, I was required to take a ceramics class, and I really didn't want to. The ceramics teacher was a great guy, a guy named Bob Epstein who was also a photographer. He and I would encounter each other in the Photo Department darkroom sometimes, late at night, as we worked. So, tongue half in cheek, I made a deal with Bob—I told him I didn't have any time for ceramics and I asked him whether he would give me a passing grade in the class if I managed to make one perfect pot. He said that's not really something you can do, because pottery is a matter of process and progress, of the evolution of your skills and your understanding of the materials, and it's not really static and simple in the way I was conceiving of it—words to that effect. But he knew I was committed to photography and that it was all I was interested in, and that I didn't want to spend any time or effort on ceramics. He could easily have been offended by me and my attitude, and he had the authority to insist that I take his class more seriously. But he stepped aside and got out of my way instead. He knew I spent a lot of time at school, in the darkroom till late at night, so he knew I was focused and worked hard.

I did make one mug, working very carefully. He thought it was too regular, bland, with no respect for the clay, and naturally he was right. But when we fired it, the glaze from the upper half of the mug ran down, one color into the other. Bob said that was part of the process—fortuitous mistakes—part of the elemental aspect of the materials. My one mug might have been a good effort for a maiden try by a rank beginner, but it wasn't perfect by any definition. Bob, being kind, passed me anyway, because he knew my heart was in photography and he didn't want to cause any trouble for me.

And then ten years later Art & Fear comes along, and it has this little anecdote that seemed to be a direct admonition for my little display of hubris, of arrogance, my little gambit, with Bob. By that time I had realized, of course, that Bob was just being generous, knowing I wasn't going to learn anything from him or from the clay anyway, because I was close-minded and wasn't going to put any time into it or explore it openly.

Clay was not the medium for me—I knew that. But perhaps I could have been more mature and more open to what I could have learned from Bob. I was pretty arrogant in those days. I thought I knew everything. Of course after half a lifetime of additional learning I know much, much less now—fortunately for me.

Here's the "perfect" mug. It's the physical embodiment, from my very own life, of the little anecdote in Ted and David's book.

Another helpful book on some of the same subjects as Art & Fear is Steven Pressfield's The War of Art.

The thing in the background in the picture, if you're wondering, is a British officer's sword from the Crimean War.

Mike
(Thanks to Bob E.)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Harsh reality

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

John W: "Ahhh. Well done Mr. J. Two mementos of hubris in the same image."

John Camp: "One of the coolest guys I ever met was a potter named Warren MacKenzie, who died earlier this month at 93. He was pretty famous (for a potter) and was much respected in Japan. He started out as a standard art student, in Chicago, I think, but read a book by a guy who was probably the preeminent Western potter of the 20th Century, Bernard Leach of England. MacKenzie apprenticed himself to Leach for three years, and did almost nothing but production pottery (because the pottery studio had to support itself) and in that time really learned how to do the work. Much of the 'art' of pottery comes with the physical act of throwing the clay, and, as with your mug, accident; you get serendipitous beauty. (There's been a tradition in Japan, which is ground zero for the most beautiful pots in the world, of collecting production pots made in Korea—they are made hastily and fairly crudely, but some are stunningly beautiful.)

"Anyway, MacKenzie came back to America, slowly became accepted as one of the two or three best potters in the country. He lived not far from me in the St. Croix Valley in Minnesota, and one of the cool things about him was, he had, like, a shed where he'd leave his pots, with a basket to put your money in if you wanted to buy one. Nobody was there to supervise or make sure you paid. You usually never even saw anyone. This continued even for a while after he was becoming a museum-collectible artist, but eventually he had to stop it, I guess, because people would come and take as much as they could, and he learned that they were re-selling it for much more than they paid him.

"I bought a half-dozen or so pieces from him over the years, and once confessed that I'd broken one of them, and he laughed and said that he was delighted that we were actually using the pot, which was what it was for. (We kept it full of wooden spoons on the kitchen counter, and I snatched a spoon out of it and managed to pull the pot over on the tile kitchen floor. I almost caught it, but didn't quite.) Anyway, pottery is as engaging as photography, but you can't do everything.

"While you might look back on yourself and think what you did was arrogant or smug, I don't think so—I think you were choosing your life's work."

Blake Andrews: "Art & Fear is an old favorite and it's nice to see it resurface from time to time. Co-author David Bayles lives just up the road from me near Eugene. He keeps a very low profile and is probably better known in distant art circles than locally. But I did seek him out a few years back and then got to know him a bit. He's still making photos, and engaged with the artistic struggle, and also Parkinson's. An amazing man. Thanks for sharing his book."

Greg Heins: "When I first encountered Art & Fear, I could only wish—passionately—that I'd read it about 30 years earlier. But soon I remembered that had I done so, my mind would have been closed to what it was trying to tell me.

"It's the first book I recommend to young photographers."

Tom: "It was a pottery teacher who taught me how to see light. The regular teacher under whom we studied painting and drawing was away and so the pottery guy stood in. He gathered us round and produced his portfolio from his student years. We spent a couple of hours discussing where the light came from and how it illuminated each subject. It was the single most important art lesson I ever took."

Moose: "Re 'A plug for an old fave, Bayles' and Orland's Art & Fear....' Sheesh, forgot to read it last time you recommended it. In my Nook. Now, 'Another helpful book on this subject is Steven Pressfield's The War of Art.' I second that recommendation. I also suggest Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist."

Comments

[Len Salem]

Fortuitous mistake indeed!
Had the colours not run it would have been a boring grey & black mug.
Now for me it depicts a mountain range silhouetted against a grey sky. A mug made by a photographer into a work of art...

[Grant]

I rather like the "perfect mug".
Time to do some "reflexive shopping" for a potter's wheel and kiln.
Sorry about the ". We're Canadian.

[Herman]

In college there was a class in psycho-ceramics:
It was for crackpots.

[John Hagen]

The hardest thing to teach a driven photography student is that the other subjects matter, especially if they are in a degree granting institution.

There is a wisdom to curriculum planners that ask students to take classes outside of their field.

[Jeron]

I wish I had been more mature and more open to what I could have learned from him. I was pretty arrogant in those days. I thought I knew everything

This. Yes, this is my younger self. I'm afraid it's natural, you know so little when you're young, you've got no idea how much knowledge there is, and the little bit of expertise is the one and only relevant thin worth knowing.

As the decades piled up, the most important thing I learned was that I know very little. And I respect the knowledge of others.

Alas, it would have been nice had I learned that when I was in my 20s..

[Patrick Dodds]

That's a lot of pencils...?

[Robert Roaldi]

I like that mug.

[Peter Cooke]

Just accept a "like" and a knowing nod for this reflection. If only...

[Speed]

Warren McKenzie was mentioned in Grit -- a book recommended by Mike last November.

The pictured mug is better than the ones I see offered for $15 to $20 on Etsy. I always thought the colors were supposed to run like that.

[Steve D]

So in ceramics is a legitimate learning process to... Splay an Clay?

I apologize for the above comment... sometimes I just can't help myself.

[William Schneider]

Substitute "drawing" for "pottery", and you'd have a carbon-copy of the situation for my photo degree.

[Stan B.]

John H-

Sometimes, the hardest thing to teach a driven photography student is that the subjects on the other side of the lens matter...

[Richard Tugwell]

"Take lots and lots of photographs of everything, anything. Edit them rigorously and regularly, keeping only the ones that mean something to you. Rinse and repeat. Eventually you will find that you only take photographs that illustrate your personal vision. And you won't take so many"

Can't remember who said that - might have been me..

[Martin D]

That is a fine mug. Glad it is still with you. And I love the mystery of all those pencils ... !

[Rob Campbell]

The mug's quite lovely; perhaps you could take another look at the medium and do it as a side-adventure, a second string to your bow?

Let's face it: unless you get very lucky in the photographic art world, there's not a whole heap of bread to be made (by the great majority of players) in other interesting aspects of professional photography, especially if trying to get into, or back into it later in life. The trouble with photography, of course, is that it won't let go, even if you want to do that. Once bitten, bitten.

I went through a period after retiring where I felt quite happy to put all the grief behind me, but in a few years, I'd have loved to get right back in up to my neck. It's not your average job.

[Ernest J. Zarate]

I am sure this is just me... but I notice some disconnect between yesterday's note from Old One to Youth, and today's offering. Yesterday, you advised the Youth to determine their One Path, and follow it to the exclusion of all else. Perhaps you best summed up that with the sentence: "Don't practice something else thinking it will help you with the one thing you want to do."

Yet, in today's writing you seemed to have followed exactly that dictum in your own youth: photography to the exclusion of all else, in this case ceramics. Now, you seem to have reached some level of reflecting on that choice of many years ago, and, perhaps, even have a tinge of regret over that missed opportunity.

I'm sure I am missing some cue you gave somewhere along your writings about how these two posts are not contradictory, or I am just too dense to "get it" and it's so obvious, a thing like that does not need to be explained. Apologies, Mike.

[I just added another sentence to address what you mentioned. I think it makes this a little more clear. Of course, none of it is really as clear as it's written. --Mike]

(I really liked your ceramic teacher's explanation of how learning about pottery is a "...matter of process and progress, of the evolution..." of one's skills and knowledge of materials. That is true, IMHO, of all creative process, including photography. Indeed, since the dawn of the digital age in photography, it seems that the essential "process and progress" has been undermined. Just think of all the time and effort we expended to take the latent images we captured on film and turned it into a visible, if reversed, negative. To say nothing of then printing that negative to a positive. Now, just push the button and, viola!, there the positive image is, nearly instantly. It seems to nearly defeat the value of "process and progress" Bob Epstein talked about. Of course, the old wet plate photographers said pretty much the same thing when dry plates became commercially available.)

[T. Edwards]

You really should try Blackwing Palomino pencils.

They really are the Leica of pencils ...

[Eolake]

Thanks. I’ve qouted and linked on my Fb page.

I bought both books when you mentioned them before.

[Not THAT Ross Cameron]

An interesting anecdote, and thanks for all the book references. Now on to much more serious matters - what are the stories behind all the pencils, and the sword?
Perhaps the image could be titled “Mightier than...” ;~)

[Chuck Holst]

We keep a Warren McKenzie pot on the kitchen counter that my wife bought before we were married. She keeps sugar in it. Also, it is unsigned. McKenzie stopped signing his pots years ago because he wanted them to be used, not invested in.

[Bear.]

In the decade or so of my personal dark age - between my loss of any sort of darkroom or time to practice film photography and my acceptance of digital photography - I attended weekly wheel throwing pottery classes, most weeks. Although my skills improved a lot over time, and I met my goal of producing working tea pots (non-dribbling) with matching cups and saucers, plus a consistent (there's the rub!) series of pretty decent small vases, I never became very good at it. But I did learn to appreciate ceramics.

[James Weekes]

That picture bookends your career. The other creative elephant in the room is your writing, which even you have argued is your strength. I tend to think you undervalue your photography but your writing sings.

[Steve Higgins]

"But perhaps I could have been more mature and more open to what I could have learned from Bob. I was pretty arrogant in those days. I thought I knew everything."

Put rather succinctly by the late Ronnie Lane, "I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger."

Ooh-la-la!

[Don McConnell]

I’d not come across this book before, thank you for the recommendation!

[Zack Schindler]

“Give me a museum and I'll fill it.” - Pablo Picasso

[David Smith]

Clay is an incredibly difficult medium to master and, at first blush, photography incredibly easy ('just push a button, we do the rest' about sums it up). But they have some things in common as well.

The smallest unit of clay is the clay particle. The smallest unit of photography is the film grain or more recently, the pixel. The units have no visible form, but the media can be manipulated into almost any form (photography of course being two-dimensional).

It is said that it takes 7-years to master the potters wheel, and that doesn't mean mucking around on weekends.

There are shortcuts and cheats -- you can buy 'readymade' ceramic objects (http://www.theceramicshop.com/store/department/53/Bisqueware/), paint them with store bought glazes, and have them fired for you, and you can probably master this method in a couple of afternoons.

I was a potter for about 15-years, on and off beginning while I was in high school, and had the incredible fortune to study under a world-class master of the medium, the Scottish potter David Cohen, who passed away last year. But for various reasons I wound up pursuing other paths.

I've been photographing 'with serious intent' more or less continuously for going on 45-years.

And what I have found is that ceramics, conceptually at least, is much, much easier to master than photography. I think due to the extreme technical constraints and slow feedback loop, it facilitates and rewards study and very careful consideration.

So I have to say the "Art & Fear" anecdote cited at the beginning is all wrong.

[Sean]

“Quantity has a quality all its own”

Which Stalin is said to have said, but it might be a version of

“At some point numbers do count”

Thomas A. Callaghan Jr

[MikeR]

Funny - I clicked on the link to the book, put it on my wish list, Amazon told me that it was already there, and moved it to the top. It had an original date of September 2012! That's the year I began following both your and KT's blog. (In September my wife and I were in Italy for a month, so I likely just did not want a delivery while away).

Six-plus years is a long enough cogitation period. I bought the book.

[Bill Evans]

Might I suggest what's sometimes seen as the arrogance of youth can be confused with single focus, stemming from the need to find one's footing in the world? It's only when you've lived through some battles, lost your footing and needed to regain it again that you learn who you are, and what you can contribute. Love this piece, and the following comments.

[Paul]

Dear Mike and fellow TOP readers please listen to this amazing podcast interview it's all about everything to do with the creative process on how one really gets it done.
The Moment with Brian Koppelman: Seth Godin 1/1/19 https://traffic.megaphone.fm/DGT4721555869.mp3

[Hank]

Huh...
So, I think this book sounds interesting, and I click on the link to order one. Amazon tells me I have already downloaded the kindle version 4 years ago.
I check my kindle library, and sure enough, there it is. Marked as “read”.
I open the book and read a few pages. I have zero recollection of ever reading it; it seems totally unfamiliar to me. Normally, after a few lines, I say to myself “oh yeah, I remember this.” Not this time.
Man, I am getting my money’s worth on this one!

P.S. started “re-reading” it...lots of good stuff in there! Thanks, Mike!

[Mike Plews]

Behind every great photographer is a full trash can.

[larry angier]

Best of all, <>Art and Fear has been translated into Makadonijan so that I've been able to share this with my cyrillic-reading friends in the Balkans and in the states, many in the arts.

Don't ask me why Ted and David's book got translated but somehow somebody sponsored a run of 500 and Ted still has some copies left...

[PWL]

Sounds a little like that quote I read somewhere by some famous photographer ( I forget who) to the effect of, “the first 1,000 bad pictures you make are 1,000 bad pictures you don’t make later.”

[bill]

The mug is good, don't think any mug is perfect, no matter how you look at it. I have more pencils.