Haphazard Artist

I am a haphazard artist. I would like to say spontaneous or intuitive, but I believe haphazard is more appropriate. I have only sketched out ideas on a few occasions. In graduate school, my committee was shocked that I had no sketches. It isn’t that I don’t have drawing skills sufficient to sketch, I just never have done it. Most ceramic artists carry sketch books with them and draw pictures of each piece they make with notes on what clay they used, what temperature they the kiln reached, what slips, glazes and other materials or processes they used. I tried that once and lost the sketch book.

I cannot, or do not make pots the same size and shape. Nor have I used the same glaze techniques for forty or fifty pieces. I make things either on the wheel or sculpted, throw some glaze or other materials on them and fire them. I do have some idea of what will happen, but leave most of the results to chance.

I don’t remember much of my days working with printmaking, oils or water colors, so I don’t know how I approached those. I do know I don’t have any sketches of my work. When I started working in photography recently, I was out shooting with a friend. I realized that she would study the scene, decide how she wanted to compose the shot, what elements she wanted in the shot, etc. I stood slack jawed. I see a scene point my camera, adjust the composition and light, and push the button. I take lots of shots and out of the multitudes, get pretty good shots and occasionally an exceptional one.

As you can tell, if you’ve read any of my blogs, or even gotten this far in this one, I also write haphazardly. I just sort of blather or babble or pour it all out, whatever is running through my mind at the time. I abhor editing. I am not a wordsmith. 

But are my successes talent or luck? I don’t have an answer to this question. It is possible that whatever art I have in my soul doesn’t do well in the left side of my brain, doesn’t survive the analytical part of my brain. My educational background is a degree in mathematics with a minor in art, law school and then graduate school in art. Sometimes it seems like a split personality and I feel the need to keep them separate, like quarreling children. So for today, I still don’t know if my haphazard approach to creativity is a gift or a curse. It just is.