nightbird ceramics

I give no advice, and ask that others will not read any into what I write here. I prefer to write fairytales, where the moral, if there is any, can only be understood obliquely and in parts. You must look from the corner of your eye if you hope to understand something head-on.

I consider this blog, which I am only now beginning and which will inevitably change over time, to be a personal journal that so happens to be available for public view. My intention is to work through my artistic ideas, including tethers and tangents.

I do not view my own ideas as better than those of others. How could they be? Ideas are things that live in your mind and, every once in a while, receive a new form through the artist’s rendering (for me, primarily rendered via clay). Yet even rendering an idea in one’s preferred medium substantively changes it by adding, subtracting, mutating, and duplicating its parts.

An idea does not “survive” outside a person’s own mind. All communication is translation. You may think of ideas as little plants that are used to a hyper-specific environment, and which find themselves uprooted and plunked down somewhere else. I prefer to tend and prune my own as needed, rather than recommending that everyone plant the ones that are native to my own mind.

If anything in my blog sounds like it’s giving advice, you may ask yourself: To whom is the artist giving advice? The answer is: to themself.

Along the same lines: A friend of mine once said: When someone experiences your art and tells you what’s not working, they’re almost always right. When they tell you how to fix it, they’re almost always wrong.

I find this wisdom to be generally true. It’s also very useful in guiding me re: what kind of advice I will accept as an artist, and what kind of guidance I offer to others.

Therefore: Read for a rendering of my mind’s garden. Use great discernment to decide how, if at all, you might apply my thoughts to your own.