After two years pursuing architecture formally, I ended up changing majors for tangential reasons — reasons not related to my love for architecture, which had only grown. I switched to fine art, largely because it seemed like a logical step at that point in time (as much as college students are able to deduce such a thing).

I started studying graphic design, since it was the practical course within the fine arts degree and since my father, like many others before him, asked regularly how I was going to make a living in life. However, the graphic design professors at my university were positively awful teachers. One fell asleep in the middle of class on multiple occasions while beaming Wolfenstein onto the screen in front of the class, another had a fetish for magenta (among other things, reportedly) and a third took an independent study approach to teaching and our class only met about four times during the course of a semester. Needless to say I didn’t feel as though I was going to learn all that much more from them in the upper level classes.

Since I was pursuing a fine art degree (BFA), not specifically a graphic design degree, I had the freedom to deviate from my chosen emphasis within the college and still graduate on schedule as long as I had the required number of upper level classes. The degree did require, also, that we take at least one course in each discipline: Drawing, sculpture, ceramics, photography, painting and graphic design.

As such, we were exposed to each department within the college as fine art students. After realizing that the graphic design classes weren’t worth paying for, I began taking ceramics courses in earnest. The ceramics department had far and away the best faculty, both artistically and technically. In fact, the two faculty members I took classes from remain at the university 15 years later and I still recommend that ceramics department to anyone wanting to play with clay as a profession.

So I graduated, having studied equally graphic design and ceramics and mastering (in terms of what a student can actually do in a classroom anyway) neither one of them. What I had learned, however, is that I wanted to continue studying ceramics and creating fine art and craft, and also that graphic design was in fact more likely to be my — at least short-term — meal ticket.

I did what I could after graduating to keep my hands muddy with clay living in Lincoln, a town of about 250,000 at the time, but after securing a design-related job at a missions mobilizer a year or so later my wife and I moved to a small Arkansas town where communal creative space for a ceramic artist was nonexistent. Living in an apartment made setting up my own studio difficult, besides that fact that we were effectively broke for two years after moving. Buying even a small used kiln was out of the question at the time.

Despite losing access to a clay studio, I still felt the driving need to create with my hands and I did what I could in an apartment with no money, using up all of the leftover supplies from my college classes, creating some oil paintings here, some collages there. Building a cabinet for my wife’s growing yarn stash from some salvaged doors (I was working for a home remodeling company at the time while trying to raise money for the ministry).

After those first two years we were able to purchase a small house with some extra space to set up a small studio. We were making enough money that both my wife and I felt like we could start spending some on our crafts again, so I began looking for used kilns on Ebay. In the meantime, I kept my creative itch occupied by teaching myself some woodcarving basics, which was interesting to me because it is part of my family heritage and because I could create sculpture without a kiln.

It was about 18 months before I found a used kiln I could afford in a location I could get too — since no one on Ebay was shipping kilns, understandably. And after that, it was probably another six months before I had picked it up and the electrician had wired the garage so I could plug it in.

At this point, it had been more than four years since I’d touched a ball of clay.

I jumped right back in where I’d left off though, pursuing a concept that I hadn’t had the chance to flesh out entirely at the university or the short time thereafter when I still had access to a ceramics studio. It’s a concept that has been with me almost from the time that I switched from architecture to studying art. I dedicated a couple hours a day to the pursuit, which went pretty well until the job situation forced us to move. The move interrupted the process, but the long and short of it is that I’ve now had the past five years to continue — albeit on very much a part-time basis — working on this concept.

Interestingly, almost at the same time I finally had a working kiln again I was introduced to an artist working in a medium I hadn’t heard of, nihonga. I was intrigued, by the artist more than the medium, but at that point in time didn’t think too much more of it.

Now, I’m thinking more of it.

After these past five years, I’ve started to realize that clay is probably not a very good way to convey this concept I’m working on. In fact, nihonga seems almost perfectly suited to it. And curiously I’m also becoming more interested in wood sculpture again, particularly after being recently introduced to Bruno Walpoth’s magnificent figures.

In college I wholeheartedly adopted a da Vinci-esque process-over-product mentality, which made sense as I learned so many different mediums and this recurring concept was so fledgling. Now that the concept has so passionately stuck with me for years, it seems time to actually make it happen.

And therein the question now arises as to whether or not I am willing to move away from ceramics, the medium that I have put most of my artistic effort into for the past ten-plus years. I don’t plan to abandon clay completely (I would love to have a soda kiln or wood-fired kiln some day), but I do believe that the concept is worth pursuing more than a particular medium, something I wouldn’t have believed 10 years ago.

Perhaps the key that turned in order to foster such a willingness was becoming a parent, and reading an article about parenting that my wife shared earlier this week. The point of the article, titled New Things Do Things, was that it is worthwhile to engage in new activities in order to discover your gift. The author points out that, along the way, there were some purchases that went unused, some time that was spent learning a craft that their children sooner or later abandoned. But in the long run, these were still very worthy investments. And it seems to me this lesson for parents can be the same for me as an artist.

My investments in both architecture and ceramics will prove to be worthwhile even if I’m not designing houses or throwing pots for a living.

Life circumstances being what they have been, my artistic education has continued long past my college graduation. It’s taken all of these years, part-time of course, to figure out how (I think) I should be working artistically, and that direction happens to utilize crafts that I have not spent much if any time pursuing up to now. Of course, education is a life-long thing, and an artist’s interests and concepts that he or she pursues will undoubtedly change over time. The concept that I keep referring to — admittedly in a covert manner — in this writing is one that I feel the need to work through before dedicating significant energy to another.

Am I willing? The time, the money spent on ceramics over the years, the days of my life that I can’t get back (Do I feel the need to get them back? Not really.). I have to remind myself that they are part of the learning, that they are a worthwhile investment. That they will contribute in some way to the execution of crafts and concepts to come.

And then press on.

Again, while it is a great blessing that a man no longer has to be rich in order to enjoy the masterpieces of the past, for paperbacks, first-rate color reproductions, and stereo-phonograph records have made them available to all but the very poor, this ease of access, if misused — and we do misuse it — can become a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly absorb, and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind than yesterday’s newspaper.

” [In Canada] parents get a tax credit for money spent exposing their children to arts, recreation, or culture . . .”

[Preceded by] “A couple of years ago, I compiled a list of my favorite books for a friend. I went through all the books I’d read for the past five years, and pulled out the ones I most loved.

I was shocked to realize about one-third of them were from Canadian authors. One-third. Not of the books I read, mind you, but of the books I loved.”

Via Stone Soup

This place had a long history before us, has a long future after us. I keep thinking it’s apart of our lives, but, really, it’s the reverse. For a little while. . .I don’t know. . .it’s like we’re apart of its life.

Gilmore Girls episode 69

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

-Journey of the Magi, T.S. Eliot

Ornament turned by my grandfather, one to the right made by my aunt many years ago.