Saturday was full of light bulbs
On Saturday morning my friend and I went to Gruene to attend the Texas Clay Festival. It was really inspiring and I fell in love with the work that was all around me. Really awesome artists with unique designs pushing the boundaries of the medium.
Clay hasn't been inspiring to me since 1991. In college I received Cs in ceramics and really didn't understand why. I felt I just didn't get it. Looking back I can see the art classes at that school were grossly neglected. Now they have a well supplied building dedicated to studio art. When I attended this college all the art courses were in portable buildings on the edge of campus. In my ceramics class there was only one dye available for use and it was cobalt blue. It was gone before the semester ended and so most of my work is just bone white. The one potter's wheel didn't run as smoothly as the wheels used in the demos at the festival. The only one I had access to would stick and grind. There was also a long list to use it.
One classmate who received constant praise for her work and made an A (there was only one A and one C) would drive to the other side of town to use a wheel at a ceramics studio and bought her own dyes. She made perfect bowls, mugs and vases. I didn't have a car or the money for that sort of thing. Besides, I loved using different textures to make up for the lack of color or to make cobalt blue more interesting. I'd throw clay as hard as I could against stone walls in the dorm to get a texture I liked. It was all about the textures for me and I loved playing with the clay. I never made a single a bowl or mug in that class. That accounted for 5% of the C. I made a cup without a handle out of the clay thrown on walls though. My Mom has it and some of other things I made. I trashed a lot of it. There was only so much my Mom could decorate with and I didn't want souvenirs from a bad experience and a bad grade.
At the festival I could see that most of the artist could have been C students in my old ceramics class because their work was along the lines of what I had wanted to do and was trying to do. Not one attended that school. After seeing their work I felt I finally made peace with those grades. I felt I was on the right track, maybe. I almost felt inspired to buy a block of clay on the way home but I have no tools. I threw those out just last year when I decided it was certain I'd definitely NEVER work with clay again.
Later that evening I stopped and visited with Mr. Gage and we looked through old photo albums. Lots of old photos of the English countryside, old manors and the families he came to know during the war. There were many photos of these families gathered around a piano singing. The pictures all looked like movie stills to me. In looking for the albums we came across old sketch books. Inside one of these books were several essays and writing exercises Robert did in high school. I read them and was floored by his talent when he was only a teen.
Mr. Gage then said he wrote in the evenings during the war when he was in England. We found those writings and I was able to read several of them, enough to see Robert as a gifted writer. I asked why he didn't write more and he said he thought he wasn't any good at it and felt his stories were "corny". I told him I thought they were good and he chuckled. They really were good. The character development, the plot, the point of view, the structure and diction...all the narrative strategies were clearly in place and at work in such a way I thought I was reading something by Flannery O'Conner (O'Conner was only seven or eight at the time). When the war was over and he came home his writing stopped. He just thought it wasn't any good and did it to pass the time. Outside of his high school teacher, no one had ever seen his work. When I asked him if his teacher encouraged him when he wrote in school, he said she said nothing at the time. Most of the exercises were rainy day assignments but he enjoyed writing at the time and would write when at home for fun.
On the way home I began to think of all those hidden talents we all posses. How we don't always recognize our own abilities and can innocently hide them so well from ourselves and each other. How limited we think we are. Sad is those who think they posses no talent at all. We all have oodles of it lying untapped. How do we begin to mine it all?
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