mudstar ceramics

Sometimes I'm not inspired.  There.  I said it.  (And I'll admit, I ducked when I said it.  What? No lightning?)

These days weeding seems like a good idea, and right now the studio has never been cleaner. Last night I even offered to type up my son's story entitled Food Wars - it's sort of Cool Ranch Doritos meets The Empire Strikes Back.  Genius, really, but LONG.  Sure I'll type it.

Is it the warm weather? I don't love summer, so you'd think I'd want to be in the cool of the basement.  And the clock of the school calendar is tick...tick...ticking down fastfastfast.  Pretty soon my six hours of "free" time will be carried away on a summer breeze. You'd think it'd make me get down to brass tacks.

Nope.

But this has happened to all of us before, right?  Well, it's happened to me before.  And now that I've lived through a few (ahem) bouts of these kinds of days, I'm not as scared of them as I once was. I used to feel guilty about this dilly-dallying, but now I see it's part of how I work.  I have to tend to the well if I want there to be anything good to draw from: remove the debris, scrape down the sides, refill.

I read more. There are books lying around the house, like carcasses, their spines up.  I rip out pages from magazines.  Tend to the blogs/websites I like:

And get inspired by things like the clean shapes and colors of these mod vases from http://modishvintage.blogspot.com/ 

And by  fellow potter (also Rae: what are the odds?) Dunn, who's pottery I admire...

...but whose sweet little watercolor sketches speak to me even louder... I love reading her blog, which I find thoughtfully simple, quiet, and graceful.

http://raedunn.blogspot.com/

I make another cup of coffee at noon.  (Can you smell the Small World House Blend from out there? Genius roasters.) Heat the milk so that when I'm staring out the window and forget to drink from the cup, it's still hot when I come back to earth.

So back to earth it is.  And on earth there is a lot of running around, the day-to-day frenetics, trying to wear all the hats at once.  It gets really LOUD sometimes with all that noise, and it's as if my head is in a school cafeteria at noon, and I can't hear what my nice quiet friend is trying to tell me.  And it's really important, but I can't shush 500 other loud noises.  I need to wait until the room empties out. My inspiration and drive to create seem to stall, but now I trust that it is just my head making room for what comes next.


I think today I'll paint one studio wall with chalkboard paint.  I want to be ready.