I'm relatively new to pottery (and LOVE it!!). My experience to date has been from very substandard adult education classes, 3 hours a day, twice a week for 2 years - not much teaching goes on as the classes are very large and there is a huge mix of abilities. I have also done some wonderful residential courses with 'real' potters and have learned loads from them. My dilemma is that this year I started a 'certificated' ceramics course... and I hate it. In the past 10 weeks of attending for one full day a week, all I have made is a very unsatisfying slab construction - most of the time is taken up with 2D work, exploring shapes, marks, colours, etc, etc. I understand that this is valuable, but just how much theory do I need to make good pots??
I would really like to hear from people who are working in ceramics - how much studying did you do and what form did it take? What I would really love is an old-fashioned apprenticeship with a potter whose work I like - don't think this exists anymore.
find another school? or talk to the teacher? maybe there's a different class?
or thru your library you might get access to various tapes that have great examples of what you're after. Steve Jepsen has a series of tapes that are very good. he advertises in ceramics monthly. the tapes are high quality & typically 90 minutes long ~ not bad for the $25 prices.
In a university course, we threw hundreds of pots, each and every one of which was cut down the middle with wire to reveal the throwing technique. This was frustrating because we all made some pots we absolutely loved! But, at the end of the semester, most of the students had developed pretty darn good technique and that was what the instructor had told us up front we were going to learn. After that there was mixing clay, blending it, aging it, wedging it, storing it, throwing it, cutting it, rolling it into slabs, measuring shrinkage, putting slabs together with slip, etc. Then there was the enormous task of learning glazing, and firing. Four years was not enough! A lifetime is not enough.
It sounds like what you are missing is a program that gives you a positive creative direction. The instructor of any course should give you a synopsis that will tell you exactly what skills, and techniques you will learn and how YOU will know you have learned them! If not, ask the instructor exactly what you will be learning and how you/she/he will know you have learned them. You're paying for instruction and you should be told what that will be. Be prepared to force the instructor's hand if they can't/won't tell you what their program is going to teach you. An apprenticeship can be a positive or a terrible experience. Unfortunately, it is mostly the luck of the draw.
Now, having said ALL that, you can make nice looking, satisfying pots without mastering all the basics. And you need to in order to keep your interest high. By all means throw and build pots, hundreds of them. Just don't fall into the trap of thinking you should keep every one! As hard as it may be, cut most of them up and evaluate your building, throwing techniques, then scrap them and make another attempt. Learn from your mistakes. You will also learn how to turn that scrap back into working clay :-). I know you have seen a particular pot that just grabs your attention, forces you to go back over and over again to look at it. If you make one of those, keep it. It's like the photographs in National Geographic, one hundred pictures taken for every one published.
Just don't sell yourself short by just wanting to make pots at the expense of learning everything else. Making pottery, like every skill, requires you to always be in learning mode. Away from the workshop read some of the older books. I particularly like Daniel Rhodes' "Clay and Glazes for the Potter" and Nelson's "Ceramics: A Potter's Handbook". I'm aging myself here. Look at as many books on ceramics as you can get your hands on. The library probably subscribes to an interlibrary loan service, use it.
Regards and best of luck,
Raj Who got side tracked by a new career and just dabbles now.
How much theory do you need? I think it is important to recognize that within the field of ceramics like with many other fields there is a terrible lot to learn. You could spend a lifetime studying ceramics and only learn some of what there is to know. As far as becoming a good potter and developing your techniques I don't think you ever stop learning. If you ever reach the point were you think you've learned all there is to know, something is wrong. One of the things which keeps me interested in ceramics is knowing there is more to learn.
Rather then asking how much theory you need to know in order to make good pottery you should examine your work and question how you could make it better. By examining what your current work you can improve your work in the future.
I have always followed my instincts in the pottery learning process; learning what I need to know to carry through a particular project, and finding more often than not that it lead me onto another learning curve.
I found from the beginning that I am fascinated by the wheel and by fire, so I have always been driven by the *how did they do that?* bug which has expanded my making and my attitude to fire. This has lead me down many different pathways, though I must admit that glaze has never gripped me in the same way as shape or form and function.
Over the years I have explored a wide variety of processes, eventually becoming a production potter, and then with my Wife a ceramics supplier, the latter opening me up to the myriad problems that others with this same obsession are prey to, which has in turn lead me into realms I would normally have circumnavigated, all in the name of *why?*. So my primary obsessions (amongst a raft of other interests) are pot making and firing and problem solving.
The best advice I ever got was from a well known potter whom I was fortunate to know who said: *keep it simple; in your making get to know two or three shapes really well before you move onto others, and don't overload them with handles and decoration......know when to stop!*.
i got similar advice somewhere & it was helpful in that i did not then "screw around" on too many foo foo designs & colors. i also was told to pick two glazes, and really get to know those two glazes before branching into others.
another tip i heard is that you never really own a shape until you make several thousand of them.
~ but after a thousand or so you start to see how hard a perfect shape is to create!
"keep it simple; in your making get to know two or three shapes really well before you move onto others, and don't overload them with handles and decoration......know when to stop!."
That is great advice, too often we have the tendancy to want to overdue things, to make it better by doing more. But what happens is usually not that you make it better but that you make it worse. Thank you for passing that advice along.
I think your message was just right. Its what keeps me enthralled in pottery, how much more there is to learn. If it was easy I think I would become bored very quickly. :o)
What makes it a craft is what you learn from other's experience. What makes it an art is what you bring into it from yourself. There is a point in everyone's learning cycle where you don't know enough to know what you don't know. That is the hard part to get past. After that if you keep an open mind and a child like wonder, you can always learn something.
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