Fear and Watermelurns

"Watermelurn"

mixed media

2007

Not a great photo. Not my best piece. But I had to move on to other things. Actually, I did try to work on more than one urn for this show, but in the end, I had to focus on completing one, and this was it.

I'm reminded of a story in "Art and Fear", a book by David Bayles and Ted Orland, in which a class of ceramics students are divided into two groups, with one group being graded on the quantity of work they turn in, and the other group on the quality of work turned in. What emerged was this: the best work came from the "quantity" group.

"It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

Hmmmmm.....

It's not "dead clay" but it would be fun to see where I could take it, if I'd had more time and more urns...Frankly, I like the name best!

Earn your Urn

The Big Idea I had for the ClayNichols Urn Show was originally called "Earn" and featured a collage made of photocopied money. Then I started working on it, and couldn't figure out how to make it work. So I abandoned the idea completely (difficult for me!) and just went with some other things that came along...My friend Kristen thought it might come back around, but I couldn't see how.

Well, the urn IS becoming the "Earn", in a roundabout way. I was playing with some of the elements this morning, and I glanced over at the scraps of photocopied bills, and went "aha" in that way that your whole body knows THIS is going to work... a quick little jolt of excitement.

I'm so excited to finish it now. I don't think I'm even going to keep going with my back up-urns until I get this one done, because I think I can pull it off. I've posted some working photos here...this is NOT how I usually go about things, but I had to get the elements on there to see if they were going to work together!

(My son just informed me that I should not use the money on the urn....hmmmm....)