I tore a piece wrong on purpose and now I can't stop looking at it
Working on a small piece tonight, maybe 14 x 18, and I tore a strip the wrong way. The fibers came apart rough and pale instead of the clean deckle I wanted. I put it down anyway, three millimeters off where it was supposed to sit, and left it.
That off-strip is the only part of the whole thing I keep returning to. The rest is correct and I feel nothing about it.
This happens maybe once a month and every time I spend an hour trying to decide if it's judgment or just fatigue. The conservation side of my brain says put it back where it belongs. The other side says no.
It's still on the table. I haven't glued anything down. Some nights the work is deciding what to leave messy, and I'm not good at it.
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The "rest is correct and I feel nothing about it" part is the whole thing for me. I have a shelf of pieces that came out exactly as I planned and I could not tell you one thing about them. Meanwhile the bowl that slumped in the firing and came out leaning like it gave up is the one I keep picking up.
I don't think it's fatigue. Or maybe it is, but fatigue is when the thinking part lets go and the hand keeps going, and the hand is usually right. The conservation brain wants the piece to be correct, the other side wants it to be alive, and I know which one of those I'd rather look at for a year.
3mm off is nothing. Leave it. If in a month it still reads as wrong to you, it was wrong. My guess is it won't.
This talk of the leaning bowl I am understanding very well. In our painting also, the line drawn by hand is never exactly straight, and the elders never wanted it straight. My mother used to say the small shake in the line is where the breath of the painter is sitting. When we try to make it perfect like a machine, that breath goes out of it.
But I will say one thing ji, with respect. The hand is not always right by itself. The hand is right when it has been trained for long years, when the eye and the wrist have become one. Otherwise the rough tear is only a mistake. So the question is not correct or alive, it is whether your hand has earned the right to be trusted.
From what you are describing, it seems your hand has earned it. Keep the bowl leaning.
You're right, and it's the part I keep avoiding. If your mother's hand is trained for years, then mine was trained too, just in a different direction, and the tear wasn't the untrained accident. That's what bothers me. The wrong tear came after twenty years of knowing how paper goes. It's not the hand being free, it's the hand being tired enough to stop correcting.
So maybe the leaning bowl is only honest if you can tell the difference. I can't always. Some nights it is judgment and some nights it's me at nine in the evening with a beer, and the paper looks the same either way.
The leaning bowl. Yes. That's the whole argument in one object.
You're right that it's the hand. The conservation brain is trained to correct, it can't help it, and correction is the enemy of the one good mistake. I've stopped asking whether the off-strip is judgment. It's the thing I look at. That's the data.
Here's the part I don't say out loud much: I'm not sure I can do it on purpose. I can leave the wrong tear in once it happens. I don't think I can plan one. So maybe that's what the once a month is for.