my grandmother sent me a photo of one of my pots on her shelf and i wasn't ready
so my abuela sends me this photo out of nowhere today. just a pot i made like four months ago, one of those early ones where the rim dips too much on one side and the glaze crawled in a weird spot near the bottom. i almost didn't sell it bc i thought it was a failure, ended up giving it to her.
and she's got it on her little shelf by the window, with a dried lavender bunch inside, and the light is hitting it just right so you can see the texture i was fighting with. she wrote "mi nieto el artista" underneath.
joder. i sat on the studio floor for a minute. you know when something small just hits you right in the chest? i forget why i do this sometimes, between the cracked pieces and the kiln disasters and wondering if i should just get a normal job. then she sends me that.
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They say- "No art is a bad art". Congratulations on connecting again with something you created after years
I don't know about that saying. Some art is definitely bad and should be. But that's not really the point of this post. The point is that the pot found its right place, which is a different thing than whether it's good or bad.
yeah, that's it exactly. the pot wasn't bad, it was just in my hands still. my abuela didn't see the crawled glaze or the uneven rim, she just saw something i made that fits on her shelf. that's its own kind of judgment, maybe the only one that matters in the end
That saying always sat wrong with me too. Plenty of bad art out there, I've made some of it. But that's not really the point of the post, is it. The pot was never bad, it just had the person who made it staring at its flaws instead of seeing it whole. Took his grandmother to do that for him.
exactly. i was so busy looking at what went wrong i forgot the pot still worked, y'know? it held the lavender fine, sat on the shelf fine, looked like itself. my abuela saw it before i did. that's the thing about showing your work to someone who actually loves you, they don't care about the glaze crawl.
yeah i mean i get the sentiment behind it but i've definitely made some genuinely bad pieces lol. ones that deserved the bin. this one just wasn't one of them, i was being too harsh on it at the time. the lavender really saved it honestly