Anderson Ranch: Day One

Man, I am behind on the blogging. I've been working hard on a dinnerware order for my dear friend Alanna, and have been holed up in the studio working away. I was trying hard to finish it before I left for my workshop with Chris Gustin at Anderson Ranch.

So here it is, Day One at Anderson Ranch! My workshop is called Architecture of the Pot, and it's focused on the underlying design of pots (or architecture). Chris spoke today about how you can have great ideas and context for your pots, but without using good design, those ideas won't be expressed as well as they could be. Chris called design "the dirty little secret of art." It gets de-emphasized in school, regulated to freshman level design courses full of exercises that seem to make no sense. But design is the language by which objects speak to us. We approach all objects in relation to all objects we've experienced before them. Good design (which incidentally, is found everywhere throughout nature) makes one's pots speak on their own.

We spent a lot of time today looking at slides of historical and contemporary pots, pointing out their design strategies, such as division (into halves, thirds, fourths, and so on), framing, movement, scale, etc. After that, we headed into the studio to start throwing and then analyzing our pots. I'll explain a little more in the next few posts, I'm not far enough into this workshop to quite know where I'm going yet!

The Anderson Ranch campus is just beautiful. It's truly a lively, vibrant artists' community, full of excited, energetic students. I'm looking forward to a great week!