Day two of attempting to make sculpture from thrown parts.  I smashed everything i made today and decided that the stoneware reclaim was not accommodating my needs.  i'm going to have to take back the 2 bags i got today.  it was REALLY groggy...  my hands are now very smooth from throwing with it.  I saved this weird thing i made because it was too interesting to throw out.  perhaps i'll fire it and leave it as a vase here--it's not worth bringing home with me.  I got really frustrated to the point where i just had to stop and leave the studio.  i didn't want to make a bad vibe for everyone else.  I went back to the house, showered, laid down for a half hour, got up and made myself a 3-egg omelet, ate half a bar of chocolate, and decided to go back to the studio and clean my space and all of my tools off.  I got a bag of royal copenhagen porcelain and threw a large and lumpy cylinder with it.  it's been over a year since i've thrown porcelain.  i missed the buttery quality of it, how it likes to move...  sigh--i missed it.  i have an idea for tomorrow on a different approach to working.  i may have to make some sort of temporary armature, but i think it will work.   i have an idea of what i want in my head, i just really hated the stoneware clay.  I couldn't carve it at all due to the high amount of grog in it.  i've always kind of hated this type of stoneware.  it's what i learned to throw with, but it's not something that makes me feel nostalgic.  i've always had better results with other types of clay (with the type of work that i make).  maybe at some point i'll learn to love it, but i am not having any second thoughts about rejecting it while i'm here. 

I was very angry and frustrated earlier.  as i was walking back to the house, i thought about the other times when i felt this way while working and remembered that those are the times when i finally had a break through.  i just have to keep pushing on and good things will happen.  Tom Muir came to do a workshop for the metals department at SIUE while i was there and talked about the frustration his students have when learning how to do things or when they're having trouble with their projects.  his response to this was to say that it's just a piece of metal-- you're better than it, so why let it make you angry?  Clay is the same way.  I can do this, i just have to retrain my mind.  After a point, I would get tired of throwing pots all the time.  Learning how to use the wheel for sculptural purposes would probably inform my way of working with pots as well.  I know that all of the hand building i've done in the last year certainly has.  I can't expect to learn Danish in a day, and i can't expect to automatically know how i'm going to do this in one either.  I have a good feeling about the days to come.

Other happier mentions for the day:
We had a really good curry dinner tonight, courtesy of the lovely Wenda and majestic Marianna.  Chicken curry, vegetable curry, home made naan, and basmati rice.  We had a movie tonight as well: The last days of Anne Frank.  It's actually quite interesting watching a movie about the holocaust while in europe.  there's a detachment from it that I have due to my being raised in the states.  It's entirely different.  Liv was telling us about how her grandparents nearly lost everything that they had because they were part of the resistance against the nazis.  It feels like a direct contrast to how people in the states hardly ever mention pearl harbor anymore.  It makes me feel very disconnected to our own history.

It's never a good idea to leave a giant bar of dark chocolate within reach of your laptop.  thought i'd mention that.