Lee Love on sun 8 apr 01
----- Original Message -----
From: "artimater"
> While most of you guys were out playing with snakes....Ivor and
> myself were getting in to the topic of forms...I think we decided it
>was a purely personal thing...This judging of forms.....I think we
>decided good and bad form didn't exist except in the mind of one....
Don,
Some ideas about form are culturally dependent, but I believe, that others are more or less universal. We all have
certain things in common because our minds come out of the same set of principles. Far too often, I believe, we stress the
differences more often than the similarities.
Art is a form of communication, where we try to express the "normally inexpressible." If we seek the universal
vocabulary of form, rather than simple self-expression, we are more likely to work in a language that transcends time and place.
'Seeking out the universal language' allows us to better communicate what we have to share.
One of the best books I know of on pottery form is Philip Rawson's _Ceramics_ pub.1984, University of Pennsylvania Press,
ISBN 0-8122-1156-1 (pbk.) This book is a "must read" for anyone wanting to speak intelligently about pottery. I feel very
lucky to have been able to hear him speak in Minneapolis before he died. Here is a sample, page 16:
"As we live our lives we accumulate a fund of memory-traces based on our sensory experience. These remain in our minds
charged, it seems, with vestiges of the emotions which accompanied the original experiences. the overwhelming majority of those
experiences belong within the realm of sensuous life, and may never reach the sphere of word formation or what are usually regarded
as concepts at all. And yet they probably provide the essential continuum from which evolves everyone's sense of the world and
consistent reality, everyone's understanding of what it means to exist, and are even the ultimate 'compost" from which scientific
abstractions spring. It is in the realm of these submerged memory-traces that creative art moves, bring them into the orbit of
everyday life and making them available to the experience of others by formalizing and projecting them on to elements of the
familiar world which can receive and transmit them. From the artist's side the projection is done by his activity in shaping and
forming. From the spectator's side it must be done by active 'reading' of the artist's forms."
--
Lee Love
Mashiko JAPAN Ikiru@kami.com
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