People Who Don't Have That

I've had these pieces for a couple of days, waiting for some good sunlight so that I could take a half decent picture. Unfortunately, it's been gray and overcast for, like, a hundred years already and The Brain suddenly didn't care anymore about getting a good picture. So I got these pictures instead.

Sigh.

Mostly you can see in this photo how yellow the light in my kitchen is. (Suddenly I'm sensitive to light, which I usually am, but not the color of light, if that makes any sense.) Also, you can see represented about one quarter of my Crayola crayon collection. (I love to color.)

That's the redhead calavera that was meant to go with the raven-haired calavera that I did a couple of weeks ago. (Was it really that long?) Anyway, you can't see the variation in the glazing (there's actually a lot of metallic green at the left edge of this plate.)

Then there's this bowl:

There's absolutely no charm to the photo of this bowl, and none of the variation in the glazes that the real piece shows. Ugh. Why did I even post this? Mostly because I am feeling like I am not getting anything done at the studio, so I wanted to document that, yes, I am actually getting some finished pieces. I'm still not satisfied with the quality of the work I'm doing, but at least I'm doing it.

Here's the monologue of the critic in my head:

You don't want to stick with the calavera theme necessarily because it's lazy.  Move on.


You're taking too long to finish any one piece. You're not getting enough done.


The pieces you're doing feel clumsy. You're not putting enough thought into detailing.


Your sense of color is awkward.


You're not experimenting enough with the clay itself. Your reliance on glazing is taking you away from what's satisfying about working with clay.

I know that what I'm doing is not boring to others, but it is crippling me somehow. I feel like I'm cranking out failure after failure and I'm not moving forward. Work keeps piling up at these bottlenecks that are caused by my own indecision and laziness and...something...my lack of moral fortitude. (Ha.) I'm the Red Queen this week, running and running and getting nowhere.

I even thought the other day of trying to move forward by cracking open a very large bottle of gin that I have at the studio and making myself a drink. (This is how so many artists end up alcoholics. Seriously.) I didn't--there are first principles to return to before I resort to that--but I wanted to.

If all this sounds like so much ridiculous, unwarranted angst, it is. You know what happens to people who don't have that?