Who Knows?

Do you know Lynda Barry? Last year (or maybe it was the year before), she released a book called What It Is, an incredible illustrated writing guide. I bought it, read it, and The Brain reeled. So I put it away for a year. I took it out a couple of days ago and started to read it again and The Brain decided to be inspired by it. (The Brain likes Lynda Barry's childlike sense of wonder about the world, which is a cliched way of saying that she has an incredible ability to tap into the things that go into making a childhood.)

One of the things that connects me to my childhood is the writing. Learning to write letters, I mean. When I was in kindergarten, we learned how to write capital letters. When I got to first grade, my teacher (who had the lovely alliterative name Cindy Sanders and who was otherwise very kind and pleasant) was exasperated that we hadn't yet learned lower-case letters and she set about teaching them to us in a hurried, rushed way. I don't remember anything but her exasperation at realizing that we didn't know lower-case letters.

In the third grade, we began to learn cursive writing. I both liked and didn't like learning cursive. We used to have to write the letters really big, like on large sheets of construction paper and it was very exacting and I don't like things like that anyway. My third grade teacher, Mrs. Pedroncelli, was a stickler for the perfection of the letters and would mark up our efforts to show us where we went wrong, making a curve not curvy enough or having the wrong lean to our letters (letters should always lean to the right, never to the left) or not following through with some flourish somewhere.

My fourth grade teacher, Sally Sanchez, was not such a stickler. I remember her saying that she used to be very picky about handwriting until she realized that her doctor's writing was like scrawling chicken scratch and if it was good enough for such an educated person to write like that, then it was good enough for us, too.  That was a game-changer of an idea. As a result, my handwriting is still good, but I don't feel guilty when it isn't. (Have you ever felt guilty because your handwriting was illegible or otherwise "wrong" somehow?)

The octopus is pretty much copied from Lynda Barry. She uses them often in What It Is and in another one of her books that The Brain and I love, One! Hundred! Demons!. The kitten is taken from an embroidery pattern that Kelly First found at an estate sale and passed on to me. This is all painted in underglaze on greenware. You can still see the pencil marks that I used as guidelines. (They'll fire out in the first--bisque--firing.) This is just the first layer of decoration that this bowl will get. Ultimately, it'll have another six or seven glazes on it, perhaps similar to this plate.

Who knows?