Birthdays, Ollas, and Obsessions

Happy Birthday, Mom!



Yesterday was my mom's birthday. That's her (in the dress, the one on the left) with her brother on the day they did the first communion thing. That was a few years ago. Look how solemn!

 Ollas!

It's been a long time since I showed any studio work, seems like. This little darling here is an olla for the garden.



Ollas, in case you don't know, are what people sometimes call the pots that are mostly buried and filled with water that slowly seeps out and waters the plants' roots. They're great in the desert. Mostly they're just long necked pots, but I thought it would be cool to put faces on them and bury them up to their necks, so the garden has these monster heads all sticking up out of it.

This monster olla has two faces; this is the other side.



That thing sticking out at the top is a kind of funnel that makes it easier to fill it with water from the hose and keep bugs out of it. (That part kind of reminds me of kappa, the somewhat evil Japanese water sprites that have a slight indentation in the tops of their heads filled with water from the river where they live. Kappa are obsessed with politeness and the only way to escape them is to be very polite and bow to them. When they bow back, the water pours out of the indentations in their heads, rendering them powerless until they can refill at the river. Always be polite to the evil spirits who pass your way, I guess is the lesson there, no?)

And I feel like it's been a very long time since I showed any finished pieces, so here is one little cup from the last soda firing.



The woman who's been doing the soda firing has been slamming the hell out of the work with soda, which I appreciate. I still miss salt firings, but I like the recent soda work.

I'm working on new carved pieces, calaveras mostly. (What else?) I'd like to clear my shelves by New Year's. (I can't believe how close that is! Ayiiii!!) There's a pile up in the bisque department (always, seems like). It's mostly one-off pieces and things that I put aside because I wasn't sure how I wanted to glaze them and now, months later, they are covered in dust. It's never ending.

Obsessions!

So I caught, just out of the corner of my eye, a headline on Yahoo about something called "maladaptive daydreaming." Have you heard about this? It's a kind of consuming, compulsive fantasizing. People will spend hours and hours engaging in these sprawling, immense fantasies. I would guess that most people--like me--who engage in this kind of thinking don't really talk about it, but I have sometimes encountered it in others.

Like I said, I've probably got some level of this--and I think that a lot of other artists do too. I remember once, this amazing sculptor at the studio started telling me about her daydreams because I asked her about some aspect of her sculptures. She used to make (don't know if she still does) enormous bears and deer that stood on two legs, five feet tall and taller. Sometimes she would combine the two, deer riding on bears, a strange and wonderful thing to see. I asked her about it once and she reeled out this incredible, decades in the making tale of her inner fantasy life where deer danced on their hind legs around campfires and bears built enormous huts where hundreds of them would gather to hold secret society meetings and learn to play music. The daydreams bled over into her dreams, and she told me that in her dreams she could converse with the bears--yes, they spoke English--but that she didn't often understand what they were telling her about themselves.

Another artist I know once told me, when I asked her if she had any tricks help her fall asleep, about this elaborate fantasy that she had about two houses on a hill. She described the houses to me in great detail and told me how she would watch the people who lived in the houses go about their daily lives, interacting with one another. She would spend hours before bed imagining these things as she fell asleep. A few weeks later, when I saw her again, she did not look well rested and I asked her if she had been up late the night before. "There's another house now," she told me, sounding as though she had no control over the situation. "It's dark and brooding," she said, "like a fortress. It seems dangerous." She had stayed up late into the night, trying to figure out where this new dark and dangerous house had come from and what the people who lived there were going to do to the other people who lived in the other two houses.

My own daydreams are not quite so elaborate, even if they are equally immense. I lose sleep over them, sometimes. I lose myself in them sometimes.

Is this a common thing? I wonder. Or is it more of a confirmation bias?

P.S.

P.S. I bought the $61.00 face cream.