Heart of the Creator

Every piece of art that I create, I respond with, ‘that’s my favorite’, and I mean it.  Maybe it’s the connection I feel after holding it, studying it and painting it for, sometimes weeks, that causes me to see the beauty in it. Maybe it’s the overall value I see in the ‘gestault’ of each work ; appreciating the whole and all the intricacies of each section and color palette. Whatever the reason, I always complete the work with, “Oh, that one is my favorite’.  There’s a little bit of wistfulness when I hear it has found a new home, thinking, maybe I should have kept that one. And so I began to reflect on the ‘heart of the creator’.

This always makes me think about my high school ceramics class. Wow, did we have a great art department with four rooms, each for a different discipline.  It was in my first class working with clay that I had a vision to create a set of mugs using slab construction.  The wall thicknesses were even, strong and smooth with a pattern I designed, stamped into the clay. They survived the first fire and looked great.  I carefully painted a dark glaze into the bold pattern and a lighter glaze on the rest. Anticipating a beautiful result, I sent them off for the final glaze firing.

I barely recognized them as mine when I finally found them on the cooling racks.  The colors were different than I had anticipated and the glaze had bubbled up and receded in weird places. “Not what I had planned,” I told my teacher as I held two of them for him to inspect.  Nonchalantly, he motioned to the trash can right beside us saying, “Ok, you can just toss them out.”

Oddly, time seemed to stand still for a split second. ‘Throw out what I created? Just because it’s different than what I expected? They still look pretty cool, were constructed well, and … mainly, I created them, start to finish. All these thoughts ran through my mind as I stood there looking at the mugs, my teacher, the trash can, my teacher, the trash can, the mugs. “I think I’ll keep them”, I responded.  He shrugged his shoulders and walked away.  He had no connection to these pieces, but they were my first ‘masterpieces’,  and I did. 

I have kept the mugs all these years as a powerful reminder of the connection a creator has to his creation. I have heard the saying that God calls each of us ‘His favorite’, and I can believe it. So when I get news that “my favorite” shell has found a new home, I smile and am glad they share in appreciation of the beauty created first by nature and then enhanced by my hand.