5 posts tagged “ceramics”
I finished off another vase today.
This is the last vase I did for my Ceramics course, which brings my Art practical method to a close as well.
From now on it is all teaching with very little doing on my part.
For the past 2 weeks in our Art method course we have been learning how to go about teaching ceramics to school kids. As usual we need to do some of the projects ourselves just to go over the techniques again and get a feel for the medium. The lecturers don’t really care about the artistic merit of what we do, as long as we have gone through the ‘making’ process. Nonetheless I always grab the opportunity to do something creative and try to produce a self-standing artwork. Often the lecturers think I am going overboard with the projects. One even asked me why it is that I want to be a teacher and not an artist. That gave me something to think about afterwards…
I always thought that art teachers had the ability to be artists in their own right, but chose to teach so that they could share their passion with others and generate a stable income as the case may be. The truth of the matter is that “those who can do and those who can’t teach”… I used to hate that stupid maxim until I started training to be a teacher. Now I can easily see the truth behind it… The vast majority of people training to be teachers with me know only the very basics of their specialist areas and surprisingly this does not hamper their ability to teach. Good teachers are basically distinguished by their ability to control a class and get information across in a positive manner. Those are the skills that are actually required to be a teacher. Still, I think that having a genuine interest in your subject area makes it easier to be inspiring when you teach, and having ability in that subject area makes it easier to give sound advice. It must be a nightmare to teach art for example when you can’t draw your ass from your elbow.
This morning I took in the first vase of a series to demonstrate various pottery techniques. The teacher took a quick glance at it and asked me rather caustically if I like flowers. I said I did. I meant to ask her if she knew of anyone who did not like flowers but held my tongue in case I had misheard the tone of her voice. I don’t think I did because she then asked if the thing was finished, implying, as art teachers do, that it was unsuccessful as it was. Needless to say I was thoroughly miffed. Granted the vase is hardly a work of art, but as a simple demonstration of the ‘pinch pot’ technique (which quite honestly a 3 year old could do) it was more than adequate.
It is strange how much we rely on compliments. They are half the reason we do anything. As a grown-ass man I thought I had become immune to criticism I don’t agree with, but that is obviously not the case. I guess if it was I would be a really hard person to get along with and a pretty harsh teacher too.
