Comments for Beyond the Picture

Comment on Nothing Has a Final Shape by Shirin

Shirin — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 01:30:13 +0000

Love the concept of nothing having a final shape!! Love that your lack of resistance to the “changes and chances” of life allows you to see opportunities to continue to create beauty indiscriminately…

Comment on Nothing Has a Final Shape by Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:03:30 +0000

My gosh, I admire your serenity and detachment in the face of such craziness! But the way you approach it reminds me of Tibetan Buddhists and their sand paintings–intricate sand mandalas that take days to create, which they then sweep away at the end of it all. The idea of creating art for the process and the spiritual experience and remaining detached from the end product. I wish I could achieve that level of detachment in other areas of life.

Comment on Nothing Has a Final Shape by negar

negar — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:44:52 +0000

Those shards are beautiful. I want them! I’ll take them just as they are.

Comment on Nothing Has a Final Shape by Earl Egdall

Earl Egdall — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:37:28 +0000

last summer Jan and I were entertaining friends in a beach house on West Island, south of Fairhaven, MA. We were standing around the living room when all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, a ceramic pot broke in two. It was sitting on a table. No one was near the table. We were not moving around or singing or doing anything that could account for the breakage. We just stood there very puzzled. Could there have been some vibration we could not detect? Why that pot and nothing else? There didn’t seem to be any way to explain it. So we shrugged. Later we replaced it as a gift to the owners of the place. They were just as surprised by this occurrence as we were.

Comment on Nothing Has a Final Shape by tgm

tgm — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:28:44 +0000

leili–love your response and reflections. you are amazing (can’t say it often enough!). thank you for sharing. moving across the world makes me feel like unknowingly threw my pottery on the floor like a child who doesn’t fully understand laws of physics…challenging but i’m waiting (with optimism) to see what the resulting terrazzo will look like.

Comment on Nothing Has a Final Shape by samimi

samimi — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:07:26 +0000

so i just broke two mugs in honor of you and your undying quest to find the truth in all things. i love you for this and part of me is like, “what the hell??? why on EARTH did this happen???” so then i kicked the broken mug pieces all around the ground in anger.

so i believe you to have come out far ahead of me. ha ha. i love you.

Comment on Nothing Has a Final Shape by charity

charity — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:48:32 +0000

oh Leili joon– what a oddly timed and strange occurance! as a fellow ceramic artist, i can appreciate this on so many levels and also relate to the feelings about breakage and “losing” things either at some point during their creation or after their “completion”…. for me, things breaking often seems to happen when i do really need to step back a little and be reminded that nothing that i make is that precious…. dust to dust…. and it brings me again to the spirit of the creating itself and that, though i strive to make beautiful things… so much more of it is about the method, motive and spirit in which i work. i find that i often break things that are my favorites… causing me to reflect again and again about what my attachment is to these objects and how to cultivate a healthier relationship with the beautiful things around me. when the breaks happen, it does sting for a moment (or two) but i invariably feel better actually…. as if the broken piece is a sort of offering for my own detachment and purification. silly maybe, but it actually feels kind of good. not to mention… i have been able to make some pretty great mosaics from the shards…. (silver lining).

Comment on Nothing Has a Final Shape by amy d-s

amy d-s — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:37:04 +0000

my first ceramics teacher used to tell us ‘clay will keep you humble’.

Comment on Nothing Has a Final Shape by leili

leili — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:15:14 +0000

Ha ha! Dearest montague, I think of it this way: I would much rather endure an insignificant pot-crash than a car-crash. It’s good and necessary to be able to think about the reasons why things writ large don’t always work out the way we want or expect. How much more so when we can use the artistic process as a tool in our research.

But yes, may your many artistic and creative endeavors be protected from violent tests….

Comment on Nothing Has a Final Shape by montague

montague — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:48:00 +0000

leili, this post left me (nearly) speechless. frankly, had this happened to me, i would have been a crying mess for, oh, a good three weeks. at least.
I wonder how to handle situations like this, situations that appear to be some ridiculously impossible to comprehend, that no kind of sense or logic is able to explain it! You appear to have made some kind of peace with it, which i admire you endlessly for.
But surely, we must believe there is a reason for it. There must be.But finding out what that reason is… well that seems nearly impossible to me.