This day totally got away from me. I did have a small agenda. I did follow it, but the tasks that appeared small turned out to not be small. Organize my desk area. Compile a short list of items to purchase. Pick up my daughter and return home with her. Go to yoga class. That does not sound like such a long list.
It took all day and I never made it into a store. Okay, yes, David and I did cart a sofa out of our house that we were longing to move on towards its next lifetime somewhere else. Check. That took a little while. So, sometimes the time it takes to finish something is longer than you first imagine.
For example, this footed bowl in the image I posted, was refired last spring, in the kiln at work. The kiln was nearly loaded but it needed a few more large items. The student work was all placed within the kiln so my eye noticed this footed bowl that was rather ugly due to its dull gray overall glaze. I thought refiring would definitely give it a lift. It was earthenware and I rarely fire in earthenware at home so I left it at work where we only fire in earthenware. The pot is pictured here prior to its loading into the kiln; it is a pot that completely references my time spent working with the master potter Marguerite Wildenhain, at her Pond Farm Pottery in Guerneville, California, back in the seventies.
My grade 7 students asked me about this pot as I quickly decorated it. I told them it had been hanging around for a while, it needed refiring and it was just the right size to fit on the top shelf of the kiln. Someone asked when I had made it. I looked at the bottom of the pot and announced, 1993. The student gasped aloud that he had not even been born yet in 1993. He was 12. So you see, the refiring of that pot did take a rather long time by his standards. It is 2010. That pot had waited 17 years to be refired.
No hurry, as Horace implied, many, many years ago. Ars longa, vita brevis, or, in translation from the Latin, life is short, art is forever.
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