Oh the Irony-or-This IS a real job!

So I wasn't really planning on posting on here today, but after reading a great post and comments on the blog this artist's life by Whitney Smith I decided I had to, but more on that in a bit. First...



What is wrong with this picture? Nothing much on first inspection; maybe these are some pendants or earrings or something. But then there is that "Oh shit" moment when you realize you just opened the kiln and these are supposed to be the witness cones and kiln sitter bar. I'm not entirely sure what happened, other than the kiln over fired, which made the glaze tests that were in there completely useless. Most everything was scrap except for a few things that didn't have hellacious bloating in the clay or weren't slumped beyond salvaging.

The few things that did come out were actually kind of interesting. These are a few keepers. The three cups in the front and the two blue cups had slip sprayed on them and should have turned out matte, but with the over firing the slips appear to have melted into a satiny glaze. Of course this isn't exactly what they were supposed to look like, but hey, you take what you can get out of something like that. The really ironic part is that I put the witness cones in this time because I was afraid the kiln might have been under firing. I can definitively say that is not a problem. Now if I can just figure what went wrong...

And now for the really great post. Ms. Smith talks about the trials of being a professional artist in her blog, and in this post in particular she talks about the crap we often get from other folks about not having a "real" job. It seems to me that most of the people who look down on being an artist as a profession are people who have a JOB. And by JOB I mean they do not get any sort of satisfaction out of work other than the paycheck at the end of the week. It seems some people think that if you enjoy what you are doing it doesn’t really count as work. Thus artist, who enjoy what they do for a living, don’t really work and do not deserve the same level of respect as people with jobs that do work. Why can’t people understand that being an artist is just as valid an occupation as anything else? Some people choose to be lawyers; some people choose to be plumbers; and some people choose to be artists.