When I went back to Art School I was already showing and selling paintings in small galleries and other public venues. I really did not feel the need nor desire to have anyone commenting or instructing me on what or how to paint, so I decided to study ceramic sculpture and explore the three dimensional aspects of my creativity.

I was very surprised to find that a hierarchy existed within the school whereas certain mediums were given precedence over others. The art school caste system consisted of these following layers (in order of silently agreed upon importance): Sculpture, Painting, Drawing, Photography and Printmaking probably tied, ceramics, and then the lowly fiber arts. I always considered art to be art, whether scribbled in someone's sketchbook or tattooed an someone's ass. I like the more permanent mediums myself but I suppose that relates to far more philosophical underpinnings within myself rather than aesthetic reasons.

But I was more surprised by the art school edict that art could not be functional. The media hierarchy made more sense when viewed through this prism. I could see how one's idea of functionality could force ceramics and fibers to the bottom of the caste. But art does serve a function. If a person hangs a painting in a particular place it is always for a very specific reason, to beautify a certain room or provoke thought and or invoke memory or emotion. There is no such thing as a non functional art work or anything else for that matter.

As for ceramics, professors might say that if you use a bowl for eating it as transferred into functionality and out of art. What about a pretty Chinese rice bowl? Is it art? How about if it is a pretty Chinese rice bowl that is thirteen hundred years old and now sits on a shelf in a museum to be viewed by thousands of viewers each year; art? How about a cereal bowl you watched your father eat breakfast out of for the majority of your life which you now keep in a special spot of your cupboard and think about your father and his love when you fill it with Lucky Charms occasionally? Is this common clay bowl an object art? My Gandalf pot is more vase than pot. And even though I never put anything in it I could easily put flowers within it. Does this nullify its existence as an object of art? What if I told you that this image of Gandalf, relating to his fall into the flames of Moria and subsequent arising, represents the ideas of rebirth, reincarnation, resurrection, and reinvention and evolution which are so very important to me in my life?

I need to get a flower to put in his head.

Clay and Glaze with Dot Method