Homage to Ian and Jo Lydia Craven

Celebrating the beauty in imperfection and impermanence, 🔗Wabi-Sabi.

These pieces were by the late 📽️Ian and Jo Lydia Craven, which I accidentally broke some years ago after we moved from Asheville to Philadelphia, and then to Kennett Square. I couldn’t throw them away. I refused to! Their spirits were in every one of their works.

I have been seeing others trying to imitate their work, but there is no comparison. Jo Lydia is a master potter, and Ian is a master glazer.

When we lived in Asheville, we visited the Craven Studio on Wall Street in Asheville. I gingerly handled each of their pieces. Jo Lydia came over and took her plate from my hand and demonstrated the toughness of their porcelain pieces by smacking the porcelain plate on the display table top, BAM, BAM, BAM! I was dumbfounded. “They look delicate, but they are tough!” She said with confidence. That was so Jo-Lydia.

We would visit them now and then, and after each visit we came home with new adventure stories of theirs. They were priceless. The Cravens were, what Southern Folks would call, Special Folks. We missed them so much.

PS: I think the 📽️popcorn bag, eventually evolved into Jo Lydia’s “tee-tee bag” piece when she had breast cancer. She made a few tee-tee bag pieces in honor of the pillow that she would use to rest her breast on it because there was so much discomfort from the radiation treatment.

By Ian & Jo Lydia Craven

By Ian & Jo Lydia Craven

For a few years, I wished for a 🔗Kinstugi workshop to come in Kennett Square because I wanted to repair the Craven pieces that I have accidentally broke after we moved to Philadelphia from Asheville. I eventually forgot about my wish. Then in July, I received an email from 🔗Centered Clay Studio announcing a Kinstugi workshop. Without hesitation, I reserved and paid for my spot.

I believe I was the only one who did not have to purposely break a ceramic piece for this workshop.

Unfortunately, my improper handling of the urushi sap came at a cost to my health. My arms, thighs, waist, and neck were covered with rashes caused by the urushi sap, which is the same as poison ivy!

I literally suffered for this art. My skin has just recovered a week ago from a four-week nightmare. It was so bad that I wished I could live in a tub of calamine lotion until it was over. When I went to see my doctor, he exclaimed, “Those are gnarly rashes!”

So if you decide to attend a Kintsugi workshop, beware! You are handling sap that is highly irritating to the skin. So pay attention to safety procedures and be mindful of where and what you touch to prevent cross-contamination!

Despite it all, it was worth it. I would to do this again, and I would be extremely careful. Extremely, extremely careful. I have one more Craven piece to repair using this Kinstugi technique.

Reality has only one purpose in art

“Reality has only one purpose in art: the artist must become familiar with it so as to know how to avoid it. He should learn from it so as to know how to distance himself from it. To say that art should represent the world as it really is would be to assert that the purpose of art is to imitate those things that do not interest us even in reality. Realism has asserted as much, but in so doing it has merely concealed its artistic impotence. By proclaiming that art has no other purpose than to portray what exists, it hides its inability to accomplish anything beyond that reality...Fiction is eternal; reality perishes. Invented forms live; real ones vanish.”

— Jiri Krasek Ze Lvovic, Gothic Soul

Letter from Ansel Adams to his dear friend, Cedric Wright, June 10, 1937

Dear Cedric,

A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that relate to those who are loved and those who are real friends.

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only of flesh and blood — children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.

Friendship is another form of love — more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptances of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship and understanding: the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things. It is more than kindness, which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is a recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the interrelations of these.

Ansel

Beaver Lake, Lakeview Park, Asheville, NC. 2018. Oil on panel. Gifted.