Time flies when you are on a mission to complete a task. Before I knew it, the Indian Market was one week away. There was so much to do and that dull pang of anxiety started to creep in. We all are familiar with them. Foremost on my mind was having something ready to submit for The Best of Show competition. I knew I wouldn’t contend for anything but I thought it was good to get your stuff out there and be visible amongst the very best the Market had to offer.

I spent several days afterwards attempting to comprehend what happened. I knew something very important had taken place, but I didn’t know how to place it. I felt compelled to craft something quickly. I started to form geometric pieces. I made 3 in rapid succession, something I wouldn’t typically do. I like to take time and let the shapes exhale as they are being built. I also noticed this increased productivity happening in my artist residency at UNM.

I have made many works of pottery over the last few years. So much that I’ve lost count. If I were to venture a guess, maybe several hundred? I would even entertain the number approaching 500 to 600 individual pieces. Most of my pieces have developed organically. I rarely create the same design twice, and many people who have followed me from the beginning have noticed my evolution as an artist. I would like to go in depth into one of my latest pieces, Lion, that holds particular meaning to me, and in a way is a representative piece of a very important event in my life that I experienced recently.

Echo is a piece that finds me in a transitory frame of mind when it comes to designing my shapes. Utterly assymetrical, she measures 8 inches tall (maximum), and 7 inches wide (maximum). Echo is comprised entirely of triangular faces and resembles my dog Ren at certain views. In fact, I had briefly considered calling this piece Hare. The ‘ears’ on the upper area slightly bend into a curve, and they offer a hint of something organic in the design.

Saturday morning was gray, cold, and breezy. It had not rained regularly since the late summer monsoon season and that gave me a jolt of enthusiasm. I had the omicron booster shot a couple days before and for 24 hours I was a quivering mass of jelly covered in several blankets.

I am not a blogger. I’m not even a competent writer. Other than facebook emoji responses, adding hashtags to Instagram posts, and scribbling my name, I only use the english alphabet to function passably as a human being.