(If you look closely, you can see a hummingbird on the right of the feeder.)
Since childhood, I’ve watched the same movies and read the same books many times over. With each viewing or reading I discover a different idea or inspiration. My understanding of the artist or author deepens and I appreciate the work all the more. …I have thrown thousands of pots over the the years, including some shapes I form again and again. I work in the studio practically every day, yet I never find it boring or monotonous - in fact I look forward to showing up each morning….I once attended a lecture by the artist Carrie Mae Weems, and she clarified something I had long been trying to define. In discussing how artists explore the same theme over and over, she mentioned that Louis Armstrong recorded “St. Louis Blues” more than 80 times, each version with a different sound. This helped me understand why each time I’m making a pot - no matter how large or small or how often I’ve made the same shape - I learn something new and find a fresh way to articulate my intention. Ceramist Frances Palmer
A couple of weeks ago, I reported on author Douglas Gresham’s advice to reread Once Upon a Wardrobe. Because I’m a firm believer in rereading good books to make new discoveries, I not only took him up on his advice and reread this delightful book, I recommended the process to you.
This week, I came across ceramist Frances Palmer’s admonition not only to reread books, but also to appreciate the repetitiveness in every aspect of art. She finds creativity in throwing pots again and again; she quotes photographer Weems, whose “The Kitchen Table” series offers different scenes around the same kitchen table; she acknowledges musician Armstrong who made each version of one song different. Each time, each person, each art form, the same, but different.
Whenever I think of repetitive tasks, my mind immediately flashes back to my first job, making one piece of electronics all day long, five and a half days a week, all summer long. Today, if those same parts were needed, robots would create them, more perfectly alike than anything I could do with two hands. Instead, microchips made my work obsolete.
But repetition serves us well not only in our art, but also throughout our lives.
As a teacher, I believe that we learn best by repetition, but not necessarily by rote, the very act of repeating over and over often without attention to meaning. Most of us learned to count and to recite the alphabet and multiplication tables by rote. Some learn Bible verses by rote.
But we all learn best to read by reading page after page with the intention of understanding what we’ve read. We learn the craft of writing by writing on a different topic each day. We learn to add by summing different problems each day. And as with all knowledge, we truly begin to learn when we can spiral knowledge and skills, one on top of another. Repetition, but not rote. When we see relationships, when we make the connections, we are learning.
Years ago, I once wrote a column about all the love songs that had been written and sung over the years. How could anyone possibly write something new about love? And yet year after year after year, composers and song writers still find a new slant, a new tune, a fresh nuance on an age old emotion.
Until the 20th century, “The Song of Solomon” in the Bible was considered the oldest love song known to man. But in 1951, an archeologist Samuel Noah Krammer translated a manuscript, dating from 2000 B.C., unearthed in Iraq from the Mesopotamia era of that region. It was a love song.
When historians are tracing poets of love songs, they turn next to Shakespeare and then Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But even before the bard put his own touch on words of love, people everywhere were crooning love ballads, the folk songs, of their region. While each person considers his venture into love unique, it is a universal feeling. And while songs are frequently repetitive in verse, we, evidently, have yet to say all there is to say about love.
2022
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