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Ceramics Monthly
June/ July/ 1988
0N BEING AN ARTIST
A Ceramics Monthly Portfolio
By Jun Kaneko
For the last 25 years, the idea of making visual objects has been a peculiar interest of mine. Having a commitment to being an artist is to feel that I might have better things within me than what I have made up to this moment. These feelings make me wonder, and give me energy and ideas to do the next work.
Making art is a chain reaction of intuitive sparks and decisions. The intuitive energy comes from the artist's curiosity of self and whole. To respond to this situation in the most effective way, an artist must have a spontaneous attitude toward the moment, visual and nonvisual. The bottom line of being a visual artist is to make something visual.
To make a visual object out of any material involves two basic concerns. One is the energy to make the object; the other is craftsmanship to construct the ideas. Some artists have a greater amount of creative energy, while others struggle to find that energy. The difference is in whether they are curious about themselves and their surroundings.
I try to do things that I am curious about. This creates new ideas, and thus brings more questions and more curiosity to the original idea. This is how creative energy expands rapidly.
I remember when I started ceramics; it felt good touching clay, but there was a great distance between myself and the clay. Often when I have had a chance to see an object made by a master craftsperson, I have felt that the maker and the material were so close together that they almost became one. It is my hope, someday, that I would become as: close to the material, so there would be almost no distance between the material and myself. I hope to become one with the material, to feel what the material is feeling.
I used to think technique was something totally different from human feeling and ideas. I thought technique was out there to learn and to employ when turning ideas into objects--convenient mechanical information for making. Now, I feel technique follows the idea. No technique can best serve all ideas. To find the best technique for one's need is the same as the creative act of making art. Even similar types of work demand slightly different techniques to best serve the idea.
I heard this story from an old carpenter in Japan: "A long time ago a villager decided to build a new house. He went to a master carpenter to ask him to build the house, then showed the carpenter his mountain property where he intended to cut trees. The carpenter asked about the man's needs for space, and after having a clear understanding of this, he walked around the mountain site, looking at each tree, trying to find the best one for each section of the house he was going to build."
This attitude of the carpenter toward his material anti the house he was going to build interests me a great deal. 1 think he was trying to talk to each tree, to find what was the best possible individual tree for the part of the house he was imagining. In this process of finding the right tree, the carpenter knows that for the north side of the building, he should use trees from the north side of the mountain. Trees growing in shade grow slower than ones growing in the sunlight. The same trees growing on the north side of the mountain are much more dense than the ones growing on the south side of the mountain. The denser wood from the north side has much better weather resistance than the trees on the south side. Knowing that the north side of the wooden house usually starts showing structural problems from dampness, the carpenter chooses to build the north side of the house with wood from the north side of the hill. Furthermore, each individual tree has its own north, south, east or west face. When the carpenter places the initial poles for the house, he will be sure to put them in the way that they were growing, south to face south, north to north, so that the pole could react in a much more natural way than if he had disregarded tile tree's original growth pattern. Also, when putting up vertical posts, the carpenter sets the right side of the tree up, identical to the way it was growing. It the pole were to be placed upside down, water could be drawn in by capillary action, much easier than when it is faced rightside up. It is very important to understand the nature and the development of the material with which you are working. This idea of maintaining a respect for the material is rapidly being disregarded in contemporary society.
There are hundreds of similar stories on materials in Japan. This attitude of understanding the creative process as a whole with nature is my goal to be able to shrink the distance between the material and myself to zero. When I finally become one with the material, I may have an interesting level of creative freedom in my hands. When I am dealing with clay as a material to make an object, I am always amazed at the variety of qualities this medium exhibits, from "water-like" to "stonelike." Each makes me think of different ideas and shapes, and I try to orchestrate these ideas as a part of nature.
Form/Scale
Oftentimes I am asked why I make such large-scale work. My thoughts on scale are closely tied with form and environment. If everything in this world were the same size, we would not need to talk about scale, or ever develop an idea for the feeling of scale. This demonstrates that the idea of scale only exists and develops in a state of comparison. When I came from .Japan to the United States, I felt I became a small person in size, even though I was average height in Japan. Maybe feelings of scale are based on our body size compared to the surrounding environment. When I look up toward a tall mountain or a tree, I sense some interesting similarities to spiritual feelings happening within myself. When I walk into most churches, their internal space almost forces me to look up to the high ceiling, to make me experience a spiritual emotion. The architects who have built the churches throughout the world must have known that when people look up, some spiritual feeling grows inside. On the other hand, when I look down into a flower by the side of the road or at children, I experience different emotions. I'm not certain if they are different because of what I am looking at or because I am looking down. But, I know for sure that I feel completely different when I'm looking down to a small person than when I'm looking up to a tall person. This might be a very important aspect of the scale question.
All of these feelings of scale are based on actual sizes and influences in the environment. But there is another interesting way of creating spiritual scale. A good example is a Japanese teabowl. It is small in size, but makes you feel it is a huge environment. When I look at a good teabowl, its fantastic visual power pulls me into it subconsciously and lets me travel the pathway around the bottom edge of the bowl. And when I am traveling this pathway, the side of the teabowl starts changing into a mountain ridge. I might feel sunshine and the shadows of clouds cast on the side of the mountain. I might even fell crisp cool air or hear the sound of a stream running. But the moment I become conscious of this, I always get thrown out of the spiritual experience.
In making any object, we cannot escape problems of scale. Whether I'm making a large or small object, in the end I hope it will make sense to have that particular scale and form together, and that .it will give off enough visual energy to shake the air around it. I believe each form has one right scale. Sometimes I feel it worked; sometimes I feel I missed it. It is impossible to explain why. When I am painting, suddenly I arrive at a feeling that this is it. It's done. One second before that, I would never have guessed the painting would be done in the next moment. Days later, I may try to understand what made me feel that the work was done. Was it composition? Was it color? Nothing gives me a convincing answer. I .just look at it and I feel it's done. This feeling happens when I make that one last move to give the best sense to everything happening in the work.
Surface Activity
I find it difficult to leave the surface of my sculpture as is. I almost always have a need to paint on it. This may be a bad habit left over from my painter's background, before I started ceramics in 1963. I know trying to cover bad form with some painting never works. Maybe I am completely wrong; it could be that I am just not creative enough to change a form that I feel is negative into positive form. My thoughts keep revolving. Finally, I give up thinking and just sit in front of the piece, trying to catch what the shape is saying to me. I walk around the studio and try to make conversation with works I have made. When I can hear what a form has to say, I start seeing marks and colors on the surface.
Most of this painting is somehow concerned with the making of patterns. This was happening subconsciously until about 20 years ago, but since then I've become interested in the idea of pattern making. To me pattern is repeating similar marks to make some kind of visual order. Even if I decide to use polka dots, an endless combination of the arrangement of dots is possible. And the spaces between the marks contribute a great deal to the tonality of the finished work. Having the ability to orchestrate the different marks and spaces in a given area becomes crucial to having either good or bad results. However, the act of making decisions about placing marks and the density of space is intuitive. If I could develop a wide and deep understanding of general space ;and its density, it might help a lot in the making of successful patterns. When, from the sky, I see houses built so densely in 'Tokyo, I recognize an incredible pattern. When I am riding a rush-hour subway in Tokyo, I see the incredible density of repeated human bodies as three-dimensional These thoughts are amazingly similar to the composition of music, I used to think music was made by the arrangement of different sounds. But, later, I realized that the silence between the sounds contributes to the music as much as the sounds themselves. Each of the aesthetic elements I have talked about is like a different sound. I hope to be able to bring them all together into a great composition.
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