Category Archives: Other artists

Empty Balance

Lynne Yamaguchi Posted on by

Collaboration by Lynne Yamaguchi, Connie Rayburn, and Bina Rothblatt

This is the second collaboration I was part of at the WIT eXchange, this one with Connie Rayburn and Bina Rothblatt. In contrast to my first collaboration, Connie, Bina, and I came up with the concept for this quite quickly, right after getting “empty” and “balance” as our words: balancing objects on the rim of an empty, small-footed bowl. We all worked together on the main bowl, then split up to make objects to balance. I wanted to make a raw, chaotic, asymmetrical piece to contrast with the elegance of the main bowl, so I played with a reciprocating carver for the first time (loved it so much I bought one after I came home), then torched the edges. Connie turned a small version of the main bowl and another bowl that we decided to paint green. After playing on the lathe, Bina wasn’t satisfied with any of her objects, but she found a cool-looking scrap of wood burned to coal and cut off the tip to put on the rim. We painted the inside of the main bowl and its mini-me black to emphasize the emptiness, then added the base to emphasize the balance, painting it black for aesthetics. If we’d had more time we would have tapered the base to echo the curve of the main bowl. It took all three of us to find the balance of the objects, but we did—nothing is attached in this piece, all just balanced.

We discovered an interesting surprise after we finished: we had ended up balancing chaos and destruction (my carved object and the coal remnant) against growth and (re)production (the “baby” bowl and the green). The unconscious at work?

Pointed Flavor

Lynne Yamaguchi Posted on by

Collaboration by Lynne Yamaguchi, Anne Ogg, and Cathy Peters

Anne Ogg, Cathy Peters, and I made this on the first day of collaborations at the WIT eXchange, after drawing the words “pointed” and “flavor” as our starting point. I barely slept the night after we drew our words: I kept hopping out of bed to turn on the lamp to jot down more ideas. I finally left the lamp on all night, with my notebook and pen at hand on the bed beside me. “Sleeping on a solution”—submerging myself in the parameters of a challenge—is a strategy I use often when I’m trying to solve a problem.

I had five pages of notes by morning, approaching the words both literally and figuratively. Examples of a more literal approach to “pointed flavor” include pepper, Tabasco, poison, cactus fruit, a spiky salt shaker. M, an apple with a razor bladeetaphorical examples include criticism, “yet she persisted,” a scream.

When Anne, Cathy, and I met in the morning, we shared ideas. We all liked the idea of lemons, and loved the idea of making the lemons as boxes with teeth inside to represent their sour bite. We decided to each make our own lemon box. After turning them independently, Cathy and I ended up carving them together using rotary tools, while Anne used burning tools instead. The burning added a terrific color element to the inside. To our surprise, the teeth ended up looking like the material remaining after a lemon is juiced, so the lemons looked far more realistic than we had intended.

Anne began turning a bowl to contain the lemons, but we realized that we had run out of time. Instead, we torched the bottom for contrast and used the blank as a pedestal for the lemons.

From Rilke’s Book of Hours

Lynne Yamaguchi Posted on by

My sister sent me this poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, from his Book of Hours, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. It speaks to me deeply. “Go to the limits of your longing,” indeed:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours I, 59

Martha Graham

Lynne Yamaguchi Posted on by

I have to share a profound quotation from dancer and choreographer Martha Graham that my friend and fellow artist Shirley Wagner just shared with me:

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. . . . No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

Context deepens the resonance of her words for me. The quotation comes courtesy of fellow choreographer Agnes de Mille, in Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham (Random House, p. 264), who precedes the Graham quotation with: “The greatest thing she ever said to me was in 1943 after the opening of Oklahoma!, when I suddenly had unexpected, flamboyant success for a work I thought was only fairly good, after years of neglect for work I thought was fine. I was bewildered and worried that my entire scale of values was untrustworthy. I talked to Martha. I remember the conversation well. It was in a Schrafft’s restaurant over a soda. I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be. Martha said to me, very quietly . . .”

Researching this quotation led me to these other inspiring gems from Graham, the sources of which I don’t know, unfortunately:

I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

Read more of this at the web site This I Believe. Also:

All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.

Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery.

Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.

Winter small-works show at Flux

Lynne Yamaguchi Posted on by

Small-works show at Flux Gallery, December 10 and 11

Flux Gallery will feature small works for sale on Friday and Saturday, December 10 and 11, 2010, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., in conjunction with Grey Dog Trading Company’s annual winter Zuni fetish show. (Grey Dog is just a few doors away from Flux at Plaza Palomino.) Customers who present a same-day receipt from Grey Dog will receive a 10% discount on the small works at Flux, or Flux customers can present a same-day receipt from Flux at Grey Dog to receive a 10% discount on their fetishes.

In addition to the small works by member artists Carol Ann, Lee Roy Beach, Peter Eisner, Maurice Sevigny, Shirley Wagner, and me, we will also have work by incoming Flux member Katherine Minott, a photographer with a love of color and texture. Katherine won’t officially be joining Flux until January, but this show will give visitors a preview of what is to come.

Join us next weekend at Plaza Palomino, and give your loved ones the gift of beauty this season. For further information, please contact Flux (520-299-5983) or Grey Dog (520-881-6888) directly.

“The beauty that changes the soul of the world . . .”

Lynne Yamaguchi Posted on by

Another quotation, this one from “Thirst for Beauty, Thirst for Soul” by Joan Chittister, in Creation out of Clay: the Ceramic Art and Writings of Brother Thomas:

What we do not nourish within ourselves cannot exist in the world around us because we are its microcosm. We cannot moan the loss of quality in our world and not ourselves seed the beautiful in our wake. We cannot decry the loss of the spiritual and continue to function only on the level of the expedient. We cannot hope for fullness of life without nurturing fullness of soul. We must seek beauty, study beauty, surround ourselves with beauty. To revivify the soul, the world, we must become beauty. Where we are must be more beautiful than it was before our coming.

The Artist and Monk Are One

Lynne Yamaguchi Posted on by

The following quotation is from “The Monastic Spirit and the Pursuit of Everlasting Beauty,” by Joan Chittister, in The Journey and the Gift: The Ceramic Art of Brother Thomas:

If, indeed, truth is beauty and beauty truth, then the monastic and the artist are one.

Monasticism, in fact, cultivates the artistic spirit. Basic to monasticism are the very qualities art demands of the artist: silence, contemplation, discernment of spirits, community and humility.

Basic to art are the very qualities demanded of the monastic: single-mindedness, beauty, immersion, praise and creativity. The merger of one with the other makes for great art; the meaning of one for the other makes for great soul.

It is in silence that the artist hears the call to raise to the heights of human consciousness those qualities no definitions ever capture. Ecstasies, pain, fluid truth, pass us by so quickly or surround us so constantly that the eyes fail to see and the heart ceases to respond.

It is in the awful grip of ineffable form or radiant color that we see into a world that is infinitely beyond our natural grasp, yet only just beyond our artist’s soul. It is contemplation that leads an artist to preserve for us forever, the essence of a thing that takes us far beyond its accidents.

Only by seeing the unseen within can the artist dredge it out of nothingness so that we can touch it, too. It is a capacity for the discernment of spirits that enables an artist to recognize real beauty from plastic pretentions to it, from cheap copies or even cheaper attempts at it.

The artist details for the world to see the one idea, the fresh form, the stunning grandeur of moments which the world has begun to take for granted or has failed even to notice, or worse, has now reduced to the mundane.

It is love for human community that puts the eye of the artist in the service of truth. Knowing the spiritual squalor to which the pursuit of less than beauty can lead us, the artist lives to stretch our senses beyond the tendency to settle for lesser things: sleazy stories instead of great literature; superficial caricatures of bland characters rather than great portraits of great souls; flowerpots instead of pottery.

Finally, it is humility that enables an artist to risk rejection and failure, disdain and derogation to bring to the heart of the world what the world too easily, too randomly, too callously overlooks.

Charles Peguy wrote, “We must always tell what we see. Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see.”

Tucson Artists’ Open Studio Tour

Lynne Yamaguchi Posted on by

The spring Tucson Artists’ Open Studio Tour is coming up again next weekend, March 13 and 14. I will be here from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., so please come by and see what I’ve been up to (and get first dibs!). I may even have some work in progress on the lathe, as I’m busy getting ready for the Spring Artisans’ Market at the Tucson Museum of Art at the end of March. I’m especially trying to finish some mesquite vessels with stone inlay.

You can find all the details about the tour, including a complete list of participating artists and maps of the studio locations, online at the tour’s website or in the current issue of Zócalo magazine. (This “Tucson Urban Scene Magazine” is worth hunting down; read it online or find it at various locations around town.) Fellow Flux artists Steven Derks, Peter Eisner, and Maurice Sevigny will also be opening their studios.