Mugshots

More than a decade ago, in one of those interim creative slumps that come around with some regularity I’M FINE WHY DO YOU ASK??, I decided to do a series of blogposts over on my other blog about all the coffee mugs I’d collected over the years.

sidebar: It is a measure of how much of a creative slump I am currently in that I am reblogging about blogging I did about a creative slump. But let that pass.

I called the series MUGSHOTS because how clever is that? I had planned a series of thirteen mugs that had specific resonances for me, but we reached one particular mug for which there was no easy, delicate, or kind way to blog about and I just sort of stopped.

I’m not picking up where I left off — that particular mug has actually become more problematic over the last decade — but I would like to tell you about my favorite mug ever, one that I actually made myself.

You will recall that I spent nearly thirty summers working at the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program, the residential summer program for gifted and talented high school juniors and seniors. I attended the program myself as an art major, and so every summer I would spend a significant amount of time in the art department. (Starting in 1984 I was at first the head of the media support staff, helping the students with research and presentation; then assistant program director for instruction, riding herd on the faculty; and finally director of the program.)

Occasionally I would get to play with the artists, and for some reason I gravitated to the ceramics studio, headed up by the inimitable Andy Cunningham. (Readers of the book may recognize Andy from pp. 49–51 and the episode with the student whose boobs exploded in the kiln. (Oh, now you want to read it?))

Andy would let me play with clay, and besides the bowl for the center of the labyrinth, I made this mug. I often think it is the most beautiful physical object I’ve ever created.

It’s hard to see in these photographs, but it is not round. I deliberately made it slightly oval so that as I drove to work every morning the coffee would be guided more surely to my mouth and not onto my tie. And of course the handle fits my hand comfortably and exactly.

On the bottom, I signed it and dated it: GHP 1987 — 38 years ago. It is one year older than our son.

It’s that diagonal swath around the outside that makes it, I think. There was this leftover piece of clay lying there on the table and I just slapped it onto my bare-bones mug, creating a visual interest that would not have been there before. It underscores the material aspect of the mug: It is clay, and it doesn’t try to hide that it’s clay; there’s a lot of appeal in that for me.

Do I have a point to all this? I think so: This was my first and only attempt at making a ceramic mug. Did I know what I was doing? Nope: Andy had to tell me what to do at every step. Did I even have some kind of shinyperfect in my head when I started? Nope: I made it up as I went along. Is the piece flawless? In no way.

Is my mug perfect? Absolutely.

Go thou and do likewise.