Finding my style
Why it is important and frustrating to find your own style
in order to get recognized as an artist.
Who am I? At 47 I had it mostly figured out when I decided to become a “professional” artist (Maybe one day I will be confident enough to get rid of the quotation marks) but becoming a professional artist means finding my STYLE with capital letters. It’s like going through puberty again.
I have been doing ceramics for 15+ years but until I decided to sell my pottery, I had never worried about my style. Style was not the issue. Instead, the issue was a constant state of frustration, never finding enough time to develop my skills and experiment with all the ideas that were swirling in my head. When you don’t have much time, you also play it safer, because it takes longer to overcome failures, and you end up stagnating. I had entire years when I didn’t have time for ceramics, like when my kids were born, but I always went back to it. I knew ceramics was important to me. I just didn’t understand how much.
When the pandemic hit, the center where I was doing ceramics closed down and that’s when I realize how much getting my hands in clay and creating something with it meant to me. I was in withdrawal but I also had to supervise my kids at home while doing my own job online. The whole situation sucked, not that I was the only person feeling this way.
Eventually, I decided to quit my job for several reasons and found the gold lining (silver is underselling it) to the whole situation: Instead of being a teacher and doing ceramics when I had time, I would set up my own studio and sell my pottery. This way I could do what I loved for a living, and I would be able to supervise the kids as long as they were out of school and when they went back, I could be home if they got sick. A win-win situation. Of course, this choice comes from a privileged situation, where my family can get by if I don’t make any money for a while, and I am acutely aware of how lucky I am. Although, apparently, the pandemic made a lot of other people quit their job and pursue their dream, so here again, I am by no means exceptional. But I like the idea that in front of this crazy situation, all my fellow quitters and I threw caution to the wind and yelled collectively : “to hell with this crap!”
Not that it’s all been fun and games. We’re in the looooong process of getting a garage built so part of the old garage can become my studio, and in the meantime, I am freezing in our old garage and putting clay everywhere. Slowly but surely, though, I am accumulating makeshift items and Goodwill finds that allow me to create my art. I am immensely proud of the caulk gun extruder I made with the help of a You Tube tutorial. However I don’t have a kiln yet and have to drive two hours every week to get my pieces fired. I don’t know that I can claim to be a professional potter until I own a kiln and can actually run it, which seems like a big hill to climb. But I’ve climbed quite a few since I started this, and I have been learning a lot so hopefully at some point I will be a kiln semi-master as well. In the meantime, I’m still churning out pieces I can sell. I have the goods, an online store, and people can buy my stuff, so I am, in theory, a professional potter. There, I said it without quotation marks this time, maybe potter is less intimidating a word than artist.
At some point in 2020 one of my fellow potter friends opened an Etsy store and encouraged me to do the same. I was naïve, I thought that if I did my job and put stuff online, then Etsy would do their job and find customers for me. After the first few months of few and far between orders, I realized it was not going to be that simple. I would have to find my own customers. I spent a lot of time revamping my pictures, looking up Etsy tips, trying to figure out what SEO meant, coming up with better keywords, better titles, better everything. I opened a store on Facebook, paid ads, posted almost daily on Instagram, and still did not see much of a difference. I know it’s a long game, and at the end of the day, I am not frantic. Sure, I’d like to sell some stuff, but in the meantime I have a bigger inventory, my pieces are getting better and I am weirdly confident that I will eventually find my public because, objectively, my stuff is pretty good and quite original. It’s a disadvantage at first, but I feel that once I will have found my “fans”, as they say, it will all work itself out. I should add that being confident never came easy to me, so it’s a nice development. Maybe it’s just a byproduct of getting older. I’ll take it.
There are things I won’t do to sell more stuff. I won’t look up the most popular searches on Etsy and make items that match. I won’t make seasonal items, like heart shaped bowls for Valentine’s Day or mugs decorated with green clovers for Saint Patrick’s Day. After doing a couple of commissions, I decided that I wasn’t going to do this either, at least not right now. Commissions are a pain, you need to make stuff that match what the customer wants and you need to make several to make sure one of them will turn out OK so you end up with extra pieces of something you don’t even like that much. I think eventually, when I have my own kiln and am more confident in my art, I might revisit that policy but for now it’s not happening. I might be spoiled, or just very arrogant, but as an artist I believe you should make the stuff you want to make, and not what other people want you to make. If I wanted to be told what to do, I could have stayed in my old job. It paid better.
But there is one thing I need to do to become a “real” artist (again with the quotation marks), one thing that I believe will help me sell more: find my personal style. I do know who I am as a person, at least most of the time (even at my age, I still have blinding revelations about myself, not always for the best) but I am not entirely sure of who I am as an artist. Until now, I made the stuff I felt like making, either things I needed for my own house, gifts for families and friends or shapes I wanted to get better at. I loved experimenting, taking classes, trying different techniques I had seen people use. I didn’t need to be coherent, I just had to follow my own fancy. A few years back I started marbling different clays (white and red, to start with), which led me to making my own color clay, Agateware and Nerikomi, and I have been experimenting with this style of ceramics almost exclusively since. So when I decided to create an Etsy store, I thought that colored clay would be my style, my signature. If you’re thinking: this is not a style but a medium, you would be right. Even though Nerikomi is a niche in ceramics, there are still lots of people doing it, and I need to find my niche inside that niche. What makes my ceramics different from every other person using this technique?
Finding my style doesn’t feel like a joyful experience for now. It’s narrowing down my choices, giving up some of your creative freedom. I chafe at the idea. I have always been amazed at potters who would just do the same shape over and over again to get better at it. Some would even destroy the pot they’d just made and start over endlessly, pottery as a spiritual experience. I see on social medias some potters that make the same finished product over and over. There are slight variations in color and shape, but overall it’s the same thing. I don’t have a problem with that, but that’s not me. I admire the potters that keep pushing themselves to find new ways to explore the shape and style they’re known for. I might have gotten much better faster if I kept doing the same thing over and over but I also think my ceramics would be less interesting. You have to keep experimenting, trying new things. I would always fire the wonkiest ugliest pot I made, because you can experiment with it (try new glazes, new techniques to make it more interesting), and because you never know. Ceramics is this magical experience where ugly stuff can become beautiful once they’re gone through the fire. An ugly duckling experience. The opposite is also true, beautiful swans can transform into lame ducks in the kiln. Anything is possible.
But if anything is possible, how can you willingly limit your own possibilities? There are so many things I want to try, I cannot possibly stick to one shape, one decorative technique, it feels like cutting off my own arm.
My answer for now has been to create “collections” but since I apparently cannot stick to one thing (maybe I have artistic ADHD), I am creating several pieces from different collections at the same time. I know that it is not professional, and not efficient. I feel that I am getting better at narrowing down what I really want to do though, but I don’t think I will ever be able to create just one type of pot over and over again. I have three main “collections” going right now: Alien Eggs (egg-shaped pots with weird decorations that feel otherworldly. Some of them are semi-functional, some mostly sculptural. I love this one because I can let my imagination go wild and pretty much anything can be added to this collection as long as it’s vaguely ovoid or round); my Motifs collection (a more traditional Nerikomi for more traditional pots (mugs, vases, plates…)); and finally “Ocean View” for pieces inspired by the sea. I still regularly make pieces that fit in none of them (i.e. I just made a set of Russian Dolls that is a denunciation of the War in Ukraine) and I’ll just keep them to myself , until they make a collection of their own. Even if one of my collections became wildly successful, I won’t stop exploring.