You're Fired! (Aug. 6, 2010)

Firing changes everything. Just ask Donald Trump.

On second thought, let's leave him out of this. His gigantic ego is too big to fit in this blog!

Back to firing. The ceramic variety, that is. Here are two photos of a tile I painted. The top photo shows the tile before being fired in a kiln, and the lower photo is what the tile looked like after firing. Isn't it cool to see the ways in which the colors have changed due to firing? What I loved about my time at the ceramics studio was the freedom I felt. I kept layering color, with no fixed expectations about which would dominate after the tile was fired. So it's a fun surprise to see how it turned out. The yellow and orange parts are now brighter. The red surprised me by really coming through, even though there were all kinds of colors layered over it. The purple, blue and green became darker.

This serendipity is one reason I love tie-dye, too. With certain art forms, the artist creates but there is also an element of surprise in the result. Embracing life's unpredictability is probably key to survival (physical as well as emotional). We often cannot control the result.

Nobody wants to be fired. But if it happens, maybe it can be the catalyst to something even better: like the kiln, it might bring about change that is even brighter than you imagined...