Finally, my clayboard order–put in a MONTH ago!–arrived! Woo! I have small clayboard! I can paint “Egg Trick”! And all those other ideas I had for small paintings that I couldn’t do because I didn’t have clayboard (rather than gessoboard) in the right size! And this other idea I had for an 18 x 24, too, although I suspect that once I’ve got what I’ve got in my head down, I will decide it needs another element, and I have no idea what that will be. Doorknob? Rubber chicken? Live fish? Bird skull? Rock? Egg? Ammonite? Frog? Slug? The options! They’re endless!

But I suppose I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it, since there’s no sense jumping ahead of myself, when I’m only laying down Endless Bloody Concrete at the moment anyhow.

Barring a Digger completed this morning, I’m pretty much spending the day in Gearworld. We’ll see how it goes.

I signed up for a ceramics class yesterday with my friend Kathy–I took it for years in college, out of a kind of dogged determination since I really wasn’t very good. I’m looking forward to it–it includes studio access at the arts center, which is only about a mile away, for a year. Assuming that all does not go ill and I wind up moving again, maybe I can finally get a hobby. Practice should take care of the sheerly practical skills of throwing, and I wonder if part of my sense of failure stemmed from the fact that I still had only a fledgling aesthetic sense, and my instructor was really a very…um…arty sort. (It wasn’t that I couldn’t make the clay do stuff, I just never had any ideas of what to make it do, and was very intimidated by the whole notion of Real Sculpture, Damnit.)It’s been eight years, and I’d like to think that my aesthetics have matured somewhat–and god knows, I have plenty ‘o ideas–so maybe it’ll come out better this time.

Or maybe I’ll make a bunch of crappy bowls. But y’know, either way’s good.