I Meant To Do That

One of my favorite movies is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. The Dot and T-man were kids when it came out, and we re-watched the video enough times to have some of the themes and lines committed to memory.

“What’s it like in the Big House, Mickey?” This is my metaphor for the naiveté it takes to get myself into another crazy situation. It’s not that I don’t think things through; it’s that I define success as taking the risk. The consequences are just part of being alive.

“I meant to do that.” Pee Wee had just been having fun doing his version of trick-riding on his bike, and a crowd of kids had taken note. The stunts ended when Pee Wee crashed over a curb along the street, tumbling several times onto the grass. As he got up and brushed himself off, he attempted to mask his embarrassment by saying, “I meant to do that.”

I am so there with that.

A recent evening with friends reminded me of a long-forgotten example of my design process. First and foremost, I don’t want to make what everyone else is making. I have always been like that. I don’t want to wear exactly what everybody else is wearing, I don’t want to decorate just like everybody else is decorating, and I don’t want to create like everybody else is creating. I'll take the class with everybody else and learn how to do something, because I don’t want what I’m doing to be unrecognizable. I just don’t want it to be just the same.

In our fourth grade art class at Wildwood Elementary, we had a unit on ceramics. I knew the minute Mr. Eels pulled out that clay that I was looking at a class of twenty-one ashtrays and one Kari original. Those ashtrays were going to start out as Grecian urns or soup tureens, no doubt, but by the time they got home, they would be good old 1960’s-style ashtrays, glazed in avocado green or burnt orange and covering one third of a coffee table. Ashtrays were objects d’art in 1960’s homes.

Since The Barn and The Peg were teachers, we spent most of our summers on marathon vacations, camping out to make them affordable, and by-passing expensive amusement parks. Instead, we visited museums and historic sites. We first visited Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, at some date in time before the death of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in 1960. The Peg started collecting Toby mug cream pitchers somewhere along the line, and it must have been during this summer excursion east. A few years later I was sitting in fourth-grade art.

I briefly considered making a Toby mug cream pitcher, but my confidence in ceramic art made me certain I was looking at an eventual ashtray. I rightly figured I should stay away from the vessel genre altogether. I did see lots of busts in the museums and historical homes we visited. Maybe my clay could be a bust, but not of some old, dusty Colonial guy. I wanted my bust to be happening and now, Baby. I chose Bob Hope.

I loved Bob Hope! Who didn’t? A nice bust of Bob Hope would look right at home on the coffee table next to the giant orange ashtray, and it would speak of our refinement. Busts, after all, were a cut above ashtrays.

I set to work on my sculpture, making a three-inch square base for it. I was appalled at how skimpy Mr. Eels was with the clay! Those mini-ashtrays the other kids were making weren’t going to make the splash they thought they would. Tea bag holders, maybe, but rather anemic for mid-century ashtrays. In a few years they could easily be converted to incense holders, but we didn’t know that at the time.

The largest part of my clay allotment was formed into a ball and balanced on the base. I held back a few smaller pieces, for the ears and that ski-jump nose in Mr. Hope’s famous profile. I wasn’t doing too badly. I felt the clay move against my touch, and it was easy to re-form errors as my vision for the piece made its trek from my mind to the work in front of me.

In the end, I just couldn’t capture the guy. It was my first sculpture, and I found it frustrating that I couldn’t make it look like Bob Hope. As I examined my options, I looked at the piece with a new eye. The guy did look like someone famous, but it wasn’t Bob Hope. Turned out, it was a dusty old Colonial guy after all. I stuck a pony tail at the nape of his neck, and proudly took credit for my interpretation of George Washington, the father of our country.

This set a pattern that I still follow. I start with an idea, but I don’t marry myself to it. As I go, I design and refine, and interpret the piece’s strength as it takes shape before me. I can usually do as I did with my nine-year-old attempt at bust sculpture, and turn my frustrations into a new line of thought, not completely unconnected to the original vision, but not a slave to it, either. It’s what makes original quilt design less of an onus and more of a free and confident step in fiber art.

Besides, I can always fall back on the best reasoning ever, thanks to Pee Wee.

I meant to do that.

Copyright © April 2006 Kari E.O. Burns