"Among the welter of material that comes up in an improvisation, we seek to simplify all that doodling and noodling up and down the keyboard and find the answer to the question, 'What is the deep structure of theme, pattern, or emotion from which all this arises?'"

-- Stephen Nachmanovitch

I decided to stop fussing with the oil clay portrait -- the one I've been posting pictures of for awhile now. It had lost it's soul. When I first began it, it was there. But then I got overly concerned with proper anatomy and changed it all around. It lost the emotion it once seemed to carry and became more an exercise in technique than a creative expression (not a bad thing -- it was a good learning exercise, but ultimately was not reflecting what I truly wanted). It was tough to put it aside at first. All that time and effort! But sometimes it's easier to start fresh. Much harder to make changes to something that already has it's structure and bones in place.

For the new piece I decided to go with pottery clay instead of the oil clay. My hand joints were really suffering from the stiff push/pull of the Roma Plastilina. The pottery clay felt so soft and responsive in comparison. Much nicer to work with. I threw all concern for "proper form" out the window and strove instead for a kind of call-and-response work between the clay form and an inner sense of "yes" --