1/11/26 - 1/14/26: full joy & volcanic origins.
1/11/26
There is an endless plethora of things in clay I want to learn and get good at, but claymation is 1,000% not one of those things. I love clay and I love animation so you’d think otherwise, but there are certain things that, in combination, are absolutely sinister. I have all the super creepy claymation that exists in the world stuck in my head. A small part of me does appreciate claymation’s power to create such intensely creepy visuals. The thing I hate about it is the very particular feeling of unease that it elicits that most other things are incapable of evoking in me.
1/12/26
I find it odd when people talk about art like it’s a hobby. I can only understand it being a passion. An obsession. A hobby feels casual, whereas I do not feel anything close to casual about art. It’s the thing I think about when I wake up, and before I go to sleep, and every moment I’m awake. The thing that, if I’m not making it, I’m then resenting the thing that’s preventing me from making it. Sometimes I feel like the only safety I ever truly feel in this life is when I’m lost in art. I get into this trance where art is truly the only important thing in this world, and nothing else exists, including time. It’s a warm vortex of happiness I wish I could crawl inside indefinitely. But I have to do dishes and hang laundry, and brush my teeth and have anxiety about the human relationships I have, and about every little thing I need to do, and all my desires and fears.
Sometimes relationships to me feel like how I stack dishes on the drying rack. Too precarious for comfort. I always make a tall mountain of dishes to test my skills as a mountain-made-out-of-dishes craftsman. I feel like I should be well-practiced, and thus adept enough at this, in order to put it on my resume. I’ve had “re-write my resume” on my to-do list for awhile now. It's those little need-to-do things that are like gnats buzzing in my ear that I avoid with such passion.
1/14/26
I just noticed my ears ringing. I enjoy loud music too much to stop, though. I know I should turn it down. But so often I need it really loud so I can really feel it and get into it and dance like crazy to it and lose myself in it. I need to lose myself in music to feel better on a bad day. I need to sing loudly to a raucous song to get any thick, confusing feelings released from my body, at least a tiny bit. I especially love doing this alone in the car, while driving on the freeway. Pure joy.
Marbling with colorful clay is one of the most relaxing activities. I’m currently taking a nerikomi class where we spent the first class actually learning how to make the colorful clay. I love when I learn such extremely useful knowledge in the very first class. This is the way I would want to teach, as well. My teacher in this nerikomi class is a visiting artist whose work I love. They are the kind of cool teacher that's simultaneously chill as fuck and full of knowledge. I just adore a cool teacher. I noticed a lot of people in my class measuring their colored clay blocks precisely and creating very exact, beautiful patterns. I needed to immediately and intuitively start combining the colors with no plan. No exactness. I’m sure it appeared chaotic and haphazard when I was doing it. The only time I use a ruler to make art is when I'm making clothing. In any other context I find the ruler to be the enemy of art. I can't overthink art, otherwise I can't feel the full joy of it. Which is mainly, entirely, what I'm in it for.
I had a minuscule amount of nerikomi experience already, and someone in my class last night was asking me about the sanding part of it. I equated it to putting a pumice stone to the foot and getting all that dead skin off. The clay reveals a brighter tapestry. It pops, freshly revealed, like a fresh foot that’s just been newly exfoliated with a porous, abrasive object of volcanic origins.