The one that got away.
"Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." - Alfred Lord Tennyson
a.k.a.: The one that got away.
I so loved this piece. An elongated, narrow, shallow vessel, my thought was to detail the surface to just the right level, leaving large areas pristine so as not to deter too much from the elegance of the form itself.
There I was, happily working my way from one end of the piece to the other, sculpting, making marks, off in that dreamy la-la land ... flowing if you will, when nearing the far end, I happened to glance back at the first few marks I had made. To my horror, I saw that which every porcelain artist knows intimately and dreads: a crack. And not just a little crack, a big momma. Cutting almost all the way through the horizontal plane of the piece.
First, my totally irrational inner optimist kicks in - "Oh, it's fine! I can fix it"... immediately followed by the realist who knows that no, there's no fixing a crack like that, no matter how much time was invested in its creation, this piece is a goner, it's time to let go.
Porcelain my love, you're beautiful. You're a diva. You're temperamental and you're persnickety. You are the Princess with the Pea, exquisitely sensitive to that microscopic amount of extra pressure I must have placed on you at the outset of the design. Porcelain, you, unlike so many of us mere mortals, flat out refuse to accept pressure you don't wish to handle. Bear with me dear, I'm learning.
