A Ritual, An Idea And A Great Twist
Coffee is the first thing I do every morning. A ritual during which I think about my day. What will I do, who will I meet, what I want to progress in. Drinking coffee is a ritual that has aesthetics. It looks best in a small espresso cup with a crema on top, especially if the cup is unique.
I have often imagined what my own cup would look like if I created it for myself. It must be porcelain, because that is the most noble ceramic material. But I never thought one day I would really start making ceramics. Now I know it was a good idea.
I always loved creating!
I wasn't a particularly good kid. Not particularly bad either. My mind often wandered when I should have paid attention to something. In those days it wasn’t common to suspect a child had hyperactivity, otherwise known as attention disorder. Now I know about that, I have understood what happened, why it happened, and the way it happened.
Creation has always been a refuge. Then I got praise, then I was creative, then I was a good boy.
And then I was fine, too!
Not because it was the goal, it was just a result. It's the result of doing something that I loved, that kept me engaged, and what I could and wanted to pay attention to. The guy next door got a computer, I made one for myself out of a shoebox, buttons, glue and crayons. It could also be opened, I showed my parents the purpose of each button. I drew huge animals on the asphalt, with a piece of stone, because chalk was too expensive.
I won a literary competition when I was 8, I attended a ceramics course in high school, and when I was 16 I had a painting exhibited at an art festival. I wrote a novel at the end of high school. I will publish it one day.
After college came work. But the job I had at the time did not satisfy my creative self. So I applied for, and fortunately I was accepted to the screenwriting course at UCLA. Two of my movie screenplays reached the quarter-finals of several Hollywood competitions. I've been writing ever since and have plans with that, too.
In the spring of 2020, everything changed. Everything around me, that had been natural before, disappeared for a while. Before, it was just news, everything happened somewhere far away, then the pandemic reached Europe. It was time for curfew. I like to live actively, do my hobbies, meet people, but suddenly the world changed completely. Appointments, personal conversations have disappeared. I stayed home, alone. I started drifting down a slope where depression joined me as my companion. It wasn't easy, I know it wasn't for others either, but unfortunately I got very far, very deep.
However, there was something to help.
One day my best friend called me to share his new hobby with me: he started wood carving. He made beautiful pieces and immediately piqued my interest. However, I live in an apartment in the city center, and wood carving involves a lot of wood chips, let alone the noise that a chainsaw generates.
However, I believe my creative self woke up once again.
The next day, my morning ritual began just like any other. An espresso with crema on top, in an elegant cup. But the moment was empty. I no longer thought about how I would spend my day, who I would meet, because I lost motivation for anything. Every day was the same. I got up, worked, maybe did a workout at home, talked to someone on the phone... There was nothing new for me.
As I was staring at the cup of coffee, I was again thinking about what my own cup would look like if I made it myself. Suddenly I was struck by an idea.
I looked for a store selling ceramic raw materials and asked if they had porcelain. Of course they had, who else if not them. Then came the research on how, how difficult it is, how much it will cost, and whether it is possible at all to (re)start ceramics with the top of the profession: porcelain. And even though the answers clearly showed that it would be too big of a challenge, my inspiration had gone too far to turn back. Against all odds this is how I started ceramics.
Learning and practice began, and the numerous warning signs all turned out to be true, despite my previous experience with ceramics. Porcelain has very low plasticity and is very difficult to shape with hand. It barely resembled working with clay in high school. A few more drops of water makes it too wet and "muddy", yet, letting it dry a minute longer than necessary and it cracks with every slight bend. When dry, it is as fragile as stuck powdered sugar. It breaks at the slightest touch. If pressed when wet, despite the repair, it will distort again after firing.
But I was right after all. The constant annoyance was always combined with new knowledge. On the slope, which I had been drifting down for while by then, I started to climb upwards.
During the morning coffee I was planning my day again, my cup couldn't be more unique, and now it has a meaning, too.