“To create a memorable design, you need to start with a thought that is worth remembering.”
—Thomas Manss
The small box, with its geometric inlaid light and dark pattern, was a gift from my father after one of his Navy deployments. When he pulled it from his duffel bag, I tried to hide my disappointment. It looked like a decorated wooden rectangle. I had been hoping for a Japanese doll, or maybe a jewelry box. “What could it be?” I wondered.
“It opens,” he smiled. “It’s a puzzle. See if you can solve it.”
After several days and many broad hints from Dad, I figured out by pushing and pulling the delicate wood design that the box unfolded to reveal a tiny drawer. It became the destination for treasures — delicate seashells, colored stones, jaunty acorn caps, shiny coins retrieved from couch cushions.
I grew older. The world grew more complicated, more strident, harder to understand. The box became a way of thinking about the challenges we all face on the other side of childhood—homemaking, parenting, shaping time beyond the ring of school bells. Most of my answers came from books. But not all of them.
Facing those challenges was like unlocking the box: frustrating, no instructions provided. Through a process of trial and error — touching, shaking, looking from different angles — I found the secret lever. One step led to the next. The box grew bigger. More appealing. More beautiful than its surface design suggested.
Life is the same. There are those who don’t consider crafts and porcelain painting art — dismissed as the product of technicians or “mere” illustrators. They are art — art for everyone, not just the wealthy or intellectual elite. Society thinks art needs intermediaries. It isn’t important if the public understands it. Even worse if they like it. Oscar Wilde captured the idea: “Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.”
My adventures with crafts and painting led me to an insight I might have otherwise missed. There are all kinds of stories to tell. Most use words, but some do not. The tools I chose and the projects woven through the decades have been simple ones. But in their ordinariness something happened. The dilemmas, disappointments, discoveries and often, the delights that have surprised me, have been easier to understand, as ideas that belonged to the arts became ideas for living.
Most of my answers came from books. But not all of them.
Beginning a craft project or opening my paint box feels like entering C.S. Lewis’s magic wardrobe. Other worlds appear. They are colorful places, teeming with possibilities. They are places where choices often lead to unanticipated outcomes — sometimes worse, more often better.
Alvin Toffler observed in “The Third Wave” that to create a fulfilling emotional life and sane emerging civilization for tomorrow, people need three basic requirements: community, structure and meaning. I disagree. It isn’t only the future that needs those things. We have always needed ways to transform life from a box with no exit, to a place where dreams and discoveries make living a deeper, richer, wider journey.
I was an unsuitable candidate for the kingdoms that make up art and design. Yet with no formal training at the outset, and no apparent aptitude, the time I have spent “thinking” with my hands — painting, printing, creating from scraps and castoffs — have sent shafts of light across countless murky hours.
Set against the backdrop of my decisions to explore old-fashioned crafts, and later, porcelain painting, the essays here are a tribute to my journey with art — its influence and its unexpected lessons.
There are lots of ways to open a box. Art is one.
