"We're all apprentices to ourselves."
Back in 1986, I went to my first national blacksmithing conference. Tom Joyce was one of the demonstrators. Watching and listening to him, I realized that he knew how to follow his own path of development. He was educating himself. First he thought of the forms he wanted to make - then he figured out how to make them. The tools and techniques followed the forms, not the reverse.
This fit in perfectly with what I'd read in Robert Henri's The Art Spirit.
So at the conference, watching Tom, I realized that going to conferences like that wasn't the way to make my own forms. No, they could only come from apprenticing to myself - free drawing, free forging, imagining forms and figuring out how to make them.
Without Tom's early influence on my blacksmithing career, maybe I'd never have found bowls - or found the courage to make only bowls. It's been a strange path sometimes. But at least it's been my own.
And when you're on your own path - you may be alone in one sense - but in another sense you're never alone. With you are the thousands, perhaps millions, of other people who have found their own paths and are following them now. And then there are the people who walked their own paths and have gone on. They're with us too.
9:42:02 PM 
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