Mandated Coffee Cup

I wrote a blog the other day that began with these words, “Perhaps the greatest mandate of art is to evidence to humans what it means to live, the meaning of living.”  It is a very difficult thing to sit in your studio and conceive of a work of art and only slightly less difficult to produce it.  It is a life made all the more difficult by what’s at stake as quoted above.  No one who believes this can go easy or arrogantly into the studio.  I have found the burden to often be untenable, to speak to humanity in a way that underscores your absolute belief in the truth that “we are Christ’s ambassador as though God were making his plea through us, …be reconciled to God.”  But there is one great balm, one great gift from Above that allows you a path to sweet success without the burden of imagined concept; the coffee cup.  I have found that a well made, hand crafted, sincerely created coffee cup can deliver Arts goods to the user.  There is a long list of reasons that I believe this to be true, reasons that are both true of the coffee cup and a work of art.  They both function perfectly as they are designed to do.  They both create sincere contact between the maker the made and the user that moves cosmically beyond the object or its function.  They both rely heavily on aesthetics and aesthetic philosophy and create worlds not bound to the concrete but lifted into beauty, the natural world and the serene sense of being alive at this moment with it and with its assistance.  These are just a few of the many reasons but the most important one that keeps me making coffee cups September thorough November of every year?  It is a mandate from The Great I Am, worthy of The Great I Am.    

An example, made by local artist Eric Botbyl.