From Looking to Making: Finding Ceramic Inspiration

I’ve been working on a commission this month, and I very much appreciate it. It will provide the funds for purchasing clay for the winter.

I should be able to finish making the order next week. Then comes glazing, which will take several full days, followed by firing my large kiln.

While my hands have been busy with this project, I’ve been thinking about what I might make next.

I often take photographs of things that catch my eye. Some are from Lake Michigan and others are from places I’ve traveled. I don’t always know why I’ve taken the photograph when I take it. There is simply something about a line, texture, shape or structure that makes me stop and look.

Lately, I’ve been going back through some of those photographs, looking for ceramic inspiration in the lines, textures and structures that first caught my attention.

I’m noticing the horizontal line where two weathered surfaces meet. A row of old bolts and fasteners. Tire tracks curving through sand. The strong horizontal and vertical lines created by a window.

I’m not interested in recreating what I photographed.

Photograph of strong window lines beside Cyndi Casemier’s colored-pencil sketch exploring those lines on a ceramic form

I’m interested in what I can take from it.

What happens if I take the lines made by tires moving through sand and wrap them around a ceramic form? Could the stones surrounding an old window become texture on the side of a vase? Could a row of bolts become repeated marks in clay?

So I’ve started sketching.

Photograph of curving tire tracks in sand beside a sketch simplifying the tracks into lines for a ceramic surface

My drawings are simple. I’m trying to remove what isn’t important and find the part that caught my attention in the first place.

Photograph of an old stone wall and window beside a ceramic form sketch exploring stone, brick and architectural lines

Then I begin thinking in clay.

Ceramic artist Cyndi Casemier’s sketchbook showing photographs, vessel drawings, colored pencils and notes about glazes and surface ideas

Would that surface be better with an engobe or a glaze? Should it be matte? Could a reticulation glaze create the separation I’m seeing in the photograph? Where should the texture stop and another surface begin?

At this point, I don’t know exactly what these pieces will look like.

And I like that.

The photographs aren’t designs for pots. The sketches aren’t plans I need to follow. They’re ways of thinking—small steps between something I’ve noticed and something I may eventually make.

Looking closely is where it begins. Making is what happens when I start asking what else it could become.

What has caught your eye lately?

The next time something makes you stop and look, take a photograph. You don’t need to know why. You may discover later that it was the line, the texture, the color—or simply the way two things came together—that you wanted to remember.