Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Amy Lesemann. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Amy thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?

My mother had a tough beginning in life, but she got past that and eventually became a senior vice president in a bank. She was very good at it, but found it, frankly, boring. It brought in money to send us to expensive colleges, but after we kids were safely launched, she said wanted to go to art school. This woman, who had shied away from any craft my whole life! She had this secret side to her! She asked me, “Are you going to laugh at me? Is it too late?”

OF COURSE I wasn’t going to laugh at her! She started at the bottom, going to the Art Students League, taking life drawing lessons, stressing about everything, fearful, but showing up five days a week. She took the buses and trains from northern NJ into NYC. And over the years she produced amazing portraits. You can still see a video of her work, Joan Lesemann, on Youtube.

When I was recovering from surgery a friend brought over ceramic tiles to scratch pictures on, to paint, and then fire. I had never worked in ceramics. I was 55, my mom’s age when she started. Could I do this? Was it too late? If she could do it… maybe I could. And I have been accepted into my first ceramic show. She is so proud.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Most people think of a potter hunched over a wheel, making, well, round wheel-y things. I don’t. Honestly, I tried and utterly failed at the wheel. Perhaps I am too intense? Everything went splat… the bowl’s side went up, up, up… and then keeled over.

And so after giving up and throwing a lump of clay against the wall, I started hand building, or as some call it, slab building. Sometimes you start by rolling out a slab of clay as you would pie dough. You can cut out pieces and build things, scratching the edges and pressing them so they hold together.

I am not a precise person. My round things have a basic concept of roundness. But I can make a fabulous Great Horned Owl, toad, lily, and so forth. In the beginning, I measured the creature I was making and carefully scaled it up so I had perfect proportions. My first teacher had me study and sketch the human skull, over and over. That really helped because surprisingly, many attributes of animals are similar to humans: most animals have deeply set eyes, for example. Once you have studied the hands and feet of a human, it’s not that far a leap to study paws and claws.

I am proud of the details in my work – I take the time to sketch the animals I will make in clay. I look at a lot of foxes before I choose one to use as a model. I know way too much about the structure of a fox’s leg. The figure drawing classes I have taken have taught me to make what I see – not what I think should be there.

But my life drawing classes forced me to sometimes to a quick 30 second sketch. Those classes taught me to embrace the life in the subject, to capture the mood and the emotion in the fox, rather than just make it technically perfect.

I lived in rural Maine for 8 years, heating with a wood stove. My NJ mother despaired of me. But I love the outdoors and while teaching eighth grade English in central Maine, I cross country skiied, kayaked and canoed, and hiked as much as I could. When we moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan for career reasons, I was glad we were still fairly close to outdoor opportunities. We still kayak and bike.

These days I express my love for the outdoors by making bears, owls, flowers, and toads. I am considering trying a moose.

I love seeing looks of joy on people’s faces as they pick up a lily or toad. Honestly, I just get such a kick out of that. Life can be hard, and if you can give some one a little thrill, that’s really rewarding.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to unlearn that I could learn anything- quickly. Turns out – I was not so quick!
When you start working in a new area after excelling in your career, a completely new start is a very humbling experience.

You can tell yourself you know that, and you’re ready for the challenge, but your ego probably isn’t. It’s very rough to start learning a completely alien topic. You don’t even know the vocabulary! Every other word is foreign! These kind people are trying to explain something to me, and I just stare at them blankly.

Too egotistical to wait for a beginner’s class to come around, I just slopped around in clay and guessed I’d figure it out. The studio director taught a few of us some things about building mugs and handles, and was kind enough to teach me some anatomy. But I was in way over my head,

Clay dries quickly and your hands dry it. So you wet your hands. Too much water and now it’s sloppy. Now you have to let it dry a bit.

But then you get distracted and you wait too long. It’s too dry! And it’s cracking! What is happening?

Someone kindly says, Look, just start again with new clay.

That is so depressing. But if you try to put a real disaster into the kiln, it’ll probably break, or at worst, explode – taking other people’s pieces with yours. And that will not make you popular.

I had to learn to listen to people. I had to shut up, take notes, and start again, and again and again. Eventually, some pieces started to come together. The studio was a really supportive place and people noticed my improvement and praised me. I beamed like a second grader at t-ball.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Whenever we learn something – it could be reading, or math, or an art form – I think most of us go through a mini version of punctuated equilibrium. We plod along, sort of learning, sort of improving, a bit. It’s kind of low key frustrating, but we put up with it. But those bursts of understanding are wonderful.

The other night, Elliott Kayser was teaching a class I was in, and I really, frankly, didn’t like his method for creating hollow tubes for animal bodies. It made for quick assemblies of animals, but there was no way to include the detail I wanted to put on.

I was crabby. Everyone around me was making simple but lovely animals and I could not manage these tube things. I could not make my brain stop adding details. It was just… a thing I did. Elliott did not take my crabbiness to heart, at all, like the pro he is. He came over, and I apologized for my attitude, and showed him my owl and toad, feathers and warts galore. “I took your class on solid form animals,” I told him. “We made hippos? I have been making variations on hippos ever since. I can’t …” I gestured towards my successful friends. “…make these hollow things!”

He nodded. “You are a detail person. But remember – that class was six hours long. This one is 90 minutes.”

I had not thought of that.

But while I could not master the hollow tube form of scuplting, or the simplified animal – I did toss out the measuring and scaling up. I trusted my eye, finally. I looked at fox. I looked at my toy model. And I went for it.

I made a complete fox in about 90 minutes. This was … a revelation. I was more of a professional than I’d realized.

That jump, that sudden understanding, following countless small steps in learning, makes it all so much more fun.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: AmyArtA2
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