Presence (Assertive)
Mantle: Spring
Exegesis moved round the class in a horseshoe shape, passing behind the row of students, surveying their work. Each had a few square feet of leather hide in front of them, and a sharpie in their hand. In hir mind, Exegesis was still a bit uncomfortable about cutting the hide up into sections that way. It was wasteful, in that you could get a lot more out of a hide if you were to lay out patterns on a full side, playing tetris to fit in as many as possible in as small a space as possible. It was a business person's perspective; lower the costs as much as you could, widen the profit margin as much as you could. Ze wasn't going to have them lay out a full hide a piece though, for that same reason of cost. Exegesis found hirself reflecting on how an educator's job led to a different mindset than a business person.
“One of the things I am seeing as I am going around” ze addressed the class in what was quickly becoming hir 'teacher's voice', “Is that a lot of you are taking a lot of time being very precise in marking out the weak points in the hide. That's not a bad impulse, since you want to get as much out of the materials as you can, but you'll find a space of a few millimeters won't matter much. These are handcrafted products, so they shouldn't all be identical. That means you can vary the dimensions to fit the needs of the materials.”
Some of the students had stopped working to listen, some hadn't. Considering what ze was going to say next, Exegesis wasn't sure which response to encourage. “And more importantly, there's the issue of speed. This is something many art courses neglect. That's part of the problem with fine arts.” Anyone that was learning from hir would learn about the tension between the fine arts community and the craft arts community. Hir disdain for fine arts was clear in the tone. “They encourage you to treat everything like it's going to be your magnum opus. I'm not here to teach you how to craft your magnum opus, I'm here to teach you how to pay the rent.”
Ze knew ze'd have to reiterate that point several times. It was training the fine arts out of them. Most would take their work in too precious a way to allow for the kind of speed a professional needed. Most would probably be thinking to themselves that if they just got better they could become faster and not have to be as detached from their work. One or two might even manage that, but the attitude it would create would haunt them through their professional life. Those few who did generate that speed without tapering down captious tendencies tended to turn into divas. They wouldn't be able to train others, they'd make terrible employees, and they'd not have the more mercenary attitude needed to run their own business. Exegesis vowed to produce as few divas as possible.
“Speed pays the rent. The largest cost in handcrafted goods is the labor. Specifically it's the time they are paying for. The time of a skilled crafter. If I pay you to work in my shop, you are the most expensive thing in my shop. That's not a metaphor. A biweekly paystub for a studio artist, working in a profitable retail studio, should be similar to the cost of the most expensive single item in the shop. If you've got your own shop, make sure you understand that your time is your biggest expense. You may love the work, and I hope you do, but you're going to want time outside of work right? Preferably at the highest grade of pay possible? It's better to craft fifty nearly perfect pieces than one perfect piece. People don't pay fifty times more for perfect.”
Time outside of work. Time to spend time with family and friends. Things that mattered. Family wasn't really in the cards for hir. Friends, well, that was still a possibility, but it had never been easy for hir. Ze was better at sales than intimacy. In a sense, they were opposite sensibilities. One was about making a fast short and useful impression toward a specified goal, and the other was a slow, deep, enduring connection with the vague goal of... what exactly? Alliance, fun, love, driving off loneliness, staying psychologically functional?
“Exij... Exha,” a student broke hir reflection in stumbling to pronounce hir name. Exegesis smiled, “X is fine. A lot of people can't say it.” Ze walked over, “What's up?”
“How is it the leather as a weak crease in a curve like this? How did someone manage to fold it like that?”
“Oh, that's the thing; No person did. The cow did. This bit is probably from the underside of one of the forelimbs. The cow bent that part of the skin when moving, so it grew the crease as it developed. It also means you're never going to get that crease out of it.”
Ze watched the gears turn in the young women's head, and could see a bit of discomfort.
Hadn't really thought about the fact that this used to be an animal huh? Being aware of the world usually leaves us having to come to terms with at least a few uncomfortable elements doesn't it? Art and rent, family, living life and working with death. Nothing exists in a vacuum.
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