When I reached out to Greta Jarani about using “Sunday Crossword” for our cover, she could not have been kinder or more encouraging about the concept for Off Season. A graduate of the ceramics program at Maine College of Art and Design, Greta has spent years as a working artist, first as an apprentice for a master potter, and now as a professional painter and ceramicist in her own right. She is also a professional educator, teaching both children and adults. Originally from Massachusetts, Greta now lives in Vermont with her wife, Daria, and their two cats, Papaya and Impa, all of whom appear in her paintings. I was honored that Greta was willing to sit down with me for over an hour, and discuss her creative journey, learning to follow her interests and trust her instincts, and how she has overcome her own “off seasons” as an artist.
Sophia Ross Eckert: When do you feel like your creative journey as an artist began?
Greta Jarani: My mom is an artist, and when I was a kid, she was always doing different craft and fine arts-based things. She was always taking painting classes. When I was about seven, she had me take a ceramics class. I remember going into this basement – it was dark and cold and smelled like clay, and we sat around a table and were able to just mess around. I made a bumblebee that my parents still have at their house. It was this very chunky bumblebee that I think was fired once and then painted with acrylic paints. I painted the wings bright silver, and I remember being so proud of it.
Then in high school, I went to a fancy Massachusetts private high school, and a lot of it was not for me. I felt very other. But they had this amazing ceramics studio, and I spent all of my time in the art room. I feel like my high school experience was about figuring out that the main building was really not for me, but there was this amazing space on the other side of campus where people were drinking coffee and talking about the Violent Femmes, and that was a space where I belonged.
SRE: I love that. Writers don’t always have specific spaces like that – maybe a coffee shop or a book store – but in college, I always loved visiting the art building and the ceramics studio. They’d let me try my hand at it, and I was truly terrible, but it was always fun.
GJ: That’s how I want my clay class to be. I teach a beginner’s class, and sometimes I’ll have brand new people, and sometimes it’ll be people who’ve just taken the beginner class for years. I really want to emphasize in my class that we’re a beginner class; I’m not trying to teach you how to become an incredible thrower. We’re figuring out if you even like throwing, and if you don’t, you can do something else.
When I was a ceramics major in art school, people always said to me that my forms were not very interesting, and it looked like I was just trying to create a canvas to do decoration on. And I realized, oh yeah, that’s true. I took that not as advice to work on my forms, but as advice to lean into that, and flatten out my forms even more – just to make plain things with more decoration. That feedback helped me learn to prioritize figuring out what I like and doing that, instead of thinking I have to be really good at one thing.
SRE: That's a fantastic way to frame feedback. In artistic spaces, sometimes we're given critique that has more to do with somebody else's form than our own, so I really love that you had that instinct to say, "Actually, I'm going to lean into the part of the craft that I really enjoy and find fulfilling."
GJ: Right. In art school I wasn’t very experimental, because I was worried about making something that wasn’t beautiful. My experiments were kind of stiff. I felt like I was heading to the goal of being a master potter or whatever, and then, sometimes I think you feel like “I’m not good enough,” but the actual truth is that you’re just not interested in it. And that is totally acceptable to say: “Hey, I’m not interested in becoming the world’s best thrower – I’m just interested in doing pottery and doing it the way I like.”
SRE: I love that, that feels very true to my experience as well. When did you begin to think of yourself as a real artist?
GJ: Back when I was a kid in high school, I remember seeing people choosing what they wanted to go to college for, and I was like, holy shit, I have no idea what I even like. I was kind of into biology, and I got good grades in biology. My dad was a surgeon, and he thought I could go to Harvard and do biology like he did. And that didn’t feel true, or like something I wanted to do. I remember looking at all the schools I wanted to apply to, and I realized the thing I liked was making ceramics, and I wanted to pick a school where I could do that. I found Maine College of Art, which is now Maine College of Art and Design, and that was the only school I applied to. It was like a 95% acceptance rate, so it was not a risk to only apply to that one school. Everybody in my life was like, “please don’t go to such a small school, please apply to some schools that would maybe look better on your high school’s list of where their students are going,” and I was like, no, this is what I want to do.
Some of the notes that, say, my mom gave me, were definitely right. My social experience was hell. But it was a good learning experience, and I figured out that I was an artist, and that it wasn’t just a fluke that I couldn’t think of anything else to do. It was actually a choice that I had made to go into, I guess, ceramics at the time, but really into the philosophy of art. That was my favorite part of art school, the critical theory classes where we were talking about what defines craft versus art, and where you as an artist fall within that.
SRE: For anyone who isn't familiar, what does it mean to go to art school? How would you say it differs from a typical college experience?
GJ: At our school, there were only four hundred people in our entire program, so about a hundred people in each year. There were five floors in the building – it was an old department store that had been all gutted out in the Beaux Arts style, and it was so beautiful. There were these huge windows on every floor. The first floor was just admin stuff, the second floor was the drawing 101 kind of classrooms, and I think the wood shop was on the second floor. Then, you would go upstairs, and there was the metalsmithing stuff, and maybe the painting studios. The fourth floor had sculpture, and then the ceramics was on the fifth floor, and that was weird, because usually ceramics is in the basement. But we had all these cool kilns up on the fifth floor of this building, and that was our whole campus, just that one building.
We had academic classes and studio classes, and there were academic requirements, but it was like, fill your course selection with studio classes and art history classes, and then once every two years, you have to take one math class, but it was mostly studio classes. I’d have six hours of studio classes one day, and then the next day I’d have one art history class. It felt very seamless. We would be talking about something in art history, and then that would kind of translate into what I was doing in the studio. I was able to take so many different types of media – I did metals, woodworking, printmaking, textiles. I did painting, I did ceramics, I did sculpture. You could just go into any of these spaces and mess around, and there would be somebody there, like a TA, to ask if you needed help with something. It was so cool to get to be in that space.
SRE: Were you able to do different kinds of firings, like wood firing, at the time, and experiment with your work in that way?
GJ: We didn’t have a wood kiln at school, but we had a soda kiln, we had regular gas kilns, all kinds of different electric kilns, and then we a Raku kiln inside, which was weird, because that usually has to be outside. We had this special hood thing that was behind it, and you would fire the Raku kiln, and then bring stuff over behind this hood. We were up on the fifth floor, so it felt very weird and magic. I remember wearing a fireman’s coat to do the Raku firing.
Doing all of those different techniques, I realized, oh, the thing I’m interested in is the functional stuff. I don’t like Raku because you can’t use it. But now, a decade on from college, I’m not feeling that way so much anymore. I’m realizing that the pieces I make that are functional, I want them to be display pieces. I’ve thought about integrating acrylic paint, like with my bumblebee when I was a kid, and doing more wall things. There’s so much talk about what is good ceramics, and it’s so different from, what is good art, because there’s a whole different set of rules it feels like.
The functionality conversation can go in so many different directions, for instance, when you move into a new place, it is kind of dysfunctional to not have any art on the wall, so the art is a functional piece in that sense. But then, what does functional mean? And what functions do we put value on?
SRE: Reading your artist statement on your website and the essay you have accompanying it, you talk about battling perfectionism and feeling like a failure earlier in your career. That's such a ubiquitous experience for those of us who are in the arts, but it's also something that we don't talk about as much. Where do you think those feelings came from originally, and how do you think you've arrived at the place where you are now, where those feelings are not driving you as much?
GJ: Yeah, I’m like, how to answer this question without completely throwing my mother under the bus. [Laughs]
SRE: [Laughs] I'll keep that out.
GJ: Put that in, she would think that’s funny. My mom and I have had so many amazing, reparative conversations since I was a kid, and she has more than made amends for certain ways that she talked about things and dealt with things. She has always been an amazing role model and friend. That being said, when I was a kid, she was very interested in us succeeding and getting good grades, and it would be unheard of for me to pass in homework without having her check it over first and make sure I got all the questions right. Which then, what is the point of me going to school to learn? Because I’m getting really good grades, but secretly my mom is turning the wheels and being a thesaurus for me as I wrote my papers. I was in college, still sending my mom essays to have her proofread them for me. She would always have tons of feedback, and she’s an amazing writer, too, so I trust her judgement so much. But it made me feel like I couldn’t put anything out on my own.
And then, in college, I remember deciding, I’m going to submit this essay without having my mom read it, and then I got an A on it, and realized, oh, no, everybody is just a person.
There are so many reasons that I have battled with perfectionism, but I feel like that is the thing that pops into my head. I used to think, it’s not about process, it’s about product. I want my ceramics class to be is very much not about product, but about process, and figuring out what parts of the process you’re drawn to. And then the product kind of comes.
SRE: I love that you bring that up – this has been my year of process over product. It's still hard, but I do think we undervalue the process of art so much, because we only celebrate the product, typically.
The other part of your artist statement, which I feel like is somewhat connected to this, is about leaving Instagram. Leaving social media feels like one of those things we all talk about doing, but then we tell ourselves we need it for something, like promoting our work. How did you come to that decision, and how do you think it's influenced your work?
GJ: It has felt so good to not be online in that way. I was so wrapped up in the idea that being an artist meant being somebody who has a lot of Instagram followers, because otherwise, how am I going to sell my work? How am I going to get involved in this or that? How are people going to find my work?
At the same time, I was in college when I was feeling the most intense about social media. I was feeling a lot of negativity about my looks and my body, and my emotions were so tied to how I felt that I was perceived. The fact that there was something in my hand being like, “Here, want to check out how you’re being perceived?” Every five minutes, you can just refresh it. People are still perceiving you. I couldn’t cope with it.
I also felt like I would never meet someone if I wasn’t online. Like, if I was offline, that would mean that my work wasn’t being seen, I wasn’t being seen, I was going to die alone. I wasn’t able to erase my Instagram until I met my wife, and she was not on Instagram. And I was like, wow, that’s so cool. And I got rid of mine, too, and it was so easy to do. I mean, they make it hard to actually delete it, but the way I thought I was going to miss it, I didn’t. It was like a weight lifted.
SRE: Going back to your art, it seems from your current work that you've pivoted more into painting, although you're still teaching ceramics. Can you tell me a little bit about that shift?
GJ: I majored in ceramics, and then right after I graduated, I started an apprenticeship with a woman in Virginia. She was this amazing potter who took on one apprentice at a time, one every two years, and I was so stoked about it. Not only was I going to have a studio guaranteed for two years, but I was going to be learning from this person, and it was going to be awesome. But I got there, and it was not a good fit personality-wise. Her teaching style really took a toll on me emotionally. There were obviously other variables. I was in Virginia, my mental health was not peak just from the get, and I felt really bad about my work and the way she spoke about my work. It felt so true and so devastating that I was not good enough.
I ended the apprenticeship four months early, and that felt like I was such a failure, not being able to stick it out for the whole two years. That was in 2019. After that, there’s a whole chunk of time between then and 2020 where I lived in Virginia, then Massachusetts, and then Vermont, and then Rhode Island, and the whole time, I didn’t have a ceramics studio. Then I moved to Pittsburgh to connect with a friend who I was going to open a studio with, but we had a falling out right away, and it was terrible. I immediately was like, oh, I’ve got to make some other friends. Then I met my wife on Hinge, and that was such a boon.
SRE: Another win for Hinge!
GJ: I know. We’re always joking that we’re the token lesbian couple in the Hinge ad. But yeah, there were a lot more unfortunate things that happened, like a car accident, and a seizure, and an assault, and an arrest, and it was all in the span of a few months. It was 2020. And Covid was happening.
SRE: I was going to say, this is already a year we all collectively remember as being terrible.
GJ: Yeah, I was like, holy shit, everything is spiraling, and I’m never going to have a ceramics studio, because I can’t even keep my feet on the ground, so I said, okay, well, what can I do in my apartment? And I started painting. I remember, my wife showed me a picture of her with her friend, and I really liked that picture. I just decided to paint it, and then I made this series of paintings that kind of fell out from that. I really started getting into the process.
My art process ties into figuring out what you’re actually interested in doing. I realized, I don’t think I’m actually interested in doing good renderings. I think I’m interested in abstraction. Then, I couldn’t figure out how to draw faces for a while, so a lot of them are either just blank, or the people are obscuring their faces somehow, which is a stylistic choice but also a necessary one. Now I am putting faces in the newer paintings I’m doing, and I’m getting more into experimenting with those smaller details, and it’s interesting to see how it’s evolved because I do feel some kind of way about presenting them.
When I brought them to Frog Hollow [Gallery], I was like, I’ve never had these critiqued by other painters, so I was mortified to have them in public, and I thought I needed five people to tell me what to change before I presented them. But I just went for it. Then they accepted them, which I was like, okay, I don’t know if that means anything yet, but it was the same feeling as not having to show a paper to my mom. Not having to have the painting critiqued by people before I present it has felt very powerful, and scary, and I’m living in that space now.
SRE: I think there's a real strength in learning to trust yourself. With writing we do workshop, which is different than visual art critique, but it fulfills a similar role. Now that I'm out of school and not in a workshop consistently, I'm also struggling with that. Do I send something to a journal even if it hasn't been fully workshopped, but I like it? Does it matter if I like it?
GJ: Yeah, and the rules that I'm playing with and abstracting – am I breaking these rules in the right way or am I breaking them in the way that a really good writer, artist, anybody is going to read it or see it and be like, oh, they fucked that up. Like, am I convincing people with this, or is it not convincing? Do they know that I don’t know what I’m doing?
SRE: Well, I was convinced, so I'll throw that out there. My reaction to the lack of faces was that I could project myself onto this figure in a way that I wouldn't with a face. I don't know that I fully understand abstraction in art, but I could understand it through your work in a way that felt resonant for me.
GJ: Thank you. I remember thinking about those pieces as being a very lesbian color wash and dreamscape.
SRE: Speaking of those pieces, can you tell me about "Sunday Crossword," our cover, and how that piece came to be?
GJ: Yes. So, it's Papaya, my cat, on the couch with my wife in our apartment. I work mostly from photos, so I’ll take a photo that I think is interesting and then do a little bit of tracing and line work, because, like I said, I’m not hugely interested in rendering. I like setting up my canvas as a kind of color by number. I’ll do a pencil drawing and then fill in. Instead of mixing my colors from the beginning like they taught us in my painting classes, I like to take one color and then when I’m going to move on to the next thing, adding another color to make a new color so all the colors kind of walk next to each other.
“Sunday Crossword” is also inspired by Renaissance architecture. I was looking at a lot of Renaissance architecture, and it has those arches in the back. I was thinking about those big archways, and doing a lot of crossword puzzles, too. In the picture, my wife is doing a crossword puzzle.
When I did the painting, I didn’t include the detail of the words, but in the print, I actually copied the crossword puzzle from the newspaper and filled it in. If you zoom in really close, there’s all the actual answers.
SRE: That's so cool. I didn't initially know what she was doing until I looked more closely and saw the title, but also there's something so intimate about it. I didn't know the figure was your wife until now, but I could tell that the point of view was close with the figure, and with the cat.
GJ: I love drawing the cats, because their shapes are so amorphous but they’re so full of personality, even when you can just see the tops of their heads. I love cats, and that is new in my life. I had never had a cat, and never really met a cat until I met my wife, and she came with these two cats, and it changed my life how much I love cats.
SRE: I wanted to ask, too, because you talk about your wife and she shows up in your work, what does it mean for you right now to be a visibly queer artist?
GJ: It feels like the background identity of everything. When we were living in Pittsburgh, it felt very political that that was my identity, and kind of scary. During Covid, we were holding hands one time and got spit on by somebody. It felt threatening to be in that area. I grew up in New England, and so after we got married, I was like, I’m sorry, but we’re moving back to New England. Now, living in Vermont, it doesn’t even feel like you need to come out to every person you meet. It feels like being a visibly queer artist means that people get who I am, and I don’t have to make explanations for myself that I felt like I did in other places.
We talk a lot about if it was net good or net negative for us to leave Pennsylvania, because now we’re not voting in Pennsylvania and all that, but my mental health has never been better than when I’m somewhere where I feel like my identity is not even interesting. I’m just who I am and who I am allowed to be. Especially at my workplace, there are queer people, and there are lesbian moms of kids at my school, and it makes me feel so hopeful. Being queer and an artist in a childcare space just feels very seamless. I’m teaching the kids art and teaching the kids that they are valuable.
SRE: Speaking of identity, you're a working artist, and then you're also a teacher and an educator in two very different spaces: early childcare education and teaching adults. What has that transition into teaching been like, and what are you enjoying about it right now?
GJ: I love that I'm in a position right now to show people that learning is not scary. In my ceramics classes, I’m always encouraging people to push things so far that they ruin it, because then you know how far you can push it before you ruin it. All I can really do as an educator is create the space where people can fuck up and not feel bad about it and feel like they learned something because they made enough mistakes. It was really intimidating at first. I feel like leading circle time in front of two-year-olds gives me the same kind of fear of being judged and impostor syndrome. If I don’t do this exactly right, everybody is going to know that I don’t actually know what I’m doing. But then you do enough circle times, and enough throwing demonstrations, you realize that all you can do is be present in a way that’s helpful for people. They’re going to figure it out if they’re interested, and if they’re not interested, they’re not going to figure it out, and either way, it’s fine.
SRE: I love that you've come back to this idea of following your interests. I have to admit that I don't always frame my work that way, and when I focus too much on what other people are interested in, I lose my direction.
GJ: Totally. When I’m engaging with media, I don’t really care what the media is about, as long as I like the voice of the author.
SRE: We've talked about your "off season" with your art, during and right after your apprenticeship. How have you filled your creative well in those times?
GJ: In between when my apprenticeship ended and when I started teaching the ceramics class last year, I really wanted to build a studio because I was so shaken from that experience of working closely with another person in the studio. Even in college, I was walking through the space wearing headphones and sunglasses all the time to avoid talking to people, and just really feeling a lack of trust and psychological safety. So, I had it in my head that I had to make my own studio, and when that fell apart, I didn’t want to get involved with another community space, because I’m the only person who can keep me safe.
My wife was really instrumental in encouraging me to go to a community clay space. She was like, it seems you’re making a lot of decorative cheese plates recently, and maybe you need to go get those juices flowing another way. I reached out to a friend who had done the same apprenticeship that I had a few years before me. We went to the same undergrad, and then did the same apprenticeship, and then I was looking around for studios up here, and I saw her name. I reached out to her, and she was teaching a beginning clay class at this studio that I work at now. She recommended me to teach this class. That was so touching to me, and I decided I would like to do that. I feel like I have a good perspective on what it means to be a maker, and how some teachers can fill you up and some teachers can make you feel like you should have come into the space already knowing what they’re there to teach you.
Actually putting myself into a new community with all the boundaries that I’ve learned from past situations and trusting myself to enter a new space has felt really difficult, but it’s paid off so much. I feel like I am a potter again, like I thought I was before, and I wouldn’t have felt that way if I was trying to create this perfect home studio for myself, which is, something I’m probably going to achieve in, like, ten years, but I’m glad that I’m in this space that I was so afraid to enter.
SRE: The community aspect is huge. Our work is in isolation so often, and being able to find other people who understand makes a huge difference. Is there anything you'd like to share with somebody who's in that position right now?
GJ: It feels funny for me to offer advice in something that I'm just starting to understand. I am really starting to understand how important community is, and I’m still trying to figure out how to engage with people in my community who I don’t mesh with. I would say that it’s really valuable to parse what is serving you and what’s not serving you in whatever space you’re in to carve out a community within whatever community you’re in. If you don’t feel safe within the larger community, you can find a smaller niche where you feel safe and grow from there.
To view more of Greta’s work, please visit her website gretapots.com. If you would like to purchase one of her prints, her work is available online or in-person at Frog Hollow Craft Gallery in Burlington, VT.