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Tag Archives: ceramics

clay and continuity

October 30, 2023
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One of the subtle yet profound joys of working with clay on a potter’s wheel is that you will inevitably make shapes that found their way more in spite of you than because of you, because the clay sent you urgent “I’m-Not-Right-Yet” messages, forcing you to wrestle. You finally reach a compromise and relax to the inevitable, and you find that the shape you have made looks familiar; then you realize that shapes nearly identical to yours were first introduced to the civilized world thousands of years ago. You are extending an ancient tradition, and interacting with your ancestors. You may even be connected with the Infinite.

glazed expression

August 21, 2023
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Fresh out of the kiln, here’s one of my more successful cut-lidded forms. The unglazed underside shows a charcoal-black clay body. Heat and gravity pulled the glaze down below the join, making for a delightful contrast. There might be a teapot in the future with this clay, glaze, and cut-lid approach.

chunks in the salad

August 11, 2023
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chunks in the salad

here is latelife in miniature. / coffee cup, coffee, / salad vessel and salad / are all as new as this year. // thanks to a career change / a prep cook’s sensibility / put the grater aside / and used a food chopper and a ten-count chop / on the carrots / to ensure there would be chunks / in the salad / and not the mundane confetti / that is the norm. also, / organic blue agave sweetener stood in for splenda / and the raisin-to-carrot ratio / was upped approximately 20%. // it was a quiet, spectacular treat, / drinking sumatran-blend coffee / and eating a poshish salad / from vessels made recently / by the prepcook-poet-potter-bonvivant. // life changes us when we change / our lives.

Bee’s Knees

June 12, 2023
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This is an utterly delightful young woman who was born Brittany but has chosen to be Bee. She is a staff member at PIP Coffee & Clay, where I do pottery-making frequently.

True to her name, Bee is always busy, at the pug mill or in the kiln room, helping potters and keeping things flowing. Her philosophy of life is “Relax and be kind.” She would have fit right in at Woodstock, though it occurred long before she was born.

But what truly endears me to Bee is that she proudly displays a visual pun in the form of tattoos just above her knees. And the Bee’s Knees is such an apt description of this delightful lady. Long may she buzz!

knockoff

December 29, 2022
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knockoff

reaching down for my nightstand sockdrawer i clumsily elbowed a small vessel I’d made years ago over the edge of the nightstand

and it fell and being brittle shattered

but though it will no longer serve to hold keys or coins I as a potter am oddly grateful to get a look at the shattered vessel wall and note with satisfaction if not smugness that the vessel’s wall is both thin and even

and i have many vessels and the ability to make more and so the loss is minimal and perhaps not even a loss but an opportunity to pair this brokenness with an undamaged comrade so that they represent two states of being

I’ve placed them on a sheet from a black-paper sketchpad that with its series of rectangular holes resembling film sprockets symbolizes how cinematic the conversion of a vessel from whole to shards may be

and the title is that fine French phrase “c’est la vie” which translates to “this is life”

feat o clay

March 16, 2021
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IMG_20210315_185700_592

feat o clay

storebought clay comes in 25lb bags
two bags fit within a 50lb box
forty boxes make a one-ton pallet
and it is cheaper by the ton
but let’s start with what one bag can do

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a quarter of a bag yields an exotic heretofore nonexistent bird
a tenth of a bag might give you a cereal bowl or a small teapot
devoting all 25lb of the bag to one shape might be the life-sized head and shoulders
of a couple of human beings
the same 25lb might depict a village in ultraminiature

2021 0316 vase

“feet of clay” is idiomatic for fallible
but perform a feat o clay
and you become upliftable

2021 0316 closed form

commune
attune
become
one
with
clay

two from quite a bit ago

March 3, 2021
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The ceramic piece with the triangle cutouts was made by me in 2007. The chapbook was made by me, with help from my friends Steve Boyle and Genny Edge, in 2008. I gave both of these creations to my mother soon after they were made, but and they were hers till she died on December 11, 2020, and now they are mine again.

I don’t even remember making the vessel, though I do remember that i did a whole series of cutout pieces back in the day. One of them graced my deceased friend Karen Wilkinson’s front-room table for several years. As for the chapbook, it was a labor of love and I remembered it well, and am grateful that this copy yet exists.

Both works now make me feel strange, and strangely hopeful.

goblet modesty

February 27, 2021
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One humble member of my mother’s collection of her son’s ceramic works is a joining of two clay techniques, Pinch-Pottery and Wheel-Throwing. A Pinch Pot is often the first vessel a fledgling potter will make. Take a racquetball-sized ball of clay, stick your thumb in it, and gradually expand the interior by pinching, pinching, pinching the clay between your thumb and your other fingers. Don’t let the hole you first made with your thumb get too big. As the wall gets thinner, use fewer fingers, and for final refinement thumb and index finger only. Wet and smooth the lip. Don’t fret if the lip is a little uneven. It is more charming and organic that way.

Now you have a a bowl for a goblet. For the base, take another little ball of clay and center it on the wheelhead of a potter’s wheel, just like you’ve done dozens (hundreds per year) (thousands by now) of times. Raise a little cylinder with no floor. Spread it out a bit at the.base, collar it in up the stem and flare the lip. Smooth the lip with a bit of wet paper towel, or a chamois if you have one, while the wheel is still spinning.

Bisque fire the pieces separately. Don’t glaze the stem. Dip-glaze the bowl with clear glaze and carefully set it on the stem, and only handle the goblet by the stem until it is loaded into the glaze kiln. The glaze on the bowl will fuse bowl and stem together.

This goblet was made early on in my potter’s journey, perhaps as early as 1989. A goblet I would make now, using the same amount of clay, would be maybe 25% larger, and would not be so topheavy. But my new goblet, though more practical, would be less whimsical. The old goblet is sacred to a time, and my mother liked it enough that she put it on her bookcase across from her recliner, where she wouldseeit every day.

Wouldn’t It Be Nice vs. Make It Happen

December 4, 2020
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Something nice started with this lamentatious post I made on Facebook:

Friends, I am Bummed with a capital B. My Phoenix Center for the Arts wheel-throwing class has been canceled mid-stream. The center cites community benchmarks for COVID-19 infection risk. I applaud their proactive efforts to stem the spread, but I also feel like the rug has been yanked from under my feet, landing me on my oversized sit-downer.

I took some clay home. Not much–I was on public trans and on foot, and wasn’t up to lugging a lot of clay around. So I can hand-build, but until I find a reliable studio space/place, I can’t throw, and I can’t really sculpt–I need to bisque-fire what I make.

Rats!!!!!

Several friends commiserated, wished me well, suggested handbuilding, and generally made me feel better, though still bummed. Then I got a Facebook Messenger message from an amazing friend of mine, thus:

It was a link to a demo of someone deftly throwing miniature vessels on a tiny wheel. Looked like fun. We had this text exchange:

G: Very cool! The demo potter makes it look easy, but you’d need surgical steadiness to throw with precision on that scale. Worth exploring, though!!

N: LOL yes I know what you mean, but they are very sweet, something you could do at home

G: Quite so. Tell you what. Find me the product and how to order it, and if it’s under $100 US, I will buy it and make something for you. Deal?

It was a link to an outfit called wish.com. The little wheel was offered at $64. I was amazed that it was so inexpensive, and in fact it wasn’t, quite: what with tax and handling and timely shipping  the bill came to something over $118. 

And just this evening I made the second of two 3D sketches of Queen chess pieces. Neither looks remotely like her. Just getting my feet wet on subject matter I hadn’t handled in many years. I like the vitality of them, though.

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Long story concluded: As I say in the title and in the text exchange, there is “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and there is “Make It Happen.” I’m thrilled that, thanks to my wonderful friend, a setback turned into a new, exciting path.

Would you like to meet my wonderful friend? You bet you would–trust me. Her name is Nina Pak. I knew her as Nina Rogers when we were classmates and (briefly for me) fellow Yoga Club members at Glendale High School. She attended my wedding to Joni Froehling on December 10, 1988, and I have not seen her much face-to-face since, but thanks to social media we maintain our friendship. She looks like this:

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She also looks like this:

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She has been a model, a curator, an art director, a publisher, and many other things. Working out of Vancouver, British Columbia, she has created time-defying, gorgeous tableaux of bygone–or alternate-universe–scenes. The curious need only do an Internet search on “nina pak art” to be privy to a multitude of breath-stopping imagery. She has said of her work, “I am not opposed to making my art look good on someone’s wall, but I feel what I create has a spiritual depth and mystery that stirs something essentially vital:  a longing, a calling, an echo of something forgotten, deja-vu, or something you can’t quite grasp but want to share.”

And she is my friend, thank the All, and this week she helped me do more than daydream about how nice it would be If. Nina, please accept my humble thanks!

breakfast with the more-than-funny man

January 26, 2020
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out of respect and admiration for the subject of this post, valley performance poet bill campana, lowercase will be used throughout, in the style (if not with the astonishing wit) of bill’s outstanding poetry.

bill took me to breakfast this morning. it was part of a deal we’d agreed on to put a ceramic vase i’d made, and bill had seen in my blog post “foom-bozzle-wozzle, part 3,” on long-term loan to bill. it is now in bill’s possession, and i’m proud as can be.

bill and i go back more than ten years, back to my early days of poetry performance, when i was still nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, and bill was supplementing his income with serious money earned by winning poetry slam competitions. in 2010 bill was the host of a the open-mic poetry event “sound effects,” and in may of that year he decreed that may 2010 was “gary bowers month.” that decree incentivized me to write, and perform, some of my best poetry.

pondering why he “gary bowers month”ed me way back when, bill attributes it to impulse: “i just did it.” but once he did it, he stuck to it, and riffed on it, and made a real something out of his impulsive throwaway thought.

and that, i think, is some of what makes his poetry enduring and deep, and much more than funny. under the hilarity is solid structure and soul.

as for the breakfast, at the ranch house grill on east thomas road, it was magnifent. we both had the signature dish of the day, a pork chili verde omelet, with hashbrowns and toast–i had sourdough and bill had the rye. conversation bounced around from bill’s grandfather, to lingering terminal illness, to personal health, to connecting with grade-school friends, to books, to the three stooges, to lou grubb and his progeny, to local tv persomalities, and on and on. one of many interesting facts: in the first grade, bill read thirty books. by way of reward his teacher sent him a fancy book, and inscribed it “to william.” it was a book about dinosaurs. so bill was into dinosaurs long before “jurassic park” roused public interest in them.

i am going to rent a car and take bill to the matt’s big breakfast on 32nd street and camelback a couple of weeks up the road. “we should do this more often,” one of us said, so we will.