I sort of went Medieval with my chess-piece sculpting today, with a dim echo of the little I know of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales informing my tool-wielding hands.
Menagerie
Making friends again with clay
Efferversced your mood today
Notwithstanding sky-so-gray–
Amplified that riff-strewn sound;
Gotten butterflies astound
Everyone with what you’ve found.
Raise a glass to absent friends.
Iridescent dusk descends
East to west where rainbow wends.
This morning brought a three-hour session of improvisational sculpting at PIP Coffee & Clay. I broke some new ground by doing the heads of the larger-scale chess king and queen using pinch-pot technique rather than wheel-throwing for their heads. It seems a more intimate, tactile way to do portraiture.
The Queen woke up as
I was adding a bulbous earring.
“You have changed me completely,” she scolded.
“I do not recognize myself.”
“Gone is my patrician nose
And my delightful androgyny
And the angular cut of my cheekbone.
Why?”
I shrugged.
“You are more You now.
You have defined eyes
And the innate regality of a survivor
And the hint of a smile
That sees you through the worst.
You are more real.”
She made me widen her eyes
And put a teardrop near the right lacrimal duct.
But of course when I did that
I had to do a dozen other things.
“You are making me more homely,” she complained.
“No. I am sculpting you, and you are sculpting me
Just as much. You are uniquely lovely
And your daughters will be lovelier still.”
This silenced her
And soon I was finished.
Monday I made these four mugs.
Tuesday I had an appointment with the urologist.
Wednesday I set about trimming the mugs.
Not all of the mugs survived trimming. I went too deep with one and cut through it. So I reconstituted the trim scraps and remade a fourth mug, a sort of big brother to the others.
I had enough reconstituted scrap to pull four handles, and one by one I affixed them to the mug bodies via the Slip&Score method.
This went well with the three smaller mugs, and I still had session time, so I carefully trimmed the still-soft larger mug and put the last, largest handle on it, completing the quartet.
The NCAA’s annual basketball tournament is colloquially known as March Madness. For one who strives to be One With Clay, March Mudness is a better fit. 🙂
Today I saw the surgeon/Who’d sliced into my hands/To help my hand health burgeon/And sculpt as clay demands.
The good doctor says that the healing meets expectations and will likely continue for the rest of the year. After a year, he says, I can’t expect any more improvement. As of now, the only two symptoms of significance are a slight stiffness in my right middle finger and continued tingling of the fingers of my left hand.
I set the wheel to spinning/And formed a mug or two/With confidence a-ginning/And symbiosis true.
The clay body, Ironstone by name, was wonderfully supple and cooperative, and results felt more collaborative than solo-showish.
The serviceable Wareboard/Took on the two with glee/Then Thusséd and then Therefored/”Three fourths of Four is Three.”
The sound of the wheel’s motor augmented with the earcup-like acoustics of the splash tray can sometimes seem like the hum of the Cosmos itself. It is a lovely Alpha Wave maker when the wheel-throwing is smooth sailing.
Alas, the Fourth went sideways/A clay wall bent, then tore./The Clay Gods’ sometimes snide ways/So humble Potter’s core.
Here is when Failure and Success prove they are brother and sister. Big Bro says “Ah well, three out of four beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.” But Little Sis whispers, “Let’s take the scrap clay, which is plenty enough for another mug, to the wedging table and reconstitute it better than new. It’s a good exercise, and it’s also good exercise.”
The scrap clay resurrected/Was centered, shaped, and trimmed/And Gloom was redirected/With Wareboard’s glee undimmed.
“Try, Try Again” is ancient wisdom well suited to artisans. Every effort, be it success, failure, or “learning experience” mix, is another rung on the “ladder to the stars” that Bob Dylan sang of in the song “Forever Young.”
Now wrap them, keeping moistness/For handle-adds tomorrow./You’re happy, and your poisedness/Is free from theft and borrow.
The clunky last lines reflect giddiness and satisfaction. Time well spent is truly priceless.
Driving to work/A piano piece by Johannes Sebastian Bach plays/On K-Bach Radio/89.5 on the FM dial/The cultivated- and accented-voiced Charlotte Wilson presiding
I know little more than crap about music/But that doesn’t stop me from thinking about this composition
I do know about prolificty/And I know that to keep the rocket-burner fires burning/The creators must surprise themselves, entertain themselves, delight themselves first
And in this piece Bach seems to lull and then startle his audience/Building his tone structures with logic/Then opening up a trapdoor of slight dissonant strangeness/Then adjusting the off-putting with new structural logic/To put things right again
He keeps making and breaking these patterns/And in the end he breaks the pattern-breaking too/And ends his tinkling journey with a perfect landing
Joe, I tell his vagabond spirit, that was a party and a half. Thanks.
When you want intense blue
Cobalt will do.
For white/miscellaneous
Go porcellaneous.
For a texture of nub
Try Crawling Glaze, Bub.
With motile non-sessiles
Do Handle your vessels.
And Showcased Absurdity?
Use Unreal Birdity.
cup, bird, bird, and mug await the fire,
a squadlet facing fate. alas, all will not survive. worse, it is the bird
with the eggs, the one on whom the highest hopes were pinned, that will suffer
decapitation.
irreparable.
.
the sculptor is philosophical. if i make another version of this one, it will be better.
then a sigh. it will not be as alive.
then a shrug. plenty of fish in the sea and on the plate. plenty of birds in the wind and in the clay.
there is a moment of silence. so long old pal.
****
Afterword: Grateful acknowledgment to Fannie Flagg, author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, for the last four words of the poem above.
a potter a sponge an x-acto knife a potter’s wheel a wire tool a needle tool a bucket of water a trimming tool and five pounds of white sandless clay
made a globular vase form let it firm up cut it free from the wheel head turned the vase upside down carefully centered and buttressed with a thick clay roll
trimmed away excess clay righted the vase centered and buttressed it again
and then the needle tool made guidelines the x-acto knife sliced the form into segments and the clay segments were baked in a kiln
and the potter took the fired-clay segments and tried several arrangements and arrived at one that felt super-right but needed something
and the search for that something amid already-fired oddments yielded a tiny egg shape and a corpuscular micronest for it to perch on
and the arrangement zinged
One with Clay, Image and Text 