Last week I made over a dozen works in progress. This week I endeavor to finish as much of what I started as time allows. It is better to anticipate what I will need before I dive in, so I have surrounded the wheel with my unfinished stuff and added water bucket, needle tool, wire tool, trim tool, metal rib, wood knife and an Arnold Palmer made with herbal prickly pear iced tea. I have also centered about five pounds of clay to make chess-piece heads and other miscellany using Throwing Off the Hump technique. Please wish me luck and skill!
To make the most of my session time today I use the “plan your work, then work your plan” strategy. I cut half a bag of Kashmere cone 5 clay into successively smaller pieces with the intent of making chess pieces. I am under no illusion that I will KEEP this plan–often the clay has a will of its own–but it’s always better to prepare.
My phone’s Camera has photoediting tools and among them is a nifty enhancer called Portrait Blur. It sharpens the focus on the focal point you choose and the further away from the focal point you get the more automatic blurring takes place.
This gave me an idea for an acrostic poem. Since the word Portrait has eight letters, and Blur has four, my acrostic could have four couplets, and the end-rhyme words would have their last letters be the B, L, U and R of Blur. The illustration would be a switcheroo, with the background in shap focus and the face, the Portrait part, all blurry.
Then my thoughts jumped to the notion of adding the word Self, creating a triple acrostic with Portrait in the middle and Self and Blur as bookends. I might then create a blurry self-portrait and have in the background a still Life with a few of my ceramic birds (I have made dozens) in sharp focus. This would yield the nice possibility of it becoming a psychological self-portrait, with the quirky birds as my alter egos.
So here we are in the blissful throes of creation, with a firm foundation for a work of art and a long way to go to reach fruition. One of the phrases I will tag this post with is “creative process.”
If you look at the attached photo you’ll see a placeholder drawing of cotton swabs, which I use to blend pencil marks for shading and will be handy for blurring as well, and a layout of the Self Portrait Blur acrostic with subject-to-change end rhyme words drab, lab, quail, derail,lieu, caribou, sector, and nectar. If I am a sufficiently nimble wordsmith the resulting poem will have a consistent meter and a theme related to “Self-Portrait Blur,” and when read out loud will not seam like an acrostic at all. My confidence that I will be able to do this is sky-high, because in the last eighteen years I have done it hundreds of times.
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.
“The King Hath Received His Comeuppance,” 11″x6″x4″. Work in progress.“Surviving Pawn,” 3″x2″x2″.“Wizardly Bishop,” 3-1/2″x2″x2″.“Somebody’s Queen,” 10″x4″x5″. Work in progress.
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.
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. 🙂
One with Clay, Image and Text 