I’ve just today begun working with an Amaco product called WireForm. It will take hours and hours of try-and-fail-and-try to attain non-clumsiness with this stuff, but I like it already. The image above is of an attempted cat–but it partakes of a mouse–but there are the beginnings of a cloak or a man. When I continue this particular effort I as a thwarted world traveler but an accomplished Awful Punster will stop playing Cat and Mouse, and do my best to make Cat/Man do. 🙂
Armature wire, 1/8″ diameter, 8″ x 4″.
In August I again became a college student, enrolling at South Mountain Community College so that I could be in their 3D Design class. The third sculptural project for the class is due today, November 6, 2017, in less than nine hours. The assignment: Make ten gesture drawings, have the instructor approve one of them, and create a wire sculpture based on that drawing.
I had never worked with wire before. It is fantastically fun to be doing so now!
At long, long last I got my hands on some clay today. It has been many months since the last time. This is a little chunk from a bag of Dave’s Porcelain (bless Dave, wherever he is–I’ve been using his stuff since 1989) that is so dry from summer spent in my good friend Joy Riner Taylor’s garage that I’m having to reconstitute it in my kitchenette sink. GREAT to be One With Clay again!! Thanks to Joy for making it possible!
In my Phoenix visit yesterday (about which in a future post) I was happy to see my daughter had given my Green Queen, made, if memory serves, about ten years ago, and given to her thereafter, shelf space. She will preside over this true story:
At the prescription counter of the largest chain store you can imagine, I gave my name and birthdate to the counter person. “That’s just the one prescription, right?” “Yes.” “That’ll be two hundred and thirty-four dollars.”
Sure she was kidding, I asked her if I could have maybe a ninety-percent discount. But she wasn’t kidding.
After giving her my insurance credentials, which they’d had already for a different prescription, she reassessed: “That’ll be twenty dollars.” That still seemed steep so I said, “That still seems steep.”
A higher-up, who was literally higher up than her, drug counter stratification being what it is, ventured that a repackaging and rebilling would net some additional savings. “Come back in twenty minutes.” I did. “Sorry, it’s not ready yet. I’ll put it on CRITICAL.” I waited ten more minutes. “Bowers?” “Yes.” “That’ll be eighteen dollars.” Grumbling, I paid and left.
At home I discovered they’d given me six times my usual prescription amount. Long story short: Unit cost went from $234 to $3–far more of a discount, in the long run, than I’d imagined. Crazy world, ain’t it?
Recently I read John D. MacDonald’s THE GOOD OLD STUFF and MORE GOOD OLD STUFF. Here is some Good Old Stuff of mine from the last century.
Here is a detail from an original clay sculpture of mine that I have offered as a raffle item for the 5th Anniversary Holiday Celebration of the Village Gallery in the Village of Oak Creek. A maniacal bird of no particular species doubles as a prison within which a crowned and hollow-headed Kirk Douglas languishes.
Here is the piece entire:
This picture was taken in March of 2008, in the back yard of a house I once co-owned. I was still married, still living in Phoenix, still unpublished except in college literary magazines and the editorial pages of the local newspaper. So much has changed.
Here is the invitation to the Holiday Celebration, which takes place tomorrow, December 15, 2013, from 1 to 5 PM.
I won’t be there the whole time, since I’ll have to get some shuteye prior to my 11PM-7AM shift at work and do a 40-plus mile to&from. But I hope to see my creation go to a good home, and I hope to hear some good music, and I hope to meet at least one person whom I’ve never met who follows this blog…
The tree looks great for the most part:
But it lacks something at the top. “Why don’t I do a ceramic angel?” I asked my angelic girlfriend. She seemed skeptical that I could, especially since it would have to be done well before the 23rd, when her kin from all over will gather.
Today I’ve taken the first step, the “concept rough.” I want the angel to be friendly, accessible, celestial, and playful. I want the wings to look as if they will grab air and move it forcibly. I want her gesture to be beneficent and dynamic.
She’ll be either Sedona Red or Dave’s Porcelain or a marbled mix of both. She’ll have to be ready for bisque fire by the end of the weekend, and glaze-if-any (though she might look fine unglazed) by the 19th.
Will it happen? If it does, I’ll show and tell. If not, I’ll hang my head in shame.
A fox pup is called a kit. A drawing of an explosion is sometimes sound-effected with the semi-onomatopoetic Ka-Blooie. In English colloquy the phrase kit and kaboodle means The Whole Thing. A charming discussion of Kaboodle may be found on Wikipedia, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaboodle
I was hoping the box lid which survived my kiln mishap would be usable as a polar-coordinated drawing substrate. I was at first nonplussed by the above result. Now I think the paper and the more 3d lid, floating in scannerspace as they do, look nicely mysterious together. This prosaic explanation may be doing you readers a disservice. Try forgetting I said anything, and look at it again. [smiles]
Two days ago I eagerly put new greenware into my new-but-old kiln, closed the lid, flipped the switch to High, and went away for a few hours. Upon my return I switched the kiln off and pulled out the lower peephole-stopper. The glow was red-orange, the pyrometric cone was not in front of the peephole where I’d put it, and there was a shard of broken ware in view. Something terrible had happened.
The next day, the kiln having cooled, I opened the lid to find the bowl, the mug and the box had all shattered at their bases. The lid to the box, though skewed atop the box itself, was intact. But what good is a lid without what it is lid to?
My best guess as to what happened is I had not waited long enough for my ware to be completely bone dry. There is a valuable lesson here. The trouble is, I keep RElearning it–and then reverting.
Friends, be patient with your ware, with your friends, with your issues. Do the right thing, and in its right time. Don’t let this happen to you! [sad face]
PS–bonus points and bragging rights to anyone who knows what title the title of this post is based on. [smiley face]
One with Clay, Image and Text 