Today the Potter’s Wheel came back to life. What a pleasure it is to again feel the clay’s interaction, wielding well-worn tools to coax designer dirt into appropriately axial symmetry!
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Tag Archives: sculpture
Claythings
This is part of the chess-piece-based series done in the early 2000s. The surface is a faux finish obtained at Ace Hardware. The original was a fountain, including a birdbathy bowl with the same surface treatment, and a small pump, also obtained at Ace. The bowl started to get mineral-deposit funky, and the fountain effect (out of the top of the head) didn’t really add to the piece, so the bowl and the pump were ditched. Amazing, the similarity in facial features to Denise’s, though this was done years and years before we met.
A few years after the chess series came the tower series. This skyscraperish tower seemed incomplete. I was doing birds at the same time, so I made one to append, with a fond tip of the hat to the classic 30s film KING KONG. The title is “Kingfisher Kong” though the avianesque wallhanger bears little resemblance to any of the Kingfisher clan. If I ever do a remake, the species resemblance will be more true to life.
Here’s a close-up of “Pterence Dactyl,” making his second appearance in these blog posts.
Here’s some miscellany standing guard in the garage. A couple of things using the plaster cast of my life mask; some functional pottery; a Status of Liberty and an Eiffel Tower from Jan Peterson’s “Draw from the Hat” qucik-sculpt assignments; another from the Tower series, and two survivors of the “Some Assembly Required” series, wherein I made vases, sliced them up with a fettling knife, and slipped and scored and reassembled them in non-functional arrays.
Fettling knife–slipping and scoring–roulettes, batts, banding wheels, double-bellied, slab roller, extruder, pug mill–I love the language of Ceramics!
Yardbirds and Kilnfire
In the house that Denise bought, there is an adjunct to the garage that is badly infested by Black Widow spiders. Soon we will call the Bugman, but by way of prep I divested the space of my boxes-o-stuff. In the process I liberated one of my sculpted birds and set it in the front yard, beside the gorgeous and enormous agave, facing two of its fellows previously placed:
“Horned Bird,” the one on the left, is the newest addition to this quasi-diorama. The two other birds are unnamed. The globular vase was made by my Phoenix College fellow ceramics-studio rat Richard R. Richard’s monogram is perfect: he is a former railroad man.
I also attempted my first bisque fire with the kiln I bought several moons ago. I set both dials to High and let it toast for four hours, which is probably not enough, but next time I’ll try five, and if that doesn’t work, next time, six. I have 04 pyrometric cones but I don’t have 05s or 06s, so I’ll trial-and-error it till I get more cones or a thermometer. But it cast a lovely light just before I shut it off, as evidenced by the view through the peephole:
There are four pieces of ware in there. Can’t wait to pop the top and see how they did!
Creation Visitation
One of the largest collections of my ceramic works is within these walls. I am a houseguest here for another fourteen hours or so. My host acquired my works through purchase at various art shows and art sales, but mostly through my gifting of them. She has given them a good home.
Here are a few of them:
Properly cared for, ceramic creations can last thousands of years. It gives me a peculiar comfort to know that some things of mine are receiving proper care.
It’s been a wonderful day, and now it’s time for bed: the 30th became the 31st. Good night, Night Owls!
Li’l Universe and Her Big Sister
Faithful readers will recall “Li’l Universe,” a clay sculpture I offered for delectation about a half dozen posts ago. The faithfullest reader of all, Monsieur Michel Lamontagne of Canada, whimsically and delightfully created an image of an alien creature “misusing” Li’l Universe at a bowling alley. So this post is dedicated to him.
The big sister of Li’l Universe is much closer to bowling-ball size than her kid sibling, though still marginally shy of regulation size. In the photo above I’ve included one of my “business” cards, measuring 2 inches by 3-1/2 inches (approximately 50mm x 75mm if memory serves, Michel), to show scale. I also took a couple of webcam selfies, thus:
So, friend Michel, there you have it. May your Byworld sojourns lead you to ever more fulfilling creative endeavor!
Birdness
Today’s journal page is based on a photo of two of my ceramic birds, which in turn were based on vessels I threw on the potter’s wheel. There is something meta-ish about doing a drawing of a sculpture, but I also found it exciting to be intimately familiar with the forms I was drawing, having sculpted them: I could ignore the visual and enhance the tactile, and it would not ring false. I KNEW these birds.
Here is the page:
And here is the photo it derives from, of my two bird sculptures:
It’s plain to see I took great liberties with the image. I might have felt less free to do so were the sculptures someone else’s creation.
Four Odd Birds and One Demented Creator
Once upon a time I was making a thin-walled bowl form on my potter’s wheel when I got a little too thin with the wall and it collapsed inward. It was my great luck that the collapsed shape it made reminded me of a bird’s body, and got me onto sculpting odd birds of no particular species–some have reminded folks of chickens, others of pigeons, and master potter Jon Higuchi once likened one to a turkey buzzard, but in their struggle to become alive and unique they are at best transcendent of genetics.
I gave this one to my girlfriend Denise, who enjoys its primitivity.
This one is the first raku piece I made in Sedona, where I now live, while I was taking my first Sedona Arts Center ceramics class. The class’s instructor, Dennis Ott, accidentally broke off half of half the beak. He was apologetic, but to me it was like the final stage of the classic La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (“The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even”) by Marcel Duchamp: legend has it that the glass of the composition was shattered via the clumsiness of offloaders; though he’d worked eight years on it, Duchamp was not shattered by the shattering, but delighted; “Now it’s perfect!” he is said to have exclaimed. And when the estimable Mr. Ott broke one half of half my bird’s beak, I could not but break the other half of the other. The bird isn’t perfect, but he’s better: now he looks like he’s laughing with a Bert Lahr mouth. (Unfortunately, the bird’s head is turned away in this picture, so you can’t tell from this. Perhaps you will come visit.)
Here is a pit-fired bird, which the blog software has turned 90 degrees, I know not why. Pit firing enables a piece to reveal the fiery fury of the process that made it; and this bird is a tortured soul, and so I am glad to show that it has been through the fire and yet still strains for Heaven (or, at this angle, for the other side of the room). Note the triangular cutout. More on that in a bit.
Well, son of a gun if this one wasn’t turned sideways too. Must be accommodative of the columnar nature of the blog. Live and learn! –Anyway, this Clown Bird, jester’s hat and all, also has a cutout. I often do that with my pottery and sculpture. Long ago master potter Hallmar Hjalmarson asked me why. “To give them an interior,” I told him; and he stopped calling me “young man” and started calling me “holy man.” (He is a treasure.) But this one’s cutout went awry. It was supposed to be an omega symbol. The interior negative space of the symbol broke off, and I turned the former symbol into a primitive window. Alas; I wish it were an Omega.
One with Clay, Image and Text 