Journey Workshop April 17 - 26 Stress vs Creativity

Well I cancelled my critique session with Steven this month as my husband was supposed to have hip replacement surgery last Friday. In the end the surgery was cancelled at the last minute because of lack of beds. With all our plans turned topsy turvy I was not able to refocus on pots and sort of fritted away the week with nothing accomplished. I should have re-scheduled with Steven as he suggested, but just did not have the energy to get my thoughts together, but now wished that I had as it would have helped to get my act together. Definitely stress has in impact on my creativity and focus - I really don't know how artists that are undergoing major life crisis manage, as a minor thing as hip replacement for my husband has such an effect on me.



We did do another gas firing with some good (but not excellent) and some so so results. I finally figured out how to adjust the spray gun to get just a very light spray (it's just taken me a year to figure that out!) and that has helped to stop all the drastic running with the Water Blue/Green. I just need a very light overspray with that glaze to get things moving.
I like how just a light coat of stoney yellow with .5% Fe looks with a slightly thicker coating of Hannah Ochre - nice light yellow to rich orange tones. My plate with appliqued figures turned out well, expect that it slumped. I am having problems with plates that I have thrown on hydrobats. Somehow I end up with the foot too small so it does not support the sides enough. Together with uneven drying of these 16" plates I end up with slumping on one side. Now that the warm weather has arrived and the furnace is no longer blowing hot air that should not be so much of a problem. Plus a lot of the figures had cracks - I had applied them to the plate after I had trimmed it and it was getting too dry. I think I will try several more of those and see if I can do a better job.






I made the mistake of using Leach White for the interiors of my garlic pots instead of a Temmoku and the white is just too glaring inside and also shows around the figures and seems to clash somehow with the rest of the glaze. Plus there is tiny surface crack in the bottom of one where I whacked one of the pots - you wouldn't have even noticed it with a Temmoku glaze but it is very noticeable with the white. The crack has no effect on the function as it would not leak, is not even a mm deep so is purely cosmetic. The garlic pots were glazed at the end of a long glazing session and I did not take as much care as I should have and it showed. Also the lids ended up a tad small with too much of the unglazed gallery showing.






I tired a new glaze - Caramel - which seems to look good with Hannah Ochre on top - it's smoother to the touch and runs more. The garlic pot with it was the best of the lot. Also I used Alberta Rust for the dark brown on some of the bottoms and I think that i like that better than temmoku as it's not so shiny and my spray both mix which is very dark brown but does not give a good colour with Hannah Ochre over it.


Well I have a couple of stress free weeks until my husband's May 11th rescheduled surgery so I had better make the most of it.

Journey Workshop April 12 - 17 Garlic Pots

With the summer tourist season coming up I have to get some saleable items into the Valley Artisans Co-op. My page on the Artisans website has pre-Steven pots - sort of different from what I am making now.
My appliqued pots that I make now are all big ticket items - selling for $175 to $250 and in this economy and our small town are just too expensive. One hundred dollar to $125 items tend be OK and after that there is resistance.






My large garlic pots sell well for $48 and so I decided to work on some, using as before the people in the window theme - (my "parade" pots) - and seeing if I can update them a bit. Before I would make them squared off with several windows and lots of people as in the top photo of the glazed one. (Has Rhdoes 32 on it).

This time I tried various oval shapes. I put on a slab base and threw the lid and then stretched it as Steven does. I gave the pot a wack with a stick for hopefully a more contemporary look. In order to tie these in with the rest of my appliqued and stamped work I made a stamp of a window frame and used it on the pot and then cut out the window inside the frame.




With another, I appliqued the frame and the back door - all this trying for a more unified look.




I also like effect of the wack which shows the end of the stick. This resulted in a corner and horizontal line impression. I will cut the stick at an angle next time so that the line is truly horizontal and see how well the window fits into that.

In terms of function the pots with a wider top are better as your hand fits in more easily than the one with the narrowed top.

Journey April 8-11 - More appliqued pots

I've been trying to get some inspiration from the picture book "Revolution" - I love the pictures - they are made from torn paper as well as a few cutouts - but the figures are so expressive and yet so simple. However so far have not been able to transfer those type of images into clay. I did do a wall plate - with lots of little figures on it - sort of expresses conflict and hence perhaps revolution - not sure if that comes across. The picture is not very good - will see how it turns out once glazed.

I have continued with the factory ship/fisherwoman. I have tried to simplify all aspects - the shape as well as the figure. Empty net and basket vs the factory ship.





I have managed to make an improvement to the bases of these handbuilt pots. Before I would undercut all around the base. This time I am under cutting, but beveling in the opposite direction where the base curves out. This seems to gie a more polished and elegant base.

To get my point across more about the negative aspects of globalized shopping I have put some logos on the shopping bags. I have also tried to guide the viewer to the back with a different top profile on the back as viewed from the front.






I had a lot of trouble with the homeless person on the back. Just does not seem shoddy enough. At first I tried adding a scarf - but he ended up like a tired Superman. I ended with narrow scarf - though now it looks like a tie - perhaps an out of work Wall street banker?
Anyway having lots of fun with these.

Journey Mar 29 - Apr 7 The Decorated Pot

After my last session I realized that I wasn't always putting form first - I was getting carried away with the decorating, the handles and all the other "gimmicks" that I like - in fact thinking up new "gimmicks" is something that I really have fun with. Fortunately they don't all get used on my pots.

So looking back over the decades I think that almost every single pot that I have ever made has always been decorated in some way before it is glazed - and in a few others I have used the glazes to make a decorative design. Yet I love pots that are simple, undecorated and have a well designed form. Why can't I make those?

We did our March gas firing on Tuesday. We tried some Malcolm Davis Shino in this last firing - but again did not get any carbon trapping. Just could not get the kiln into heavy reduction at 012.



However did get a orange and light grey on some test bottles - orange for the waxed areas - so that might be a start in the right direction. The bottom half of the bottles is a temmoku.



My porcelain plates with the stony yellows - did not turn out that great - one slumped though it is hard to see in the pic. I trimmed it too thin on one side - I guess it just dried unevenly beofre I got around to trimming it. I rather like the diagonal lines, though both areas should have had the lines going in the same direction. I may do more of them on plates.

The other I had glazed too thickly with the stony yellow so the water blue underneath is not vivid enough.



I think also I could have had more layering of other glazes - such as Hannah ochre and Blue as the yellow area is rather boring. They still all look sprayed - somehow I will have to develop more transition areas when I switch from one color to another.

Journey Mar 20 - 27 Form, Form, Form - Sixth consult

Well it's getting down to the home stretch - just a few months of consults left! I was starting to panic as the end-of-the-journey get together and show in July was coming up fast. However Steven just told me it was postponed to Oct. Whew!! Now I can relax a bit.

I always feel energized after talking with Steven! Lots of suggestions to mull over. I still need more control in my spraying - pots still look sprayed as well. Need more subtly. I still had not ordered the sprayers that Steven recommended from Harbour Freight. He also suggested that I try an airbrush on some of my appliques to get more detail. Will have to buy one - they are not expensive but will need a smaller connector to our air hose. Some of the small fish would stand out more if there was some contrasting colour.





The children with a balloon - in order to guide the viewer to look at the back of the pot I put a balloon showing up on the back rim - Steven suggested that if I had made the back balloon sticking up more than the front one it would have guided the viewer even more. In this pot I had used a wire for the balloon string. I epoxied on silver wire. Steven thought that the kanthal wire would have been better - especially if I could have incorporated it into the pot and fired it part as part of the pot. A close up of the pot shows that shiny silver wire really does not fit with the earthy colours of the pot. Will try again incorporating those suggestions.




The parade pot - I have not made any for quite a while and was wondering if I should continue. Steven thought that it had great possibilities, but somehow the tree and people separately were OK but together did not really mean anything - my other pots all had some sort of message. Will think about this and see what I can come up with. The Parade pots actually do mean something to me - as I remember growing up in Montreal and having to go downtown to see the parade. I used to always envy the people who lived along the parade route and could watch the parade out of their apartment windows. However this is not communicated to the viewer.

The teapot - I was asked to critique it first - I mentioned the handle - no quite fluid where it attaches, the knob - the wire loops do not really go with the more U shaped wire additions on the handle. I also did not really like the way the throwing rings got erased by the spout attachment and perhaps the spout could taper just a tad more. (That flaring spout creeps in again!).



Steven mentioned that I had seen all sorts of valid stuff but not the thing that had struck him right away and that was the belly - it was just too flat and this made the spout attachment look a bit strange (and perhaps the spout could have been a little bit longer). Now that I look at it through his eyes - it really is rather obvious. I guess I was so concerned with all the details - the wires, the spout and the handle that I had not really considered the basic form. Another lesson that need to be hammered into my brain - I really have to consider first of all the basic form - I always get carried away by the decorative details and I love thinking up gimmicks for my pots - so have to remember - form, form, form.

Journey Workshop Mar 16 to - 20 The foot fits the pot

I have been thinking about Alex Solla's comment to my Jan 20 - Feb 20 blog. It was about a show years ago that Steven Hill had juried in California. Alex had a pot in it, and he still remembers Steven's comment about it - that the foot related (or not) to the pot and lid. I have been mulling over that comment and have been looking at my pots trying to analyze the feet in relationship to the rest of the pot. I have trouble with feet. It finally hit me when I was polishing the bottom foot of my large stamped fish platter. The rim was nice and thick. The foot was also quite deep, and set off the platter nicely but in cross section was not very wide - so it really did not look like it went with that pot. You would think that it would be obvious - but not to me.




Well after the disappointment of not making it into the Masterworks East Show hosted by the Ontario Craft Council, I decided to enter 4 pots (maximum entries)into the Ottawa Guild of Potters - I had joined them last summer as I wanted to get exposure to other potters. All 4 were accepted - which was fantastic, including the piece pictured called "Our Fragile Earth" (homeage to James Lovelock's 1970's theory of Gaia) and the platter with the weak foot. I guess Steven was not the juror! As 3 of the 4 pieces that I entered were very different in style I wonder if the juror thought they were picking three different people?

While in Ottawa I visited Octopus books - to see if they had any pottery books but quickly learned what a wonderful store it was - it labels itself as a different book store specializing in books that encourage analytical thinking on politics, the environment and society. I ended up buying two books - both of which I will find inspirational for my pottery work. The first was a short picture book "Revolution" - pictures done in red, black and white and simple figures done with paper - cut out and torn. The other book I have just started reading and found that I am having a hard time putting it down. It is called Dark Ages America. Very depressing - and perhaps sensationalist and extremely anti American - but lots of good points being made about the future of our society.

We had another pot session at the Guild - this time looking at cups and how they functioned. Definitely no consensus about what handle works best! However handles must feel smooth and several handles had rough edges - definitely would not make it into the favorite category. Same with the lip - some just lacked that slight indent at the lip to make sipping a little more comfortable. Almost all the cups had flat bottoms - no holding pools of water in the dishwasher that way!

To see a slide show of the Masterworks Show - http://s273.photobucket.com/albums/jj224/crag_photo/MASTERWORKS%20EAST/?albumview=slideshow