Updates!

So, it's been since MARCH since I've posted here.  Why it's been so long is probably as interesting to you as why I've re-started, so I'll spare you, for now.  Maybe I'll wax on about my torrid life later in the post, or maybe, as I already said, I'll spare you.









Anyhoo, here's a few pieces I've made in the intervening months.  I've posted about a couple of these already, while they were under construction, so if you're dying to know more about their origins, click back a few clicks to earlier posts on this blog.

This first one I think I was working on, in dribs and drabs, for maybe 5 months.  I'm guessing it looks very pretentious to the trained eye, but I don't care - I enjoy its swirling-ness which keeps the eye moving.  To paraphrase Diana Vreeland: the eye has to move!  What could be more pretentious than paraphrasing Diana Vreeland?

The second one is STILL unfinished - it's going to be my first lamp.  Since this video, I've installed a metal rod down the center to hold the electrical cord and lightbulb, but I still have to re-paint the whole thing (spray-paint! sacrilege!) and I'm struggling to figure out the best place to do that while living in a co-op high rise apt. bldg. with cameras in every common area.

As a point of interest (if you will), here's how it looked (overhead shot) when I put it into final firing.  It had disintegrated after/during the first firing, but was salvageable through the sacrilegious travesty of epoxy!

Here's a trifle I threw together with scraps from another piece which I think ultimately did not survive past "bone-dry" (pre-firing) phase.  Cute, but a trifle.   Notable perhaps only because I used only "underglaze" (clay pigment) with clear glaze over it - my first time trying that.  Nice, rich colors, for sure.   I had it lying around for like a year before I shored up the base with miliput & epoxy so it would stand up straight.  Justa sculptcha.

Lastly, here's another piece I made on a lark, although it ended up being a fairly involved process to attach the candle-holder discs - after firing, with epoxy (sacrilege again!).  The lark aspect was that these extruded strips were just leftovers - scraps, really - from extruding strips for that orb piece at the top of this posting.  I literally just slapped them on top of each other, glued together with slip, made a rough-hewn elliptical base and tossed it into the kiln.  In like 5 minutes.  The discs were a challenge because I had to fire them separately and match their support to the top of each stick - they were all just craggy shards of fired clay at that point.