Unearthing an artist's statement - didn't know I had one!

I'm getting my résumé together, and discovered that my "commercial" web site ( www.rolfsjogren.com ) has an empty link to a "bio".   I sorta remember a bio I wrote for my last job, so I searched my computer.  Instead, I found the below, which I think I wrote in 2008 or 2009, but I happen to still like fairly well.  Reading it and looking at the ceramic pieces I've made since then, it strikes me as, shall we say, "illuminatingly dissonant".  If I draw inspiration from the natural world, a notion originated by the Romantics, it strikes me as odd, but no less authentic, that my sculpture is totally abstract and often geometrically obsessed:

"Born in Oregon, much of the creative inspiration I drew from early in life was rooted in the awe I have for the natural world.  The forest, the mountains, the ocean - overwhelming visual stuff that makes everything that man does seem small and insignificant - it’s the stuff the Romantics of the late 18th/early 19th Century called “the sublime”.   I remember this feeling long before I had ever heard about the sublime - driving along the Columbia River Gorge, age 10, viewing a distant mountain formation that clearly began far beneath the Earth’s surface and extended up from the river, diagonally, a few miles, a few thousand feet up in the air.  I thought, that mountain has been there for millions of years and will be here for millions more, yet I, a tiny mammal at its base for a few minutes, am contemplating its massivity, dynamic shape and endurance and I am impressed by it - how absurdly pitiful and yet extraordinary this act of perceiving and appreciating the mountain is.  Later I read how that was an experience of “the sublime” - something beyond mere beauty - elemental, iconic and primordial.   Bizarrely, it seemed to me later in life when I began to appreciate modernist art, this experience of the sublime can occur even with something man-made if it is a similarly distilled essence of a form (however it may be perceived - e.g., music, or a taste of exquisite food, or even a smell)."

Conceited - helix vase in progress

Just an update on this helix piece.  I did end up making 2 of them, and decided to fire them at Cone 2 instead of the usual bisque+high fire (Cone 10).  Everyone in the ceramics studio who gives me the time of day also advised me that the cantilevering structure would result in severe slumping at Cone 10, but that nothing like that would happen at Cone 2.  So, they're now waiting for Cone 2 firing, with a big sign on them that says "fire slowly - greenware!"  The clay is so thick at the base that I'm afraid they will blow apart if the firing isn't super-slow.  After the Cone 2, I will glaze them at low fire.  The logic is, first, they have to be fired hot enough to be reasonably hard, and hot enough for the two different clay bodies' post-fired color-contrast to come out.  Second, I want them glazed to be consistent with the other members of this two-clay-bodies series and for them to perhaps hold water (we'll see about that...).  As with almost all my pieces, this is apparently an experiment.  Anyhoo, here they are in their swirling glory, pre-firing:

here's the link if you can't see the video on this page:
http://youtu.be/je_6pvGNwQY


Here's a piece I'm working on, which is sort of a marriage of two threads I've been doing over the years - the segmented-spiral theme, and the alternating-clay-types/colors vessels theme.  Robert said, "it's very Rolf."

It's a bit of a conceit, or a folly, or something, to think this could legitimately claim to be a functional piece (a vase), but maybe that's the point.  At this stage in my making ceramic pieces, I'm definitely looking for a point to it all, besides just being fun to do - if my work is to have any interest as fine art beyond the (arguably) decorative.

It's going to be one of a pair, or even more, and the companions might eschew the functional conceit, just to mess with the viewer's brain (another conceit).

Here's a link to this video on YouTube, if you can't see it here. >> http://youtu.be/mn1aiTtEJIM

Zebra-striping, branding!

Early last Fall I started experimenting with using alternating layers of sculpture clay and throwing clay, for creating a very rough-hewn color and texture contrast, and the few pieces I had done were semi functional. For Christmas gifts, for some unlucky family members, this year I decided to incorporate this technique into an experiment in creating a "line" of nominally functional everyday ceramics - coffee cups, tumblers.  Apologies to those who already saw this on Facebook...

Here are the results:

You Win Some, You Lose Some, Then You Win One

First, the good news: this is the first time I've gone ahead and re-built from scratch a piece that had failed to survive firing (the bad news was that this piece did not survive firing the first time around - when I had used Throwing Clay, and apparently hadn't paid close enough attention to the strength of its connection-points, in its construction). Here's the version which didn't survive, just before firing:

And here's the re-created piece, after successful glazing & firing:

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.

Zebra-clay experiment in rough shape forms

[see also update, April 28, 2013]  
I'm in the middle of making a piece (or two) made of two different clay types ("bodies") used alternatingly in flat, slab-like formation.  Lately in constructing my pieces I've been using mostly "throwing clay", which for reasons I don't fully understand, is used at our studio primarily on the throwing wheel.  Its texture is somewhere between White Stoneware and "T-1" sculpture clay, but I think it's just as strong while wet as T-1 but has less "grog" (particles of rock) and is very flexible like stoneware.   It seems to have a fair amount of iron in it, so it looks red while wet (green) and pink-ish after bisquing, and reacts a lot to glazes.  So I built this tower, meant to be a lamp-base, and matching orb (seen below), just building the forms as if I were using coils, but instead using strips of the two different clays, in irregular shapes, alternating.  Originally these two were one piece and then I didn't like how it looked - the orb is too big for this base, I think - so I severed them apart.  Due to the mysteries of how the kiln-gnomes manage their work-flow, he tower got high-fired literally 3 weeks before the orb, even though I  had them ready at the same time, so here's the finished tower next to the orb before it was fired.  I used Nelson's Celedon glaze, anticipating that it would react with the most contrast between the two clays.

The results, in terms of that effect of contrast between the two clays, was far stronger and more pleasing than I had even hoped for.   I'm thinking of making a smaller orb to pop on top of this tower and having it be a lit-from-within lamp.

Tri-leg totem tremble.

It's a couple days before Halloween, and a day before Hurricane Sandy is about to hit the Eastern seaboard.  That has no correlation to this post whatsoever, I just thought I'd set the mood, as it were.  Today I just finished construction of a sculpture everyone at the ceramics studio is calling the best one I've made yet.  I appreciate their support a lot, but I've definitely learned the hard way not to consider anything I make worthy of my own pride until it's safely out of the kiln.  I'm a little worried about the legs, which have become quite spindly as they've dried, and one of them - you'll see in this video - is warping itself off to the right.  It's too dry to reinforce the legs at this point, but the base and the next level are almost autonomous, structurally, so it's conceivable that I could replace all the legs at once, as a module.  Maybe I'll make that module anyway, just in case, and just use it for my next piece if I don't need it for this one.  Sorry, just thinking out loud...

I'm taking suggestions for what to call this.  Maybe "caped three-legged whatsit" or "coy matador" or "ocular figure donning a shield".  Please weigh in with your thoughts...

Gallery-worthy, if I do say so myself.

Here's a piece I ended up calling "Single-eared, multi-tiered whatsit" for the Greenwich House Pottery student show last Spring.  It's the first piece I think was really polished enough (in the sense of being "finished") to look like it really belonged in a real gallery show.  And that's given me some ideas about making that happen through my own devices - since the professional art scene in NYC is maybe a little out of my reach.

Here it was months earlier, right before it went into the kiln:

Spinning under control

Finally got around to making proper videos of these two sculptures, posted at the end of this entry..  Notice the blue "ears" on the first one.  Now look at the image at the top of the sidebar column to the right. ==>
Yep, same piece.  I realized a month or so after that image was taken that this piece was not finished - every time I looked at it, I thought, it's missing elements, protrusions, wings, ears, horns, whatever it might be, to balance it and animate it.  So I added two curved horns, attached (>>gasp<<) with epoxy.  These are just underglazed blue with a clear final high-fire glaze on top.

The post-firing/attach-by-epoxy step was sort of a milestone for me.  I have never considered doing something like that before, because of a combination of lack of confidence and a weird sort of amateur-puritanism about making ceramic sculpture, based on a self-imposed ethos which requires the piece to be finished _in_ the kiln, never _after_.   The lack of confidence part is about not trusting my un-mediated artistry - meaning, as long as the final rendering takes place in a process which I have no control over (firing), then the art is sufficiently detached from my own hand so as to accept that the piece stands on its own.  The result of those two feelings is that, even now, as the blue-horned piece sits next to the Spiral Step piece on my counter:

 I can't look at the two of them without a little voice in my head saying, this one is "pure", that one is "adapted" (or, less charitably put, "tainted").   There is this thing about creating sculpture which has to do with the idea that the form itself existed as an idea in whole form before I even picked up some raw clay to start rendering it.  Was it Aristotle or Michelangelo or DaVinci? - who said something like this - the form exists inside the marble; the sculptor simply reveals it.   The ceramic-making corollary, in my mind, is that the firing process itself, as it literally transforms a temporary rendering into a permanent form, must be the final step in moving the form from idea to reality.   Put another way, it is as if, by radically changing the piece after firing, I changed where the goal-post is just because I wasn't thrilled with the initial outcome.   All of this internal dialogue, I'm hoping, means I'm in the throes of transitioning into thinking of form itself as an artistic medium I feel comfortable in (i.e., sculpture in a broader sense), not just the craft of ceramic-making.    Hope I didn't lose you somewhere in that paragraph, but this internal dialogue is what this blog is about for me.

iPhone/YouTube: http://youtu.be/05V5rXVxILQ

iPhone/YouTube: http://youtu.be/pAhd522d6dU

Once again proving I'm an amateur - 1st Lamp, stage 2

Awesome glaze color & texture, not-so-awesome sticking to the firing tray.  I have no idea how I'm going to get this tray off of here, but at least it didn't stick to the shelf itself, which would have resulted in the kiln gnomes chopping the piece into bits.  I'm thinking some kind of little, very sharp & tough saw, and several hours of cutting are ahead of me.  Oh, the zoomanity.

I'll keep you posted!

R

Another lamp in the works.

Hi, this piece is my second lamp attempt.  Looking at it now, I'm not sure how a lamp-shade fits into the equation, so we'll see - maybe I'll put a bulb down inside of it instead.    Please ignore the extension cord sitting on the windowsill...

 The first lamp attempt I think is still in the kiln. It's been waiting to be fired for weeks now and I am very anxious to see how it turns out. It's a crazy one. Here is the first one waiting on the kiln shelf, lying on its side.  A little forlorn looking.

Time to adapt the donuts

What to do with three leftover clay moebius strips, aka donuts:

This piece is still wet (not fully finished construction, and not bisque-fired)

Here's a quick video...

(For those of you viewing on an iPhone/Safari browser, here's a YouTube video of this piece:

ANTIQUES AT THE PIERS SHOW, NOV. 20 2011

I've gone to this show a couple other times with Robert, and it's sort of interesting to watch it change as the economy changes.  Fewer and fewer booths with really high-end-esoteric stuff, and more and more merchandise of very spotty interest, incongruence and perhaps a more pedestrian, flea-market-randomness is seeping in.   Still some great stuff though, and I'm glad I went.

Here's a handful of highlights.   Devoting a Sunday afternoon to this became worthwhile after I learned about two styles I wasn't familiar with before:  "Dutch Gouda" (1920s, Dutch) and "Boch Frére"(1930s, French).  

Here's the "Boch Frére" style (sorry, this picture isn't the greatest)

And here's the "Dutch Gouda" style.  Actually, I'm not sure about the lower group, but it's definitely in the same time-frame & general region, I'd say...

COULD IT BE A LAMP?

Making art/junk in "this economy".

I posted today about a show at the Armory where I saw some interesting things (see next post), but once I got going, I felt a need to document what I've been doing lately.   First, I would describe what I've been doing as "not enough" in the ceramics realm.  This is because my day-job life has been unsettled and draining for the last couple months (left a part-time job I've had for the last year for a new full-time job where I was previously part-timing simultaneously) and the new job "atmosphere", shall we say, is taking some getting used to.  Details of my day-job life is off limits for this blog, but the transition has been affecting how much time I can spend on ceramics and also affecting how inspired I am, or not, in composing art and even thinking of whether pursuing this hobby, if that's what it is, is worth the effort and sacrifice of extra time needed to spend at the new job, or much-needed after-work, total-passive decompression.   Hopefully this will pass and I'll get more inspired again.

It should also be noted, in "this economy" (a phrase that has become just a little too pat - you hear laugh-tracks after the phrase on sit-coms) I am very happy to have a full time job again, after 2.5 years without, and people close to me are also having a very dodgy time applying their high-level, commercial-creative skills into a making a living.   The longer "this economy" goes on, however, the more it just feels like the powers that be have deliberately woven a new fabric of our nation's work-culture, in which everyone just feels on the edge all the time about keeping or having a job.  It kind of feels like this was the intentional outcome of the 2008/9 financial crisis - a culture in which those of us fortunate enough to be working are all so grateful that we dare not demand better.  And those who aren't working are just like deer caught in the headlights.  We've been convinced that we cannot afford universal healthcare; we dare not ask for a raise (or even a salary close to what we made pre-crash); we try not to think about how we'll get by when we have to retire; we spend half our weekends doing work that on Friday was described as urgent but, come Monday, our bosses might not even need, much less take note of - all due to how unsettled business is.   Sorry to be gloomy, but this is the real atmosphere in these times for a person like me, and I don't subscribe to the dictum that only smiley-faces should be documented in forums such as these.  This blog is about my discovery of ceramics, how I've discovered a passion for expressing my creativity through this art form at a particular period of my life, and how the world and my circumstances affect this passion.   If you'd rather I never stray into "the world and my circumstances" in this blog, however, I do value your opinion.

OK, enough, so here's the last piece I finished.  I'm pretty happy with it!   So you know the scale: it's just over 12 inches tall.  I can't imagine really how the world will be made better by this new objet's existence, but here's to that leap of faith...

It's sculpture-clay with chun blue glaze over clear glaze.

And...

Here is a poorly-photographed work-in-progress.   This one might, MIGHT, become my first lamp (!).  I'm using "throwing clay" instead of regular sculpture clay, as an experiment.  I'm liking it a lot, so far - much stronger than stoneware clay, for cantilevering and such, but feels less crude than sculpture clay.  There's a pretty long window in the timing of its moisture-level when it feels like putty that will form and then stick any way you please...

"Pavillion of Art & Design" show Nov. 2011

Hello lovelies...   Instead of parking myself in front of my computer on a Sunday afternoon to edit historical photos for my current job, I decided to visit an art show that Robert recommended I check out, at the 67th St. Armory, called "Pavillion of Art and Design".  It's a random assortment of highly commercial, high-end galleries featuring many works which one would have assumed you could only see in a museum.  Picassos, Légers, Kapoors, Basquiats...   A surprisingly robust selection of ceramics were on view.  Here are some highlights:                               (see all the dealers: http://www.padny.net/ )

And...

Here was a wall covered with scarabs with some of the most exquisite glazing you'll ever see.  By some German artist called RaR, I think.






And...

Of note was a floor-to-ceiling divider by Peter Lane (the Brooklynite, not the Londoner):  

And....

Here's a contact-sheet of everything else (much of it non-ceramic sculpture) I found of interest:

Two new pieces, in progress

Hi, sorry it's really been inexcusably long since I last wrote. But at least it's not for want of making new pieces! I'll do a full post about these and more in a few weeks.  But here's just a couple videos of two pieces I am working on right now.

This first one has already been high-fired twice, in "red tomato" glaze.  I intended for it to be complete as it is here, but it just didn't look compositionally finished to me, so I'm working on some amendments. I'll call them "blue horns", for now.

This second one has only been bisque-fired.  I spent all day today sanding it, and I've yet to decide what color(s?) to glaze it.  You'd never know this piece is _not_ white stoneware - it's just very dusty because of the sanding.  "There must have been DUST on those mints!!!"

Truism #1

"You see, a document has a use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document though it certaily can adopt that style."  - Walker Evans

"Spiral Crankshaft"

At last, this buddy is finished.

 I'll go ahead and say it: it's probably my best.   You'll recall from last Fall that this piece was damaged during high-firing - the drippy glaze stuck it to the kiln shelf,

and the kiln-loader-gnomes at the pottery were unable to dislodge it without destroying the base.

Since I worked on it for a pretty long time and, if it weren't for the damage, I would have thought of it as one of my best pieces, I started to imagine ways of fixing it.  Including a "shoe" suggested by the pedagogical sages at the pottery,

 which, due to painstaking measures to compensate for shrinking, took 2 weeks to build but ended up shrinking too much to fit onto the broken base.  Oh, well.  It did turn out a brilliant gold-copper color (not pictured), so I'm keeping it at a cultural curiosity.

Enter, an angel, named Robert Fontanelli, who swooped it up and took it to Woodhaven, Queens, where lives a ceramics restorer who reportedly works for The Metropolitan Museum.   Robert took the J train all the way out to Woodhaven, proving, as if there was the slightest doubt, his sainthood and, returning 6 months later (wha?) to retrieve the item, ultimately earned his platinum-gilded angel's wings.   (Why it takes over an hour to travel 10 miles in the American city with the best public transportation is a scandal and a microcosm of what is wrong with how this country is run, but that's a subject of a different blog...)

Anyhoo, the glaze looks like melted metal, which is what I wanted (iron wash only).  This puppy stands nearly 2 feet tall, and it intrigues people (or so I like to think).  It's biomorphic and mechanical and sort of architectural, all at once, which basically describes what my brain gravitates toward when I'm bopping up & down on the elliptical machine at the gym, daydreaming about what useless tchotchke to conjure into concrete manifestation at the pottery studio.   The restorer reportedly even said, "it grew on me".  Yay, curmudgeonly art-restorer in Woodhaven whose apartment is crammed floor-to-ceiling with broken ceramics likes my work!

Here are some more views.  You can see this piece in person at the upcoming Greenwich House Pottery Members' Exhibition, opening June 2, on view for about a month.

 

Whee!

New piece spins before bisquing

I love this guy.  What is it?  Acid-trip ash tray?  Star-shaped cookie-cutter for cooks on Planet Claire?  Homage to Daniel Liebskind?   Crustacean diorama?

I just like that building it makes me feel a little like I've turned a corner in the direction of "I can make any weird object I can imagine".  Which is sorta my only goal, I guess. 

What color should I glaze it?