"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?

(*** note: see "UPDATE" at end of this post...)  On the heels of the "Gris" piece I just finished, I was going to make a lamp.  I got a little carried away with the form, and it kept toppling over.  Then I started building it on its side.  Then I thought, jeesh, just leave that form on its side and make a horizontal piece, and the lamp be damned.  The form is the bottom-most piece - a sort of figure-8 lying on its side, with an extra loop.

Here's the result, just before bisquing (it's about 30" tall, per usual):

It's a little "busy", I know.  Maybe I didn't know where to stop.  As with the "Gris" piece, I didn't have a plan for what it would look like before I began, or anywhere along the way.  I finished a section, then just imagined the next section and possibly the one after and built it.  Then there had to be a sort of "flourish" at the end - a gesture that makes the entire piece come to its service.  That's how I think of the ribbon-like top piece, which flows down to the base in a graceful, if tortured, way.  At the top, from certain angles, it looks more like a dragon's head than a ribbon (although maybe that's just because I watched "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" again last night) and if you go with the dragon idea, it might look like the dragon is emerging from a chaotic cloud of, well, ashes, and voila, you've got your basic phoenix sculpture.  I suppose every artist at some point channels a phoenix, dontcha think?

UPDATE:

(March 6, 2011)    A funny thing happened as I was on the verge of taking the piece to be bisqued... karma from just a smidge too much hubris?   And I had though hubris was just part of the "making art" deal.

 I keep thinking about this one Roz Chast cartoon where the character had purchased a lovely ceramic vase and on the way home the bag "just tapped" against something and when she got home discovered it had shattered into 1 million pieces.  I "just tapped" the work-table with my knee, and, ka-boom, it was all over in a split second.  

I have to say, I'm deeply appreciative of the words of encouragement, post-disaster, I've gotten from like a dozen of my compatriots at the ceramics studio - urging me to continue working in this vein, despite the, um, "structural failure" of this piece.   Thanks to all for boosting my morale!

 

Second spontaneous bioform sculpture - in progress...

*****

Enough with the old series, onward spontaneously! GRIS sculpture finished!

I've named this piece "Gris" because of its color and because another artist in the studio said it reminded her of Juan Gris' work.  He happens to be my favorite Cubist painter.

After glazing: a very pale lavender-blue (china white over "don reitz green" glazes; high fire; "T1" sculpture clay)

 detail shots:

This is my first sculpture not in the "step-spiral" series, since I started that one (which I think is now finished...).  It's going so much faster because it's just attaching slabs together, whereas each layer of the spiral steps was like its own sculpture, which although they were simple, they had to be sorta perfect, and then I had to assemble all of those together, again with the idea of achieving a form as close to the perfect geometric form in my head.   This new one I had only a really vague notion of what it would look like finished, even after I had done the base.  Just sort of letting each step dictate itself as I work my way up.  I'm having more fun with it because it is more spontaneous and I can incorporate what might be mistakes and make them "happy accidents" - one of my favorite things about making art: you can transform accidents into assets in about two seconds.  

Before high-firing (after glazing: china white over "don reitz green")

Before bisquing:

JUST BEFORE BISQUING!

Spiral cylinder vessel finished.

SPIRAL CYLINDERS FINISHED!!

So here it is, the last piece of the spiral-step series.  I made 5 pieces in this series and it took like a year.  Like literally a year.  I made other pieces in between, but really these pieces were the only "works of art" I produced during this time.  And they're so consistent!  Each one has a pretty glaring flaw, except maybe the pointed oval one.   This one, the cylinder, is flawed mostly because someone who works at Greenwich House Pottery accidentally put it into the high-fire kiln, instead of the low-fire.  As a result, it came out mottled and gray and warped considerably more than it would have in low-fire.  I glazed it in Majollica, so it should have come out a beautiful, smooth, bright, shiny white.  Still, I basically feel fortunate that it survived at all - putting a low-fire glaze into high fire can result in a piece being completely destroyed.  If it weren't for the drab-looking finish, this piece would be pretty darn fine.  Here's a few more pix, followed by the stuff I wrote while I was building this piece:

 * * * * *

 Having survived bisquing, this piece is one I'm really keeping my fingers crossed for.  Everyone at the studio says it reminds them of the Guggenheim Museum, which I guess is obvious, except that its basic form is fundamentally different: the Guggenheim is a spiral with the expanding arc rotating around a single axis; this piece is a spiral of separate circles, each on its own layer and each with a different axis/center-point, although the spiral form itself (which is not physically there) of course has its own, single center point.  The pieces of this series are all obviously architecturally inspired, but their geometries go pretty far beyond any building that has actually been constructed or designed (that I know of).  It would be "nice" if any one of them ever inspired an actual building to be made.  Hint, hint to all you architects out there.   ;-)

It has a couple cracks in a couple spots that my instructor, Nick Schneider and the studio manager, Albert Pfarr (both incredible artists) advised me that it might be better to low-fire glaze the piece to minimize the danger of these cracks widening.   And I got some advice that using Majollica glaze would be the best option in order to hide the cracks most effectively.  Coincidentally I decided the piece would look best in white, so Majollica made the most sense.  I'm not thrilled about low-firing it because I can just picture the piece falling over at some point and shattering, whereas if I high-fired it, it might survive such a tumble intact.  Anyway, here are a few more photos of the piece just before low-firing it.  The piece next to it on the shelf is a sculpture by Albert Pfarr (incredible, right?).

  

Work in Progress!

Ostensibly, this is the latest and final addition to my geometric-spiral-shapes vessels series.  I like this guy the best, but I felt that way about all of them at this stage - just before bisque-ing.