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...