Welcome! 
It's an effortful and uncertain journey from the clay dig to the dining table or ceramic exhibit. A 30,000-year-old human endeavor transforming the essential formlessness of clay into artful, usable and meaningful vessels and sculpture.
And profoundly, the most common ceramic form on earth is the shard.
An ironic metaphor for everything -- Creation Myth and Creative Process -- clay both fascinates and daunts. If it were too easily explicable, we'd be on to something more mysterious, right?
There are others out there with my name -- and maha blessings to them!-- but I'm the Liz Crain who's a ceramic artist, sharing my individual version of ceramic art's saga with you.
To reveal this ever-unfolding tale, I use images and writing of not only my work and whatever/ whoever else in the world affects it, but hold conversations with my readers as well. Together we'll explore as much as we can, stretching from formlessness to the ultimate shardy end.
|
When I first began to make faux metal ceramic cans and containers – several years ago now – I created a classic red gas can, just like the one which sat in our garage next to the lawn mower my whole childhood. I titled it Dad’s Gas Can and I liked it so much I used it as my 2010 Open Studios postcard image. (That’s the postcard above.)
I’ve made dozens and dozens of cans since then, a lot of them similar to this iconic one, but each unique. The original stayed preciously seminal to me and I tended to hang onto it. Last fall I offered it for sale for the first time and, as can happen with ceramics, it got broken.
How it got broken is a retail story with a twist. The customer touched it (which with ceramics you want them to do!) but he fell for the trompe l’oeil-ness of my work because he also assumed the handle and bail wires were functional. He ham-handedly grabbed that handle balanced so nicely on the rim and pulled. He pulled hard enough to exclaim, “Hey, this handle’s stuck!” and pulled harder still. He unstuck that handle, all right, shattering the ceramic “wires” and then…….. he walked out of the gallery!
No acknowledgment of his destruction. No payment.
I posted my disgust and pain on my Facebook page. Most commiserators suggested a small hangtag on each piece saying something like, “Hi I’m not a real handle, I only look like one.” (Some also suggested a firing squad for those who “walk the ticket” and don’t pay for breaking things.)
One commenter shed a beam of brilliance on my situation by observing that not everyone out there understands what they’re looking at in the ways that I and my ceramic art colleagues do. And to the uninitiated, a handle is meant to be used, right? So naturally they’re going to give it a try. That susceptibility is built into the kind of work I choose to do. I’d never thought of that and realized the hangtag idea was not only a necessity, but an educating kindness as well.
And happily, after really looking at the manner in which the piece was broken, I decided I could probably re-attach the unharmed handle to the unharmed body, re-fabricate the bail wires and bring it back to good as new. Dad’s Gas Can still had things to teach me.
First off, how to re-attach that handle so it would be a sturdy support for the new clay bail wires which would need to be fired? Glue was out. Besides, I wanted a re-fabrication not just a glued-on repair.
 D'oh! Use low fire clear glaze to re-attach that handle!
 Careful, careful. Not too much glaze. Don't want it to show or run.  Help the handle seat and the glaze to set up a bit
There’s an art to using clear glaze as a heat-set adhesive. Mostly we find glaze fusing things together that we didn’t want it to and we counter that with all kinds of waxes and resists. In this case, it’s using that fusing property to our advantage. But judiciously and respectfully.
 A kiln stilt for added support when the heat makes the glaze melty like honey  Look, Ma! No hands!
For Goodtime Insurance, I leaned a tall kiln stilt onto the outside edge of the handle in case it should slide out of place, which would have made the piece truly unrepairable. Because the outside was finished entirely with underglazes, I chose not to use anything to prevent the stilt and handle from sticking together. But when I went to bed, I began to worry that was a mistake. Whew.
Next up, re-creating those bail wires. This proved to be as straightforward as the process I go through in the first place. The only real consideration was creating enough play for natural shrinkage around points that were already vitrified and as shrunken as they were gonna get. It would be a bummer to get the new wires happily crafted only to have them crack because they got stuck and couldn’t move in place.
 Miles of hand-extruded clay bail wire, two feet at a time.
 New raw clay bail wires recalling the gestures of the originals with some free play for shrinkage  Staining the bail wires with Coffee Brown underglaze to suggest the look of tired old metal
There were a few markings on the top left by the former bail wires, so I used them and photographs of the can to help me form the new wires into a semblance of the first rendition. In the years since I made this can, I’ve learned how to support the wires better within the circumference of the top and gave these new wires the benefit of that experience as well.
I was tempted to just leave things out to dry, but I decided to dry them slowly under plastic for a few days and candle overnight before cranking the kiln up again. This time to a lower temperature than the one I fired the handle re-attaching to: don’t want that glaze to get too soft and stretch anything!
 Very low temperature firing of the bail wires with more propping in the kiln
And here’s the good as new (maybe better!)Â re-attached handle and re-fabricated bail wires on Dad’s Gas Can. All it needs now is a friendly hangtag to help folks know that it’s ceramic trompe l’oeil.
 "Hey, This Handle's Stuck!"
 Is there a name for the Muse of Blogging?
At a workshop early last fall, I asked the presenter, ceramic artist Wesley Anderegg, how his ideas for new work came to him. Did he have a backlog waiting to draw from? Was it a sudden inspiration? A visual image? A concept? After all, his work uses Concept as a long suit, often leaning on a quirky visual pun in support of it. To my surprise, he laconically replied that in truth the title of the piece came to him first, and the rest of the work followed along in embodiment of it.
Now that’s an odd bit of insight, which I recognized instantly as a ratification of own my creative Step One, not so much of my visual art process – that’s as visual as visual can be – but rather, that’s exactly my blog writing process.
The Title presents itself as a fulmination of Something I Have to Say. Those slippery snippets of insight, the wry and dulcet posits and synchronous happenstances that make up my world? They unite, distill themselves and wander into my frontal lobe in the form of words.Â
The Title must also be delicious and tantalizing enough to impel me away from whatever else I am taken up with. Ideally, it should plant me at the keyboard and keep me there to slog through the typing, the inserting, the looking up, the linking, the editing, the tagging, and the publishing. And the re-editing and re-publishing. Folks, it just doesn’t write itself.
If I miss getting to the writing apace, I capture the Title Headline Idea and the motley insights for it on whatever writable surface I’m near. For months now, that’s been the case, as I was way too busy cranking in the studio. The result of which – besides a ton of new work -Â is I have a sizable clutch of suggestive blog titles I know I’m not likely to turn into full blown posts. They were written on the ice and the ice melted.
You know where I’m headed with this, right? In order to release their energy and un-snag mine so as to be able to write afresh, I want to share them here. This amounts to a cyber-version of letting go of clutter, a la my new found holiday, Discardia. (Which you, too, should seriously go investigate and celebrate.)
So, let’s pull them out one by one and see what might have been some incalculably awesome reading. Yes, yes, I could have just recycled it all, but this will be more fun.
1. Under the Hood with String Theory and The Swerve;Â This comes from the book I was reading (The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt) and an email conversation with a friend. My cryptic subnotation reads, “proposing unifications and reasons, strings swerve.” On the same note: “Tuvan Throat Singing.” “Feynman.” Click on the links for a glimmer, cuz that’s all I have now.
2. The Mess-up; “1.One supervised experience with a hot stove. 2. How it goes terribly wrong. 3. The itch you can’t scratch. 4. What happens when it goes wrong and our reaction to what happens. What happens after that.” OK, I know this had to do with making mistakes as a learner and, as an instructor, guiding students through mistakes, or even letting them happen. And I recall I wanted to talk about expectations and perfectionism.
3. In Which I Attempt to Explain Myself; No further explanations available.
4. Flaccid Visors, Dead Elements and Other Tolerations; Meant to be a discussion of the needless annoyances we put up with, even adapt around, but how they still negatively invade our psyches. Yet, just like the Circus Trees, it can also become its own artform.
5. Singing Wrong Right; My notes say: “Brush abuser” (clearly a self-reference) “Skate Stupid” and “practice, practice, practice.” Not sure how all that quite fit together, but I think it was about bending the rules with confidence.
So, that’s five Phantom Blog Titles with Notes, gone, but now never to be forgotten. I kiss them fondly and wish them well, like old boyfriends, knowing they gave as good as they could at the time, and so did I. Yet, it’s now Now and new titles keep arriving in my mind. Think I will grab one of those and sit down at the keyboard soon.
 Garden Variety Rust Arrayed in a netting of motley spots, swaths of lichen-like crusts or perhaps in random streaks of dull over shiny, rust – a result of iron oxidation – is a fascinating study. Its visual appearance speaks more of an event or process (entropy?) than of a static state of being, making it both unremarkably common and maddeningly unique.
To create the look of a vintage metal container in clay, I find I need to constantly scrutinize how rust interacts with its subject. Notice how it invades a formerly new surface, how it spreads on edges and dings, the extent of its reach on the salient and the crenelated. How many colors are on those few square inches? Cream, ochre, peach, terra cotta, roan, burnt umber, ebony. You can’t make this up.
If I only wanted a rusty color on my work, though, I could choose one from the underglaze crayon box and have at it. OK, maybe two colors. But I want more: I want my ceramic surfaces to be believable as real rust, real metal, especially in that initial gander. Yet, in the next glance, I want the viewer to fully notice that it’s not real rust, not real metal and then waver between the two sensations, not quite believing either version of what the eyes and mind are telling them. Trompe l’oeil in action! I want them to have to look again and – very important – to reach out and dare to sneak a touch. And just maybe need to take the piece home for further contemplation and remarking.
I’m also wary of crafting too-exacting of a replica of a rusty container, because, like a kid in Sunday Best, the piece then has to behave too much and lacks rambunctiousness. Take a picture! Get the real thing instead. I prefer to create a compelling interpretive impression of form and surface instead of executing a physical inventory report.
In both shape and coloration, I want evidence of my subject’s imagined narrative. What’s the story in each piece? Did this can get tossed into a roadside ditch? Was it butt-down in a mid-last-century dump? In what part of his musty basement workshop did Grandpa store this? Where’s the lid and what broke off right here? Did the graphics fade evenly with time, or only on the side they got decades of sunlight and weather? Rust is nearly always involved in this equation. Best to bump up the study.
It’s another delicious case of Learning to See and Seeing to Learn. Photos are great for starters and finishers, and I use them often for detail suggestions, but the meat in this sandwich is reality. It requires looking at a lot of real rust (which fortunately for me is nearly everywhere) and then acting on those observations, sprinkling them with imaginative narratives.
Knowing that authentic props help, people give me rusty stuff and unusual vintage metal containers. Or they tell me where to find them. My favorite Rusty Things Walk ever is the completely littered desert just across Highway 127 from the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel in Death Valley Junction, an old borax mining company town. For miles around, the wild and enduring encrustation of broken machinery and glass coupled with the scrubby scrub, widest of skies and Eagle Mountain in the near distance pleases my soul. So does a collected boxful of odd bits: square rebar, glass shards with rusted chicken wire inside, a child’s toy and, always, cans with bullet holes.
That’s my kind of vacation: a learning one with the time, space and silence to ponder and to let rust whisper its secrets. Later its messages will find their way to my hands in the studio. Lessons learned.
 Rust Never Sleeps: Vintage Conetops
It turns out Kit Carson, the man, was next-to-nothing like Kit Carson the Legend. The man was guilelessly honest, reliable, soft-spoken – maybe even taciturn – loved Indians, his Taos ranch, wife and children.
Yet he was also a consummate wanderer for justice, showing up in history, Forrest Gump-style, to save the bacon butts of many famous explorers and soldiers in the first half of the American 19th century, that unsettled and questionable time of nation-forming and Manifest Destiny.
He was a smallish man, modest and ashamed of being illiterate, but he fluently spoke something like 14 languages, most of them Indian, which had to have come in handy. A natural leader, his personal bravery in sticky situations led him to proficiency in making crunch-time choices that were nearly always right. He once walked 25 barefoot, unhydrated miles (lasting over 30 hours) through the rocks, cacti and varmints of the Southern California desert – having removed and then lost his boots and canteen – to sneak silently past a Mexican Army siege encampment in order to bring reinforcements from San Diego and wrap up 1846 solidly in American favor. No wonder he fell into the League of the Legendary. He didn’t mean to, it was just what resulted as he addressed each problem in front of him.
Time. Temperament. Talent. We make our marks from the marks that make us. We might be born that way, but there are always kinks, wrinkles, simple twists of fate, and callings we hate, but answer nonetheless.
Kit Carson, the man, became alive to me as I worked long days in the studio last June, listening to the 17 CDs of the book Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides; a masterful intertwining tale of one man and a few uncertain decades nearly two hundred years ago. For me the book’s tale also spawned juicy associations to family, friends, artists and my own creative process.
As I fell into a studio rhythm with the sweeping story, it was not lost on me that frontiers abound in more than just the physical or temporal way. Perhaps frontiers are limnal Absolute Thresholds, as opposed to defined portals, which make it unclear when one has passed through. I’ve always compared my important creative/life interests to climbing up the mesa wall in search of the tabletop which is large enough to wander around on for a lifetime. I know I have found that in clay, but long for the specifics. Often, with no details, I just trust and show up to do my job (thank you again Elizabeth Gilbert.)
I also was struck by an NPR interview with Eric Fischl, the painter and sculptor, in which he inadvertently revealed to me why listening to stories while I work is a valuable and supportive non-visual practice. He said, “…and if you’re making a sculpture, modeling a sculpture, oftentimes your hand moves away from what your eye can see, and it begins to inform the eye and inform the mind in a totally different way because the hand is full of memory, but it’s memory that only touch can unlock.” By shaping and coloring the clay, while my mind roams the American West with Kit Carson, I distract ego-self and go to the place only touch knows.
So the doing, the touching, but not the thinking and watching, reveal the specifics I seek. Get in there and make art, while you move your eye and mind to a safer and slower spot.
Kit Carson was idolized as a swashbuckling stallion-riding woman-saving hero in the dime novels known as Blood and Thunders, but the real Kit Carson preferred to ride a mule all over the wide-ranging West, often alone, and wanted no part of ego-filled glory. And so shall I, in metaphoric parallel, ride the mule of my craft, slowly, intentionally, uncomplainingly and daily.
 Love Karen Hansen's playful WallHeart I could have said paean or laudation or even, dare I, encomium, but panegyric was the big ass word I needed for this public praise piece about my Art Buddy Karen Hansen.
So, without tons of backstory, and letting the photos describe her ceramic art, what’s good about Karen as an Art Buddy?
 What's she DOING in there? (Karen Hansen, greenware) She’s Magnetic. It’s got to be about Frequency (or is it pheromones? I forget.) No matter, when I’m in classes with her, I want to know what she’s doing, thinking, making. It matters to me a whole bunch. Even though our styles are divergent, they’re sourced from similar resonances and I simply need to be around that to channel the muse and protect me from the detrimental energies in the room.
 You know, deep down inside, TV is good for you! (TV Wall Plaque - Karen Hansen) She’s Associative. That means that she collects her fascinations from nearly any quadrant and synthesizes them into enjoyable quirky meanings. A quick study of human foibles, she makes good fun of nearly every thing and every body. She’s facile with words and slippery thoughts. As a matter of fact, that might be her true medium. But it comes out in the clay too.
 Half Empty? Half Full? Nope, just 1/2. Deal. (1/2 Lidded Jar - Karen Hansen) She’s Versatile and Steady. Adaptive and Constant. Ever-changing and Predictable. Do I speak in parables and opposites? Yes. Because it’s true. I’ve probably quoted it before, but it was Steve Allen (or maybe Marshall McLuhan) who said, “The funny man (sic) is a man (sic) with a grievance.” If we go beyond the oppositions, we find the unifying core of humanity in both tragedy and comedy and I enjoy that skill in Karen.
 Karen's Playland (or one of them...) Hey, I see that oil can back there! She Brings It Basically it’s a Full Catastrophe Package with Karen. Equally capable of shop talk, philosophy, baudiness, pop culture or fine art references, and animal humor, she most humbly reveals her passions. She can simultaneously complain and assess, with chuckles. She buys my art, too, astounding me.
 Skullheart, Pitfired babydoll head, Pillsbury Doughboy, Candies and dial tile...the beginning of my Karen Hansen art collection Well, I mean to say I’m pretty fond of her. Art Buddies cannot be conjured. They ARE. I have a modest shelf of Karen’s treasures, pictured above. Some I traded with her, some I just purloined from her “extras.” Karen would modestly say these pieces reflect more about the eye of the beholder (me) than the maker (her), but I like them because they hold her special juju. Back to that vibe thing. And I want MORE stuff in this collection, especially of her newer work.
 Polka Dots and Spirals for Everybody (Lidded Jar - Karen Hansen) Fortunately for all of us, she recently entered the art market, a move I applaud. There’s her Etsy Shop, Polka Dot Clay Studio where you can see and buy lots more of her fun style for yourself. And there’s the Santa Cruz Open Studios Art Tour 2011, which we’re both still waiting to hear about our acceptance.
 One Word: Birds (Lidded Jar - Karen Hansen) Conspirators. Birds of a feather. Com-madres. That’s how I feel about knowing Karen and her art. Did I heap enough public praise? Did I use enough illustrations? I hope so.
 Corazon Espinado in the most exquisite way. (Wallheart - Karen Hansen) Thanks, Karen!
In terms of ceramic art, mine and others, I did it up royally last weekend. That means I went for maximum effort and uber-luxe spectacle by attending and participating in both the California Conference for the Advancement of Ceramic Art AND the Santa Cruz Clay Show and Sale at Bargetto Winery.
Friday: To Davis, CA and back (2.5 hours each way) in 12 hours. The other 7 hours we were NOT in the car, we toured 45 exhibits and demos at the 22nd annual CCACA. What a whirlwind of wonderful work! I’m always dumbfounded by a few pieces and suitably inspired by a great many more. For the first time, I was kinda sad not to have the whole weekend there.
Biggest showstopper of course: Cabrillo College’s outdoor exhibit titled “Hard Times.” Described as “a social comment on the economic down-turn and a trompe l’oeil ceramic art installation.” My all-ceramic aquarium piece, which I have previously spoken of, was made for this. Here are a few shots, a street view and one from the uphill side of things.
 It was almost TOO realistic!  Anything not white is ceramic! All the “pedestals” are pieces of furniture. Everything else is a ceramic treasure. (Well, you already know the aquarium is glass…) It’s daring to take an outdoor space and fill it with such a large concept. And when the sprinklers went on Sunday morning, the aquarium even held some water.
Saturday and Sunday: My first away from my studio outdoor ceramic booth set-up and sale. I called it a Pop-uP Pottery Village. It contained a population of around 25 local ceramic artists. We were all lined up in row and around a courtyard, representing an impressive range of pottery and sculpture, featuring artists old and new to both the craft and the sale. (Me? Definitely a Newbie on all counts, really.)
I found an authentically playful way to engage my visitors and my colleagues, felt surprisingly comfortable and pleased with how it turned out. At the end of Sunday, all my business cards were gone, I added a dozen new fans to my mailing list, made respectable sales, got a couple of leads to galleries (!) and found out I must have a bigger vehicle in order to safely hold the booth, furniture, display shelves and all the carefully packed boxes of breakable work.
Here are two views of my booth set-up, front view and from behind the “counter.”
 Yeah yeah, I really need some signs!  I asked my visitors if I was the appetizer or the dessert. It was probably a good thing to be so incredibly busy because my game got really tight. Not only did I survive some completely new ventures, I was energized and encouraged by them. A few things still need to be put away, the studio needs a good clean-out, but I am happily aware of how getting out there completes the creative cycle for me. Each time round is less scary and confusing and I savor the recharged impetus to make more work. And, best of all, thankfully these two events will NOT be on the same weekend in 2012. Yes!
 This is the only kind of aquarium I really like ~Liz Crain “Apparently We’re Not Fish People” is the title of my finished ceramic aquarium piece in the photo above. It’s all ceramic except the actual glass/plastic aquarium.
You may remember my earlier posts about making ceramic aquarium gravel. It was for this piece, and not a live aquarium!
Since those posts, I’ve made the super funky retro diver, the precious merbaby, and wrecked columns, the small Asian boat, rocks, shells and logs. Also the Japanese pump box, old school heater and cord, Tetra Min food cannister, Ph test strip bottle and Ick Rid sample envelope.
It’s all done in time to travel to the California Conference for the Advancement of Ceramic Art (CCACA, pronounced SEE-KA’-KA) in Davis, CA this weekend. It will be a small part of Cabrillo College’s outdoor installation entitled “Hard Times.” Photos of THAT coming soon.
I’m completely taken up with the rest of the preparations for not only the Davis conference, but for my first foray into selling my work at an outdoor ceramics show and sale with the Santa Cruz Clay folks at Bargetto Winery in Soquel. It’s packing and pre-packing all the time now…..Day trip to Davis Friday, then Saturday and Sunday in my booth in the Santa Cruz Spring sunshine.
So, off I scoot, leaving you with one more view of my latest narrative sculpture.
 The title was taken from a Craigslist ad
 How much can one bowl contain? (Joseph McBride) Last week I bought this sweet bowl directly out of the hands of my friend, mentor and colleague, Kathryn McBride. It’s not her creation, it’s her young adult son Joseph’s.
Joseph’s work is generally not offered for sale. He was donating it to a fundraiser and this was a scarce moment of opportunity. It’s a generous receptacle; a patiently hand-stamped, piebald copper red-glazed, evenly thrown bowl with a well-crafted foot and a subtle hand-pinched rim. I short-stopped it on its way to the fundraiser and sent my check to them instead.
When I placed it in the center of my round oak dining table, it began whispering, then humming, then ringing as clear as a temple bell, inviting me to not just notice the energies it has as a work of art, but to delight in the connections one bowl can forge in personal, local, and international ways.
Preponderance of the Personal
As a form in space, this bowl is a concave mandala, a vortex of radial symmetry. It dances with the Japanese notan of light/dark and positive/negative. It can hold anything and nothing equally gracefully.
The bowl also contains a few metaphoric miles of my journey with Kathryn, as we parented our similarly-aged sons and shared our personal and creative challenges. That Joseph — despite his many other interests and talents and being “raised in clay” — found his own way in ceramics is delightful and unexpected. I’m among a pantheon of proud Aunties.
Local Hands
Joseph told me he originally didn’t intend to even bisque fire this bowl — since it apparently didn’t meet his sliced-thin standards –but a fellow potter friend disagreed and sent it to the kiln unbeknownst to him. He eventually glazed it differently than his other bowls. It’s a bit of a renegade, this piece, off on another path entirely. A Wilbur the runt piglet saved by Fern. I was pleased that he was pleased I bought it.
An Ocean of Ripples
When the giant earthquake wracked Japan last March, it shook the brick climbing kilns of the ancient pottery town of Mashiko, crashing them to the ground. Like the tsunami waves that were generated throughout the Pacific Ocean, the circles of ceramic concern radiated out, touching the pottery community here in Santa Cruz. Many I know have pilgrimmaged to Mashiko. Those waves continued to England, too, because of the profound 20th century association of Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada, which changed the ceramic cultures of East and West everlastingly.
Global Hands
Quickly, quickly, quickly a heartbroken but energetic group of Santa Cruz potters sent out the call: Please donate whatever ceramic work you can to a fundraiser, all proceeds going to help Mashiko recover its livelihood. Leach Pottery in England is doing similarly and I’m sure there are more.
Joseph was donating to this event and I bought his bowl. A lot of dedicated ceramic work came into being for what I hear was a supremely successful effort. Joseph’s rogue bowl of loveliness will help more bowls to be made in Mashiko.
All because I listened to it, the patterns and colors of one engaging big red bowl revealed spirographic loops of personal beauty, of friendships, of compassionate local artists and of a globally overlapping web of potting communities.
 Today's Kiln Yield (the good ones, anyway) Before delving into the main question, here’s what I mean by a Blog Blast. For the past few years I’ve written longish posts. I compose and edit as I go (a not so good idea), making nifty essays which even I did not have time to read, even though they were worth it, IMHO. No more. Here’s to the short, pithy, candid and extemporaneous post. Longer than a Tweet or a Status Update, shorter than War and Peace, or even a term paper. Still worth it. Still friends.
All Bow!
I know what I want from my ceramic endeavors: the realization of what I had in my head to begin with, only better! I want the Kiln Gods to undo my ham-handedness, my fear and laziness, my lack of knowledge and brain farts. I want nothing less than Transformational Magic, that slice of perfection that no ceramic piece in the world has heretofore attained…until now. All bow.
I’m no different. And sometimes I do get that, briefly. As in performance arts, I feel I am only as good as my last kiln opening. So, when I don’t get the fairy dust, this is how I understand it.
Did I Take the Short Way Home?
Warps, cracks and breakage is the norm for mishandled clay. Glazing faults abound: wrong material/color choice, misapplied, too shiny, streaky, runny, bubbled. These are obvious flaws (except when they’re not because you wanted this exact messed-up result. After all, it’s contemporary art we’re talkin’ about!) Flaws are mostly not too fixable. Better to love and honor the quirky properties of clay and glazes on the front end. But when it does not go well in these departments, have your disappointment, even your everlasting shame and tantrum, then get out the hammer and start over. Oh, and learn to gently amend and refire a little too. Smash seven times, make anew eight. Get back on the cylinder that threw you. Learn to fly with your craft, bird by bird. No way out but the long way.
Got Appreciation for What Is?
What’s harder to understand is when a piece is gorgeous, but just not the specific gorgeous its creator intended. It happens to all of us: the heatwork of the kiln changes things and we hold treasure and call it trash only because it wasn’t what we ordered. The piece is too dark, off the expected color, bled or shrank weirdly. Whatever it is, it failed to meet our prior specs and we’re ready to smash once again. But wait! Tuck this one away somewhere, maybe for months, and then look at it without the pangs of former expectations. You might return to the “amend and refire” mode, you might decide it’s a true goner, or you might see it for what it is.
What to Want
And here’s the Tricky Bit: Don’t settle for “good enough.” Good: the enemy of Best, right? While it might sound like I suggest seeking only objective perfection, it’s really personal excellence which excites me. I may joke about wanting it all from the Kiln Gods, but I know what I alone put out there steeped in my heartfelt best comes back. Often better than I know to want, challenging me to keep stretching. I seek repeated opportunities to do exactly that.
That’s what (ceramic) artists really want.
 Investigate Everything! Some of you might not want to parse out what makes one thing more beautiful than another. I completely understand. Keats complained that Newton had “destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism.”
I’m here to meld that duality and I contend further that prism and poetry can co-exist fruitfully. In fact, in order to make my best art, I require that generation of The Third which emerges from Opposites.
I’ve tried the romance of just messing around with the crayons, the keyboard, and the clay, rather juvenilely hoping that the lightening bolt of genius will make a lucky strike. (Even sometimes thinking it actually did, for me.) Ultimately, though, it’s like playing Blackjack: while the odds are better than most games of chance, they still are in the House’s favor, not mine.
Goal-less and right-brained fooling around is creatively essential, but it is a warm-up: the beginning doodle, the free-write, the initial pinching, coiling and rolling. It so rarely makes it to that zen place of offhanded perfection, as much as we might be glancing over our shoulders to see if it did.
To take my craft into beauty and excellence –leaving the lightening bolts to shock themselves –I explored the nature of the creative process, studied Color Theories and The Principles and Elements of Art until I felt conversant and sometimes even fluent.
In other words, I got scientific and it helped. Now I could not only wonder at the rainbow’s glories, I could unweave it and put it back together in my own poetic way.
When I changed my art-making from 2D mixed media to 3D ceramics, a whole new set of loveliness standards came into play. What about Line and Form in Space? What about that Viewer in motion around the piece – or actually using it? What about Front, Side and Back? Top and Bottom?
So…. besides sticking to the work in my studio evolving my efforts, besides near constant conversations with mentors, colleagues, fellow enthusiasts and supporters, besides Art History courses and museum gallery visits, and besides deep thought on what motivates and thrills me, I read books.
And here are those that I deliciously don’t quite understand, but every time I delve through them, a little more is revealed:
The Nature and Art of Workmanship and The Nature and Aesthetics of Design, both by woodworker David Pye. If you click on the links, you will get descriptions and reviews. (Don’t miss the one for the Design book by wiredweird! I can’t describe the power of this book any better.)
Li: Dynamic Form in Nature by David Wade
And two exploring the realms of Sacred Geometry, whose philosophies lie at the heart of my seeking the Music of the Spheres in all I do.
Sacred Geometry by Miranda Lundy
The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art and Architecture by Gyorgy Doczi. The cover of my edition gives a hint of how the author connects the Golden Mean and the Fibonacci sequence to both the natural and visual world: with the language of mathematics.
 Certain proportions occur over and over again joining unity and diversity Herein lie richly illustrated pages with examples from plants, crafts, animals, Art: both ancient and modern, writing, the human body, music and more, all pointed toward a revelation of cosmic order so universal the author coined a new word for it Dinergy. “…Made up of two Greek words: dia — ‘across, through, opposite;’ and ‘energy.’”
A sample page.
 So this is why Acoma Pottery is so pleasing! (Hint: maybe) So what makes something beautiful? It’s surely not book learning and the methods of parsing, unweaving, reducing and dissecting! I don’t play around with numbers at all, I make art.
Rather, it’s about understanding that essential beauty’s out there, we’re all capable of perceiving it and here’s a Tiny Bit o’ Why. We may wildly disagree on specifics because there are many ways these patterns manifest.
Time, place, culture, narrative and materials don’t matter, yet there it is: A certainty of visual knowing instinctive and true.
I swear this knowing is how I sense when a work is done. There’s an out-breath, a hand relaxation, a satisfaction, all related to the cessation of seeking more for that piece. The rainbow is rewoven for now and I don’t need to measure it to make sure.
 Hot stuff wall paint is named Briquette PART ONE: The Set-Up
Legions of artists fantasize about The Perfect Studio. Whatever the particular siting, configuration and appointments, it comes down to it being a vortex of personal creative energy where the conduits of genius become pure and we are blissful.
I’ve walked around a few incredible art-making habitats, many with zen views, which gave my artist’s soul the same frissons as Disneyland’s Peter Pan’s Flight did for me at age 6.
After the thrills, though, come the tidal waves of malicious envy followed by the dirty backwash of self-admonition: “A lot of artists don’t have any studio at all!” The Voice nags. So I go clean and rearrange one more time, dutifully attempting to bloom where I’m planted.
Sometime late last year I got a case of INeedABetterStudio-itis that was not induced by envy or guilt, but by a strong re-conceptualization of how I work best. I noticed things go better for me in my creative space when:
1. It has an open feeling with largish work tables and good task lighting.
2. It has dedicated places for tools, supplies, and other necessaries and they are clearly labeled.
3. I have separate areas for wet clay forming, bone dry and bisque work, and for decorating and photographing work.
4. Deep storage and side activity supplies are not visible.
5. It is inviting and pretty easy to keep clean.
6. There’s a private feeling, separate from my household.
Those were the qualities that I kept seeking in the yellow space, a large back bedroom located off the laundry/pantry pictured below. But, I was asking too much of it. I wanted it to be an active studio as well as a major seasonal storage area, a photography studio, an Etsy Shop inventory and shipping area, a place to stage and prep my outside-the-studio teaching and volunteer projects, an art reference file cabinet and a mini meditation hall. No wonder I had no lasting success in wrassling it into a dream studio!
 Free Swimming in the Creative Soup It was clear, though, that I would not be moving off-site, out in the yard or be converting the living room. What, oh what to do besides more Sisyphean tidying? Eventually it occurred to me I could switch out two rooms by moving the active studio around the corner and down the hall to the off-the-beaten-path red room, taking only the necessaries with me and leaving the other functions behind to be joined by the exercise equipment.
And that is what I did. See the just-moving-in shot at the top of the post.
A few weeks later, I performed a dedication ceremony thanking “the divine cockeyed Genius assigned to my case“, by clearing and blessing the newly-born space.
 Flowers, Candles, Oranges, Incense, Salt and Rattles PART TWO: The Never-ending Conclusion
As I continue to pay attention to what I need in my studio (to make it vortex of personal creative energy by opening the purest conduits to genius and thereby fostering my ultimate bliss,) I make adjustments.
I stand when I work, so I propped the tables up on bedrisers and topped them with HardieBacker board, a smooth and durable work surface. As a bonus, the higher tables make the storage beneath them accessible without groveling.
I can reach everything on all the shelves, no footstool required, and I am able to keep stuff nearest to its likely use.
I swung the decorating table 90 degrees to create more elbow room, found sturdy, stackable clementine boxes to hold everything on the shelves and labeled them, got rid of the odd-shaped wareboards, threw out the broken and moldy and gave away anything not often used.
Albert Einstein, an earthly genius, said, “Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.” In the spirit of simplistic balance, I am scrutinizing my remaining tool collection and questioning why I have 8 cut-off wires, 16 needle tools, 23 ribs, dozens of similar wooden modeling tools, a deep drawer full of sponges and a whopping 212 brushes – I just counted them!
I think the bulk of these need to go. They are going.
In practice, I only use about 20 favorites from all categories, which I keep handy on my right side along with my water tub, spray bottle, sponges, hand towel, brushes, slip container, and a cache of beloved sticks, straightedges and dowels. It’s an artist’s version of a mise en place, which works really well and I have begun to hone.
I now drive a custom cockpit of ceramic creation. Here’s a non-action shot (because an action shot would be less clear.)
 A way of working that works My entire studio is becoming a pretty decent personal version of Japanese workplace organization called 5S Methodology
1. Sorting (Seiri)
2. Setting in order (Seiton)
3. Shining (cleaning) (Seiso)
4. Standardizing (Seiketsu)
5. Sustaining the discipline (Shitsuke)
There are three other Ss that accompany this methodology: Safety, Security, Satisfaction. While they mean something different for factories and schools, I see them more as positive emotive qualities, emanating from the newly organized and clean space, helping me feel professional by fostering my sense of privacy, comfortable confidence and pleasure in my craft.
It’s a practice, this studio functionality perfection biz, but, I swear, now that I don’t need to kick a fire lane in to the work area every time I enter, only to stand there both fog-brained and hyper-distracted – essentially pre-defeated by the disarray – I’m making better art and having a way better time at it too.
 Thickening without Glassifying If you think that generating thousands of just-right tiny chunks of dried clay in order to have ceramic aquarium gravel is madness, you would not be far wrong. But it ends up the rewarding kind of madness, as you shall soon see.
I really did not think this through! But how could I? No one I know and no one they know has done this, so it has been necessarily one foundering discovery after another.
After hand-generating the gravel, those buckets of tiny bisqued chunks need coloring. But glazing them won’t work; the glass-forming ingredients in glaze will simply fuse them in a lump to the kiln shelf. A rookie mistake. Perhaps a nice effect when done on purpose, but for another project. (Hindsight Hint: generate the next batch of aquarium gravel with pre-colored clay and call it done!)
If I couldn’t use glaze, then would mason stains, oxides or underglazes stick well and evenly? The viscosity of underglazes can be thin and take three coats to cover well, but they seemed to offer the strongest color in the easiest format.
At the first try, the bits got too wet and wound up unable to bind with the color. It looked a little like bluish barf: color in a flat puddle punctuated by the pinkish chunks. Dang. I let them dry overnight while I felt a bit queasy over it. I considered the possibility of resorting to acrylic paint….but that thought both freed me and bolstered my resolve to find a fired-on solution.
I talked with the deeply resourceful Gail Ritchie and we agreed we needed to add something which would sticky-up the underglaze, but not be glassy in the slightest. We came up with CMC gum fixative, Karo Syrup, honey, maple syrup…..all of which we theorized would help the underglaze attach while it dries and then burn away in the kiln, it’s job done, leaving the gravel in beautifully-colored separateness.
Karo Syrup was handy. Karo worked! Best use for Karo Syrup since homemade popcorn balls.
I added a few large drops of Karo to about 2T of underglaze…stirred well, and then mixed in the gravel sample to make a thick and dry-ish sticky mound.
 Mixing the Bisqued Gravel with Karo'd Underglaze For most of my samples, I used a heat gun to gently dry and separate each pile and then handled it as little as possible to avoid knocking off any hard-won color. I left one pile wetter and fully connected, just to see if that mattered…and while every sample fired up evenly colored and separate, the wetness of that one damp batch left a lot of color on the kiln shelf, which I needed to scrape off and re-coat the shelf with kiln wash. It’s worth it to dry things before firing them.
Here’s what the little test kiln known as Sparky looked like when I opened it the next day. So fine!
 Lovely little colored piles Ceramic aquarium gravel-making has been the full creative catastrophe, with a happy ending. I’ve worked harder both physically and mentally and it’s taken scads more time than expected. Ironically, this gravel is only a bit player – pun intended – in the finished ceramic Aquarium Set-Up For Sale piece I envision. In that respect, it’s like fine silk lingerie, something usually only the wearer knows about, but great for self-confidence.
Every speck of ceramic aquarium gravel represents the whole effort to me now and I find I cannot let even one fall off the board or over the edge of the kiln shelf. They’re shards of meaning and intent, like artistic DNA, each carrying the whole idea.
 Bone Dry Chunks with Bowl and Sieve Labscape
Notice I only said How and not Why.
If you’re thinking of real gravel for your real aquarium, the Why becomes problematic. Why do that when it will take a full workday plus overtime to grind enough gravel to fill a ten gallon tank to two inches? Why ever do that when there are unknown toxicity issues with underglaze and oxide colorants that your prize fish may demonstrate by dying on you?
No, this gravel-making is a completely sculptural endeavor of my own device. It’s one item of many spurred by the Cabrillo College Ceramics Department’s proposed installation at the annual California Conference for the Advancement of Ceramic Art held in Davis, CA at the end of April.
 A Magic Realist Ceramic Rock Portal We’re following up our fantabulous 2010 Cabrillo Rocks Portal installation -pictured above – with a life-sized out-on-the-lawn trompe l’oeil ceramic Yard Sale! Folks are right this minute working on fishing gear, globes, games, toys, linens, shoes, hats, bags, skateboards, dolls, a bake sale and then whatever else we can concoct between now and then.
I’m offering a used aquarium set-up: a real aquarium with clear glass, but with the frame painted white (like all our tables, shelves and props will be) and everything else in it ceramic. I plan delicious tongue-in-cheesy mermaids, sunken ships, broken Greek columns…along with faux warped and stained cardboard boxes containing the pump, heater, filter, and canisters of fish food, medicines and a net. A complete mock set-up! Just needs fish and water. $30 OBO.
Hence the gravel. It’s important to the faux-y integrity of the piece for me to make my own. But HOW???? My first approach was to bust up bisqueware with a hammer. Too hard. Too sharp. Too uncontrollably uneven. It’s much easier to chunk up potato-chip brittle bone dry clay – which is essentially “dust held together by memory” according to one wise kiln tech I have known.
I used a mortar/pestle in the clay lab, but started with the densely heavy 10kg weight as shown below.
 Bonedry wares returning to Dust Then came the pestle which got the pieces to a mix range of pure dust to pea gravel sized.
 Crush Just Fine Enough, No Finer Next, a trip through a series of fine to coarse strainers and meshes straight out of my kitchen. Put the gross chunks through a fine sieve to get rid of the dust and too-teensy bits, pour what’s left onto a pizza screen and shake. The perfect size falls through!
 Fine mesh behind; Pizza screen mesh in front Continue to crunch up the leftover big pieces, then sieve, screen and shake a few more times. Sieve the inevitable dust out of the desired gravelly size and collect in buckets until there is enough volume to acceptably fill the tank. Plan on around ten hours of this in order to have enough volume, factoring in the clay body shrinkage.
Also factor in sore shoulders, upper back and arms, temporarily-impaired hearing from hours spent in the drone of the glaze room’s exhaust fan, and the gag factor from wearing a particulate mask until the creases in your face are nearly time-worn. All pretty unavoidable.
I’m pleasantly aware that making gravel this year is an act of “decomposition” regarding last year’s rocks and am lovin’ the strange parallel.
In the next-related post on this topic: garishly coloring this gravel and making tired boxes and whatever else has come up.
 Each face is unique; it has to be A new series of face jugs has begun! Similar to the Local Talkers 2009 in that they are based on the faces appearing in the 2011 Local Talk column of the Santa Cruz Good Times, but different because each one is full-sized and meant to be a stand alone work.
I’ve lifted some of the limits I placed on myself in 2009, in that I can choose one or more faces/respondents a week, or none. And I can base my choice on expression and/or on what the person says.
Each jug is stamped with that person’s first name, last initial and one word of their reply to the question of the week. In the top photo are, left to right, Cecil U. Stopped, Kate K. Y and what eventually became Nicole B. Amphitheatre.
Here she is at leatherhard before being cleaned up and getting the base coat of underglazing.
 Love the headband and the earrings! And just for fun, here’s a close up of the source face.
 Facing the camera and smiling slightly For me it’s not about creating a photographic likeness, but an energetic and gestural one. The clay jug form has its own demands that must be served. The cylinder needs to balance in all ways. It can only stretch so far. It can’t get too heavy with add-ons. (Hair!!!!) It needs to function as a vessel, although I’m finding I care less and less about that as I go deeper into sculptural expression. I just might be getting to the same place as sculptural teapots which are generally full of narrative and SO not meant to be used for serving tea!
I am keeping better studio records this time too. Here’s the page so far for Cecil U. Stopped.
 SO much better than binder paper! So, that’s my Studio Report at the outset of one thematic series I will be exploring this year. The face jugs provide a looser more organic foil to the other works I’ve got going and I like that I get to find my way from the plain cylinder to the character waiting to take form.
 Fallen Sphinx Totem It happens several times daily: the dog pushes open the back door to get in and I am too pre-occupied to get up and shut it. Besides, we are having weeks upon weeks of the best Summer-in-the-Winter ever here on the Monterey Bay and there is no need to batten the hatches. The daffodils are blooming and the bugs are still asleep, a sweet time.
Last week Zorro, our sly XL Mini Schnauzer, pushed himself inside and disappeared around a corner. Shortly, I heard an emphatic crash which ended with semi-tinkling flourishes. Well, that got me up! I wasn’t sure where the sound came from and found no obvious broken dog messes anywhere in the house. Nothing jiggled off the dryer, no artwork detached from the walls, my studio remained quietly waiting for me. The dog was unconcerned. I concluded that because of the open door I must have heard one of our (nine – but that’s another story) neighbors, or the roofers three doors down. Back to my pre-occupations.
What fell is pictured above. It has been a fixture in the side yard for years and it fell over behind plants, a wooden cart and the fence so I didn’t notice it until days later. I called it the Sphinx Totem and it is still one of the most wildly complicated things I have ever pulled-off in hand-building ceramics class.
Each of its parts were soulful references to ancient and classical imagery, the entirety crafted to resonate with the sacred geometry of the Golden Mean as explored and diagrammed in the commanding book The Power of Limits by Gyorgy Doczi.
I can’t locate a photo of the completed piece in its former wholeness. Instead, I found my concept drawings:
 Sphinx Totem Sketch with Golden Mean Harmonics Starting at the bottom, a ring of roots surrounding a Greek column – a column being a formalized tree as well as an axis mundi. On top of the column a sphere within a cube frame. Then a large shallow bowl windrose with symbols for the eight winds of the Mediterranean around its rim. Above the windrose, an s-ribbed wind turbine which I had designed to spin at the slightest puff, but inertia and friction have long-proved to be fearsome contenders.
Guarding the whole piece at eye level, the Sphinx, one of my first figures in clay. She’s magnificently capable of issuing a perplexing riddle. She rendered the top pieces – a fairly graceful Lamp of Learning and a lumpy Rub ‘n’ Buff-colored Chakra Tower – mere finials of denouement.
The interior support for this four foot high twelve-part affair was a metal pipe which went about half way up, with a longer wooden dowel inserted into it running the entire height. As predicted for Someday, the dowel rotted and broke at the exact top of the metal pipe, toppling everything higher than the axis mundi onto the marble, bricks, and Mexican river rocks below. Teetering Empyrean! Someday’s arrived!
Years of ceramics have left me with little resistance to the shardy reality of a broken Opus. This might be an oxymoron, but I felt rather Vulcan: it was fascinating! I photographed it, swept up the pieces and noted that my favorites survived whole: the roots ring, the column, the Sphinx.
 What's meant to remain I take this as a sign of necessary evolution and simplification, of putting away childish things, of movement and progress, crossing the bridge, fording the river, sailing to the New World. I am blessedly released from a certain kind of past and this crash reinforces it.
With a new studio, the new year, new associations and the ACGA Exhibiting Member acceptance, fresh vistas have appeared. And while a few somethings, even significant ones, are lost, Time is currently sending more fascination than lack. Gravity is just not all that grave right now.
Fall seven times, rise eight as the saying goes. But maybe it’s easier than that; maybe falling is like autumn leaves, utterly natural… and if we trust and allow, don’t mope and protest, and stay fascinated, we see that rising up and leafy renewal are already written within Fall Down Go Boom.
|
Connect with Facebook
|
