How To’s

How to Make Your Own Ceramic Aquarium Gravel

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.

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Claiming A Character in a Plain Clay Cylinder

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.

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A Year’s Journey, One Local Talker at a Time

I want to walk you through making one small face jug, which, times 53, comprises what I have been doing all of 2009 in my Local Talkers series. Each one is unique, but there is a unifying rhythm to making them and it goes like this.

Nearly every one starts out as a hand pinched and closed sphere about 2-3 inches across.

I can barely explain how I choose The Subject Face from the 4 or 5 in each week’s column, and I have been known to drift from one face to another mid-making. I look for some expression or attribute that intrigues or amuses me. I am not making a portrait so much as an echo or an interpretation. Sometimes I read the names, occupations and responses, mostly I do not until after I have chosen and started in.

Here’s the choice for Week 43:

One thing in David Baker’s favor was I had not had anyone in a headband all year and his face is elongated with that great center part in his hair. I started by paddling the sphere into a long capsule, then pinched it to form a base, neck, chin and that scalp part, as you can see.

To my artist’s brain, it’s exactly like a rough sketch in charcoal. Add in a tiny bit of pressure to work while the clay is at an ideal wetness at every stage — although even that can be controlled. (I could work for months and years on this if I needed to.) I want it done in a few days and will control the drying with brushed/sprayed on water and plastic.

Here are the basic Mount Roughmore features in a mix of a lively but stoic face:

I am pleased with this profile and demeanor. It has a classic feel: Egyptian? George Washington?

Next comes details and rough hair.

The clay’s perfectly malleable but too sticky to finalize things, so I am relaxed about burrs and fingerprints. All in good time. I have delineated the headband position before I commit to much more hair. Oh, and I have made peace with a certain androgynous quality I find in nearly every face.

Now the headband is on and I am starting to think about where I will add on a spout, perhaps a handle and other decoration and where exactly I will press on this week’s number.

All those additions need to be in place before final touches, otherwise I will be fighting with myself and my tools. I want something rather organic and abstract for a spout, suggestive of a feather or an antler, but not actually recognizable. Not sure about a handle…there’s plenty going on with the knot in the headband.

And here’s what arose in response: An open-ended spout-structure, surrounded by another supporting loop and a pressed-in 43 in the hair.

The newer additions glisten due to the clear water brushed on to both help attach them and to provide a unified smoother surface.

One more shot from the front. Is that a pipe? A blossom? I am glad it is not specific! And I like that it is subtly resting in back, not taking anything away from the face in shape, subject or placement.

And that’s that for now. It’s too wet to attempt much more today on it. It is good to wrap it up in plastic and let it sit at least overnight, exchanging moisture levels, drying slightly on the outside and letting me see it anew on the morrow.

If things go at all like they have with countless other small face jugs, when I work on this piece again I will need to restate hair and refine facial lines, “disappear” some seam lines and edges, clean up those burrs and fingerprints, and maybe even patch a crack or a thin spot. Once that is done, I will make sure the piece sits level, sign and date the bottom and begin drying it ever so slowly, gradually loosening and removing the plastic, for the next week or so, until it is bone dry and ready for the bisque firing.

I have said to countless people over the years that clay taught me patience and I can see once again how true that is in describing what I do without thinking for one small face jug. Times that by 53 and I see I am really working on Mount Rushless, and I guess I can claim some sort of bonafide Clay Abiding Award, knowing as I do, when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em.

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Outside Adjustments, Inside Surprise

A few posts ago I showed ya’ll the results of my figure sculpture studies with Cynthia Siegel this past semester. I wrote that post before Cynthia reviewed my work and,  following our brief but thoughtful discussion, there is a bit more to share with you concerning the Two Hour Challenge sculpture of runner Maggie Vessey. Up top is a shot as close to the angle of the source photo (below) as I could get.

Here’s why it’s great to have instruction: Cynthia pointed out aspects of this pose that, given a bit more time, I might have addressed, but one never knows! I will just list these points and you can see for yourself:
1. Maggie has thrown herself down, and is maybe still a little bit in motion. She may have even been rocking slightly. Her butt does not rest on her shoes, as I have modeled it! And even if she was completely still, a runner’s muscled thighs and calves probably wouldn’t let her fold up into a compact Child’s Pose. What I have made is resonant with wet clay not quite being able to stand up in the air AND with the strong emotional folding in of the figure.
2. Maggie’s back is arched. I have modeled a sway back! I kept trying to keep the clay up in the torso, but did not get this all-important line. I feel pretty sure, given more time,  I would have restated this until it was fairly accurate. After all, it is the one view I did have!
3. The proportions of the negative space and angles of limbs needs compacting. I have elongated things. Arching the back correctly will help this problem too. The lower leg shin needs to curve upward more.
4. The arms are pretty well done, but they aren’t inserting into the back correctly. There is more of a transition that includes the shoulder blade and that web of muscles….that alone would help with a better back/shoulder curve.
5. Muscles are convex. My thigh muscle on this side is concave…I got it strong on the other side, though!
Now for the Inside Surprise! What drew me to this photo was the memorable and compelling emotion. That’s why I saved it for over nine years, wanting to align with and honor it in a piece of art. Far more than realistic replication, for me, that emotion was the most important aspect to capture, even in a short academic exercise.
Every item I still need to adjust to make the figure’s Outside more true arrived because I was paying more attention to the felt narrative I wanted to express. I got into this position while sculpting and so did Cynthia in our talk! Cynthia even put the whole pose into motion in her discussion of movement and musculature.
If I draw, I craft one view, with many others implied, if I’m lucky. If I sculpt, like it or not, I must address all views, even the ones not easily seen.
At one point in our talk, Cynthia and I picked up this smallish sculpture and discovered the Inner Truth of this pose. I treasure this unrealized, expressive, protective, intimate inside view!
Here is the fearsome power of misery, anger, defeat and the active defiance of all of it too! This is what arises in me when I look at that photo and what my hands wanted to make.
Ultimately getting the figure accurate, in my personal view, is meant to support the message of the work. Like a musician bending notes or playing ahead or behind the beat, a sculptor can choose to simplify, abstract, or distort, too. And if they know where academic, even photographic, realism lies, they are that much more agile in expressing their intentions.
Ultimately, keeping the Inside alive while Adjusting the Outside, sounds like a life skill as well as an artistic one, and in that case, I’m signing on for the duration.
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Channeling Willem and Karen


So The Plan was this: trade a piece of my art for one of Karen Koch’s and alter it mightily as in Erased DeKooning by Robert Rauschenberg. (You who need the thrilling and informative backstory are encouraged to see Karen’s blog and my previous post, the one just before this one, which will connect you to the other two previous posts…so just scroll down…as always, I’ll be right here when you get back!)

I have concocted this lidded ceramic container recalling some of the shapes and textures of both my work (the Soap Bubble bottle) and Karen’s. It has been bisque-fired and is ready for more decoration. My plan was to add colors and patterns not to exactly replicate Karen’s lovely little piece, but to riff off of it in 3D. Could I do that with the decidedly less-wieldy underglazes?

Apparently not. My first brushings were tentative AND pretty ham-handed, if that is possible! I hated them. But the hate was well-utilized because, all of a sudden, I remembered that DeKooning spent eons scraping his paint off of his surfaces, painting more and applying absorbent newspapers, and scraping and applying, scraping and applying. Thank You, Willem! I just got creative permission to do less than rinsing it all off and starting over, but to do more than piling on more colors in hopes it would get better.

Enter the sanding screen as seen in the first photo up top. I LOVE this thing! It makes Instant Old surfaces. Off I went outside with a mask (because you don’t want to breathe ceramic-anything dust) and ever so lightly and randomly scraped and altered the surface I had thickly painted.

It got better! I started to feel the rhythms of Karen’s piece, titled Purple Music. I thought about music. I wondered what Karen was listening to when she made it. (Karen?) I put the Real Jazz station on the satellite radio, literally caught the vibes, and painted and scraped and scraped and painted.

Eventually I broke out the underglaze chalks and pencils. Betchadidntknow they had those, right? For we who love that dry, calligraphic surface, they are heaven. AND they smudge good, too! The bottom photo shows the piece nearly done. It is altogether more playful and rhythmic and totally has the effect I was wanting. Whew!

So, I leave us right here with just a few more steps to go: clear glaze wash and the final firing, with an important twist in the works. Stay tuned, kids!

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Shhhhh! Creative Radio Silence



It is pretty much true for all of us with Right and Left Brains: I find I can’t talk and create at the same time. I can talk before (What’s the Plan?), on breaks (How’s it Goin’?), and afterwards (Here’s the Deal), just not during. As a matter of fact, I enjoy watching the demos of creative instructors because there is often a point where I can almost see them switch brain hemispheres and pause their verbal instructing in order to get the demo piece to the right artistic place. Makes me glow inside with recognition.

For the past week I have been in the silent During phase with the DeKooning/Rauschenberg-inspired art exchange which I am involved in with Karen Koch. (I have described the swap’s progress and premise in my previous posts of 8-17-09 , “Creative Timing” and 8-12-09 “Art Swap, What If?”) I have been quietly and happily deploying my Big Idea, step-by-achin’-step, and have been unable to make words about it. Yet, I also know I need to come up for air in order to document this fantastic experiment for me, for Karen, and for every other interested soul out there. I’m currently on a creative break, so I will recount the tale as it has unfolded so far.

As of today: the first bisque-firing is cooling down! I lifted the kiln lid and peeked and the piece made it through without self-destruction, always a positive sign. Now it can never revert to earth again, having passed the point of no return in order to become a delicious, absorbent ceramic canvas for the rest of the decorations I have planned for it. I am relieved and blessed to create another day.

So let’s take those photos up top, have ourselves a pictorial, and see what silent changes happened last week.

Top: The wet signature on the bottom of the work, a ceramic tradition. The idea is that if the piece is inscribed while it is still unfired, the artist was actually present. While there is no problem with other types of signatures being authentic, this wet signing is just one kind and I happen to prefer it. Sometimes you will see an artist’s chop/stamp pressed in the wet clay, sometimes a painted underglaze signing, all perfectly wonderful. This one includes a date and an inscription which might be the first in the world to include a Twitter hashmark address!

Middle: One thing I love to do is give a piece some color before that first bisque firing. It helps ease the stultifying transition from forming to decorating. There is so much waiting around in ceramics, it is a common problem to lose one’s stoke between the making, drying and bisque-firing steps and consequently to be neither in one’s right OR left brain when re-encountering it. I painted some amethyst and white underglazes, only partially mixed, on the whole piece. This serves as an underpainting and helps me regain my place quickly after that first firing. I chose those colors because they are common to both the pieces Karen and I traded, as she so skillfully observed.

Bottom: Off to the kiln! This morning’s photo shows the piece loaded in the kiln. And, surprise!!! It has a lid, formed from memory to recall the top of the piece I sent Karen! It has been painted with chartreuse underglaze as well as the amethyst/white mix, neither of which look at all like they will when fully fired, part of the flying-blind fun of ceramic decorating. (Oh, and don’t worry, all you energy efficiency sensates, I did not run the whole kiln with just this one piece….about 20 other works were loaded in after this shot, and they survived just fine.)

So, after today’s firing success, I am charged up and ready to do the decorating work in the coming days. Until then, I will maintain creative radio silence on this project. Over and out.

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The Focus Pull

In the world of filmmaking, when the camera changes focus during a single shot, (say from Mrs. Robinson’s half-stockinged leg to Benjamin in the background, conflicted and staring) it directs the viewer’s attention in a powerful narrative manner. I want to borrow this focus pull concept and play with it a little in the realm of this blog. Let me steer our collective attention beyond the deliciousness of thinking, making, showing and blathering about ceramics and creative process for just a bit.

You see, I went and signed up for another of Alyson Stanfield’s oh-so-valuable online classes: Blog Triage, and it started today. This class is different for at least two reasons right from the start: One is Cynthia Morris, the co-instructor, who adds another mindful mother lode of experience to the work at hand, and Two is the fact that the class assignments will, like as not, play out here with all of you, dear readers, and not just in my private office or studio.

Case in point: the first assignment asks for me to essentially pull focus and blog about what I expect to get from blogging and just who I would like to be reading my posts. This request creates a heady funhouse mirror effect on me, but I know the point of looking at things from other perspectives is to be more than self-referencing, that the meta-awareness generated is gold for the narrative comprehension.

I have read and followed some blogs for years…I just did not know they were blogs! I guess I thought they were highly entertaining, active and personal websites, which, after a fashion, they were. As a blog consumer, I enjoy warmth, humor, community and an artful turn of phrase, even profundity, in the writing. I usually want to think or learn something too. I want to connect and feel moved, to sense the passion and pulse of that living human on the other end. Even if I never comment! Please don’t ask me to separate the trivia from the minutiae: if I read about your capricious kid, your trip Down Mexico Way or your braided body hair, I want to be invited along with you and not merely asked to stand and admire! P.S. You are allowed, nay, encouraged in, your detailed techie-nerdy passions, though. Su embebecimiento es mi embebecimiento.

Now that I have a blog of my own, I’m expecting myself to generate at least the level of excellence I find engaging as a blog-sumer. I need to keep me entertained! It is harder than I thought, too, but not because I bore easily. I figured my understanding and meaning-making would come in the doing, and it has.

Here’s what I like so far about SoulCeramics:
~I am gaining a much clearer and confident artistic voice! I prefer to play with words and ideas, layering many concepts and kinda quirky references into my writing, and, funny thing, I like doing that with my art too. Neat!
~Love, LOVE, LOVE being able to make hyperlinks to some of my obscure observations…..it fosters greater understanding all round. (Thanks to my phenom-son Roger!)
~I am forging a powerful community of readers and commenters who tell me in many specific ways how they enjoy and benefit from my musings. I am meeting like-minded folks, not all artists, a lot of them bloggers about hiking or beer brewing or Silicon Valley in the Early Days.
~I am proud to invite others to my blog…and I had not thought that was the case until today.

But, who do I want to attract here? Can I even describe this micro-demographic? Starters are starters, so here is a first, impromptu attempt:
~Family, friends, colleagues….everyone I already know.
~Ceramic artists, heck, all artists, really. I love cross-pollination.
~Thinkers and readers.
~Lurkers and Laughers (having been one at times.)
~Pranksters and Cosmic Thieves (put these in to wake you up….if you’re still reading… I know this is a long post….)
~Folks who can give me good support and professional connections, whoever and wherever they are now.

So, some things once seen cannot be unseen, and pulling focus has revealed a plot twist. Blogging about blogging has changed my blogging. Good for us!

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