Studio Journal

Mumble and Schmuck

 

MumbleandSchmuck_ GO115_2013

 

Let’s take Schmuck first. It’s not what you think. That’s Yiddish for fool, jackass, prick or worse.

In German the word means “jewels or ornamentation.”  And in graphic design it relates to layout, sometimes with letters, sometimes with geometric lines and circles.

It had its heyday in the  Modernist and Constructivist eras of the early 20th century, but it’s a delightful new term to me.

And, yes, schmuck is part of the etymology for the term “family jewels.”

As for Mumble, that’s my own graphic design term, as far as I know. One I developed to describe what I actually do when I am applying lettered ornamentation.

Both terms have a useful place in decorating my ceramic faux metal cans, pitchers, fillers, pails and whatever’s-to-come-from-this-creative-experiment.

Up until now, I have generally been mashing-up the layout, colors and script of old product brands onto my ceramic surfaces. It isn’t gospel copy, but rather the impressionist essence, I seek. Therefore, plenty of times I find myself “suggesting” a product’s features and benefits.

When I am “Greeking it in” – another highly technical phrase for suggesting content or layout, but not actually producing it – I am hearing in my mind the essence of what it must be saying. My brush moves along with my thoughts, mentally “selling it'”to the consumer.

At times I suspect I feel this with as much conviction as the original copywriter might have experienced; I’m just not making it readable. I’m mumbling, and it looks like Greek to all who cannot read it, but it contains real thoughts and real words. Hence: Mumble Script.

Of late, my product-defining brush is finding its own brands to sell. They might be ironic and readable,  but the hyperbole-laden and intentionally unreadable body copy remains.

~Liz Crain, a writer and painter/decorator who mumbles on purpose.

 

 

 

 

 

Share this:

You’re Better With Better Tools, Maybe.

I just spent a small fortune on some clay carving tools. They are stainless steel, nicely shaped, and noticeably weighty, so maybe their price per pound compared to garden variety aluminum/wood tools is the same, or even cheaper. I don’t know. I don’t care.

Sexy-Expensive-Designer tools are a relatively new thing in the clay world – new as in this millennium, really –  because clay is such a primal activity and often just as easily managed with your hands and maybe a stick and a shell. I have a couple of older books devoted to the ancient practice of making your own brushes and tools. I’ve done this.  I think as a group, clay folks are pretty opportunistic and will have fun making a tool out of pert near any ol’ thang.

OK,  now I’m getting silly. Yet I do mean to contrast the down and often dirty home-grown self-sufficiencies of much ceramic work – especially functional pottery –  with an ever-growing arena of High Artistry featuring the precious piece – now considered sculptural – on a well-lit pedestal in a hushed gallery. Could this paradigm-shift extend to the tools as well?

As usual, I sit somewhere in between and am not above cutting an expired plastic card into a shape I need to texture my clay. Yet  I am equally amenable to paying $30 for four sassy-orange, very nicely engineered and name-branded cutting tools.

And why is that? To my mind, tactility rules, not aesthetics. How does it feel? Does the extra heft improve my performance? Do the insanely precise loop shapes cause me to take more care when I make a cut? Do I clean these tools more often because I respect not only their excellence but their cost? Maybe that’s all true, and yet…

Am I buying mystique? What or who is the maker/seller Xiem?  I know it’s a clay center/gallery in Pasadena where a few years back I was rejected for a show by the mythic Paulus Berensohn. I figure he gazed upon the slides – yes, slides! – of my pathetically unevolved work for a few seconds, and then sent the loveliest personally hand-written rejection email an artist is ever likely to receive. Other than that, Xiem has a certain panache and stretches like a heirloom sunflower towards a stylistic sensibility I’m not quite sure I fully share,  having one foot as I do on the opposite bank of that crik,  being a homemade tool-maker and all.

Am I buying Xiem’s tools because I’m a sorry-ass toady wannabe?  Nope. At least I’m sure of that! I bought these tools because they felt right in my hands.  I hoisted their remarkable heft, noticed the eight cutting shapes and their sharp beveled ribbon edges and knew I held excellence. Excellence I could extend into my work. These babies are just gonna HUG the road!

I have a lot of tools, but like my first Cabrillo SummerArts instructor, Una Mjurka, I return to the ones that do their jobs simply and well. Una had reduced her tools to mainly an all-purpose wooden stick and a favorite brush. She’s good like that. I’m almost there. It’s a practice, sort of a ceramics studio version of the Zero Waste Home. I have my personal stick and brush, and I know purpose and supreme function wherever I encounter it. Why bother with gizmos?

So the Better Tools Search comes with a caveat: what’s better for you? What do you need to make? What will facilitate that?  What do you need to jettison? Will this new tool facilitate your crafting more than any tool you already possess? How will you justify the cost,  of either your time spent making it, or your cash spent buying it? I can both recommend and un-recommend these Orange Beauties. Depends on what you want. But if you ever get to test-drive one, do it!

~Liz Crain, a ceramic artist who  – up til now –  swore her Amaco T-9 Sgraffito Tool was the supreme instrument.

Share this:

Facing the Faces: The Reality of Real Art, Real People

 

There’s a creative pause in ceramic art-making I call “The Bisque Freeze,” and I’d had a nearly two year case of it after beginning the portrait sculpture pictured above. Any manner of hesitancies can feed The Freeze, but they all are sourced from the fear of farking up your precious work with your rotten and unsure decorating choices once you’ve gotten it safely through that first bisque firing.

 

This piece was not only the biggest thing I’d made to date, she was both fearsome and delicate. Here’s a side-view showing the thin porous ponytail in the back. Lots could go wrong, but it can with any piece. With this it would just go wrong in a bigger way. I spent those paused years making other things and occasionally wondering how and when I would get back to the baby elephant in the clay studio.

While I had learned the Big Head construction methods in a two-week summer workshop with the energetic, affable and very clear instructor, Stan Welsh, he understandably did not cover finishing techniques, as the works needed at least a month to dry afterwards. Two summers later, under the surefooted guidance of the energetic, affable and very clear instructor, Tiffany Schmierer, I learned the underglaze wash and dry-brush methods that matched what I’d had in mind for the piece all along. Or more to the point, I learned about being bold and fearless once again in the face of The Bisque Freeze.

 

 

 

 

 

Two related asides before I continue this saga.

First, a lot of my ceramic faces are caricature portraits. To me that means that something about the very real countenance of a very real person catches me up and I find myself portraying that response in a face jug (a la my Local Talker jugs) or a portrait bust. Usually I work from a photo and only have the one view, but that’s enough and I am free to interpret the other attributes. Sometimes I go Classical Greek style and emphasize the ideal, but mostly I go Roman Republic realism,  showing the gritty detail to reveal the unique character.

In that summer workshop with Stan I made two big heads, one a rather repulsive stuffed-cheeks hot dog contest eating champ, nearly ready to spew. The other, this compelling wistful anorexic woman,  proudly sitting for her formal portrait because she was getting healthier. I don’t recall noticing the name or other info with the photo I found back then, just this: “She’s in recovery and gaining weight.” It’s the reason I could bear to explore her pained, skeletal features, because she was hopeful and proudly representin’!

Second,  when I finally felt I could approach adding color to this Major Work, I stood it on a wooden table outside, hosed it off well, let it dry in the sun and covered it with thin washes of color, happily building up the surface information and modulating areas for values, tones and interest, deep in relationship with the persona.  I was lost to my work, unaware of the handyman who’d been around a few days helping to dig a trench for new gas and drainage lines down the whole side of our house.  Later that evening my hubby reported that after seeing my piece and watching me work,  he had exclaimed with a bit of incredulousness, “Geez, when you told me your wife was an artist, I didn’t think you meant a real one!”

I’ve chuckled over that unvarnished Emperor-has-no-clothes honesty ever after; without question the finest validation out there. It’s about being deeply, undeniably real in all ways possible, even when real is still a completely squidgy interpretation. Me. The Subject. The Art. The Viewer. Real as real can be. So real, even the handyman acknowledges it.

Even though I’ve drifted away from making faces and figures for the time being, I still heartily enjoy them. Recently I’ve rekindled the dialogues with my portrait work as I gathered my collection of Ugly Jugs, Skull Jugs, Character Face Jugs, Local Talkers and Portrait Busts in order to display them from now until the end of April, 2013 at the Scotts Valley Library in an Art at the Library group exhibit entitled – of course – “About Face.”

As part of the renewed conversations with these pieces, I wondered if after 5+ years I could re-locate the source photo for “She’s in Recovery” and went googling around. It’s all so much easier now and I not only found it many times over, I learned her name, I learned her fate.  Her name was Kate Chilver and she lost her 19-year battle with anorexia at the age of 31 in 2011.

~Liz Crain, who is profoundly glad she made this portrait bust of Kate Chilver, who’s name and struggle are fondly and respectfully acknowledged.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Share this:

Love the Slab You’re With, Part Two

 

You’ve got a batch of wet colorful, marble-y, strata-fied  slabs now,  as a result of trying the underglaze decorating methods outlined in the previous thickly illustrated post, which is naturally titled LTSYW, Part One. What oh what can you do with them?

I have a hunch we have all  just begun to see what. For that reason, I plan to relate the paltry few things I’ve done and noticed when I tried, and leave it at that. There really aren’t any appropriate Do This and Then That instructions from here on out, because the technique is wide open to expression and experimentation.  I’ll throw down a few dots, but you get to connect them any way you discover. Lana Wilson – the source of this technique for me –  says the same in her handouts: “Play.” “Experiment.” “Play. Play. Play.” I, too, learned by playing and wish that fun for you!

 

 

Before I leave my dotted breadcrumb trail,  let’s take up what I think Lana is getting at when she calls herself “The Queen of Low Standards.” First, it infuses a workshop atmosphere with relaxation, fun and the gifts of imperfection. She says it more than once in the course of several hours, for tension-releasing laughs, for instant forgiveness when a demo goes awry, for purposely scrambling off the pedestal of know-it-all ceramic expert which some might have placed her on. Yet Lana is clearly conversant in the technicalities and artistry of her field. Her fingers move deftly and with intelligence. She’s as comfortable presenting a full day of hows and whys and stories to match as she is forgetting the specific word for a glaze fault. And if the audience can’t supply it, she pops it out sometime later. A clear pro at work.

 

 

 

 

 

There is no Fourth Wall with Lana, though; you’re in the soup with her.  Pretzel logic. Crazy Wisdom. Magnetic PERMISSION. She actually handed out strips of paper with the word “Permission” on them and invited us to write down what we wanted permission to do or think or try. And voila!, we had the Permission Slip for it. The Queen is benevolent! But about those Low Standards? My guess is that keeping the way into the work accessible unlocks the largest amount of joyful possibilities and provides access for the diverse pantheon of Muses, not just those of Ultimate and Objective Perfection (if they even exist beyond our timidity!) Once we’ve allowed ourselves to play in that way, THEN we can begin to sharpen our skills, get technical, learn from our mistakes, become conversant with how this method works for us.

Back to those slabs!  Here are some things I’ve learned about them when I played around.

Good to Know:

There are all kinds of ways to amend  your patterns while the clay is still flat.

You can add more color if you like, probably not too wetly.

You could stamp light textures, carve lines, or roll thin scraps on top to emphasize areas.

You could even carve out “worms,” turn them over,  switch them around (on both sides!) (Lana’s fun idea; she calls them fossils.)

Rolling your added textures and additions smoothe is a good idea. It sets the designs and creates a unified surface.

There is range of optimum workability when the clay still bends without cracking: pretty darn wet to “mozzarella” hard.

Thinner rolling = more stretching/fading/abrading of colors.

Patterns or templates for your planned creations might be a good idea. Lana used a tile cutter with an ejector!

It’s good to work rather deftly – ala Lana, with a light-handed clarity of purpose. What do you like to do with slabs? Try it!

Simple joins, overlapped or beveled, pressed and perhaps lightly paddled are good. Add water before attaching, if you’re so moved, but that’s it.

You might need to support your creations’ seams and walls until they set up.

Excess handling, too much water or tooling, fussy appendages: all impact the still-damp patterned underglaze and can smear, erase and create an overworked feel.

You can paint bare cut edges, say at the top of a cylinder, with a line of underglaze to complement your marbling. Lana showed us black edges which are snappy.

Alternatively, make some very thin strips and create a rolled edge. Attach with water, press well.

Dry slowly, bisque slowly, just ’cause.

You can amend with more color and washes after bisque, when the first colors are set.

Clear glaze, especially a transparent matte, looks great.

I’ve also used colored pencils, Pitt ink pens and clear acrylic satin medium to seal non-functional and purely decorative work.

All your remaining wet clay scraps have interesting new possibilities too.

Enjoy this process and make fun stuff! Happy New!

 

~Liz Crain, who’s found a jazzy new way to play with clay –  and since her word for 2013 is “Synthesis” is excited to see what comes about when she incorporates it into the vintage faux metal work she’s done for several years now.

 

 

 

 

Share this:

Love the Slab You’re With, Part One

 

Sometimes an activity you encounter meshes with your essence and you melt away into it. A friend explains the basic golf swing and just like that you’re sailing the ball 350 yards at the driving range and they’re saying, “It’s not supposed to be that easy!”

You find your bliss in the swimming pool, the computer lab, a knitting circle: all wonderful fascinations.  You sync with what you already know and scaffold from there, unstoppable in your  heedless avidity.

It’s precisely what happened after I spent a Saturday early last November at the Richmond Art Center with ceramics maven Lana Wilson as she demonstrated her method for coloring and collaging clay slabs and then making stuff out of them. It’s fresh and fabulous and lets the clay be clay and me be me.

When I returned to my studio and fooled around, working from my woefully unreadable notes and her handout, I was simultaneously back in Ceramics 101 trying to wrangle wet-out-of-the-bag clay and was also thrust forward into the freshest color and design possibilities I’ve seen in years. It was unadulterated infatuation and I could not stop my hands.

A bag and a half of clay later (37.5 pounds!) I’ve come up for air. Wow.

This method is clearly about staying in the moment. Loosely intentional. Intentionally loose. Don’t be fooled, though, it’s not necessarily easy. Even though Lana calls herself “The Queen of Low Standards, ” I will explain why that’s a canny ruse in the Part Two post. In the meanwhile, Part One will cover the slab-making.

The Black Side

Take a bag of clay  -a white clay is used here, but there are no rules, you get to decide what you like – slice off thick 1″ or so slabs from the long end and throw them down on your working surface sideways to stretch and thin them,  some or a lot, you decide. Or alternatively roll them out on the slab roller. Paint with 1-3 coats Black underglaze,  letting each coat get ‘unshiny’ before applying the next and brushing in alternating directions for evenness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I need to tell you black is not required! Feel free to use any color(s) you enjoy!

 

When you’ve got enough coats and they’ve nearly dried, try a bunch o’ textures. You know what you like. My favorite from this array was the squares/alligator roller tool (a tenderizer?) but all of them were pretty wonderful, because they retain their character when they’re manipulated, which is coming.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Colors Side

When your Black Side has set up enough, (or even not…..random markings and unmarkings are most welcome) flip everything over and pick out some underglaze colors to play with.  One to three  coats again, maybe not all the same, depending on what you think you might do for patterning in the next step. You don’t necessarily need to know anything about where you’re headed, though. Adventures for everyone!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I want to speak to the Controlling Ceramics Perfectionists in the audience – and you KNOW who you are: this process is worth the price of being messy and unclear. (What you might think is evidence of Low Standards is actually a wicked plan for unexpected beauty.) There is no possible way to make a mistake here, so own it: goofs are in your head. You are officially freed from your need to get it right because there is no wrong. OK, end of message.

Now, add more colors, thickly or thinly, with or without patterns. Know that they will change mightily as you work, so you don’t need to commit or invest or even pay exact attention. On this slab, I was playing with round, target-like circles and complementary colors, that’s all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can also do more texturing and carving as in the black side….I just didn’t here.

 

 

Tossing and Rolling

Yes, this is the same slab as the last photo! Gone are my precious quasi-intentional markings.  I threw it out more on the work surface, and it got abraded and messy, even a little more smeary than I expected. (My next batch of slabs was thinner to start with….so there was less smearing as I thinned them. Good to know.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You also can use a rolling pin to thin your slab. Lana  used newspaper between roller and slab. I did a little and then did not. The transfer of colors with both the newspaper and roller is interesting. See what you come up with. You still are doing great.

 

Cutting and Recombining

Now it’s time to cut the slab apart and  flip some of the pieces. Cut any old way…this just happens to be pizza wedges, because I’m a radial symmetry aficionado. Try stripes or puzzle pieces. Flip, overlap and roll together again, creating an entirely new collaged slab. The clay itself is still floppy wet and takes to this technique without any resistance. If it got a little dry, just brush each seam with clear water  before rolling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The parallel scratched looking area on the lower left is from inadvertent markings from my smaller roller and/or handling. if you don’t want that, roll lightly.

 

Cutting and Recombining Again

You can stay with the above pizza-like slab, but you are also free to cut/tear and recombine at will. And it only gets better in my book. Here is a variant, including  thin twists rolled flat at a few of the seam areas. It makes the slab absolutely unique each and every time.

 

 

This is the first post about this process. Look for a second post on how to form work from these amazing slabs sometime after the new year!

~Liz Crain, who was as surprised as she could be about this new ceramics method and the freedom it afforded her to reinvent herself and her ceramic process, once again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Share this:

Six Ways to Hate Mugs and One Way to Love Them

Mugs have tons of specifics to execute in order to do their job well:  handle, rim, foot,  balance, containment, usability. Beauty.

But mugs get no respect.  Teapots – especially if they don’t actually work – currently have the corner on cache’  and collectability. Even the simple teabowl can garner more acclaim.

Yup. Mugs have to fight for every ounce of approbation they receive and I know why.

Let me hate on mugs in six ways and then tell you about my new line of work: mugs.

Six Bad Things About Mugs

1. Every coffee shop,  roadside attraction and public radio fundraiser has custom logo mugs. Slip-cast  decaled restaurant-ware Made in China, they’re common as a cold.

2. Every local Potter’s Sale has mugs. They’re a handmade staple, but often poorly crafted: too heavy and lumpy,  with ungrippable handles, wobbly feet,  lip-slicing top rims, poorly-applied glazes. It’s amazing to me how bad of a mug even a fairly competent potter will offer for sale. Crude is not wabi sabi!

3. They cost too much. If you buy a $5 handmade mug and it underperforms, well you maybe got exactly what you bought. But there are $50 and up art mugs out there. They begin to approach the unusable teapots and ineffable teabowls, but still make a bid for your daily use. What’s it gonna be? Can you justify your love?

4. If you use them, they will break. If you feel too precious about something, the OOh OOh Tremors will kick in and you will break it sooner rather than later. Or you will be aware of the Tremors, do an end run and use the mug only for posies or, worse, pencils.  I’ve tried gluing a broken handle back on and it broke again, mid-sip, spilling hot coffee in my lap and on my keyboard.

5. They cost too much for the artist to make. Mugs take a lot of fiddling to get right. More than one expert ceramics artist has told me they just can’t recoup their time costs on mugs. They’d have to price them beyond a comfortable range, so why do them at all?  Vases afford respectable returns. Even pitchers or platters.  Wallhangings.

But everyone wants mugs. Even me….witness my Open Studios Mug Tour last October.

6. I don’t really have a sixth point, I just like six as a number. If it did, it would be about the utter irrationality of loving mugs anyway, because it’s a good lead-in to the next section.

 

How I Found A Way to Love Mug-Making

Over the years, I’ve been asked and asked and asked to make mugs. I’ve come to think it’s because mugs are understandable and useful. It’s a way to have a little something from the artist.  Giftable. Defensible. Enjoyable. Nothing wrong with all of that!

Mugs with faces (Tobys) were logical and appealing for my requesters at one time, but not to me, so I stuck with the Ugly and Character Face Jugs.

And now I get requests for miniature gas and oil can mugs, paint can mugs, tobacco can mugs, beer and soda can mugs, fruit and veggie can mugs. As nifty as these ideas might seem,  so far I have resisted. I only can say I’m more interested in the pure form of the can than the can-as-mug form. And I’m well aware of all the extra fiddling and the woeful reports on cost-effectiveness. Mugs have been a no-go artistically and business-wise for me for a long time. I had no inclination to circumvent the obvious.

Until now.  I promise to post a How-to pictorial soon, as I’ve encountered a mesmerizing layering process.  But all I want to do presently is lift the curtain on a new way of being with the clay that begs me to make nothing but freshly formed,  excellently crafted and sassy mugs. Very little fussing, great usability, lots of artiness. Just barely in my control yet still very functional and I like that.

And for all the fun, they’re even cost effective enough to keep the prices down. Everyone wins!

So, meet the new Strata Mugs! Here are three, still experimental, not even bisque-fired, but all they will need after bisquing is a translucent matte glaze and off they will go to the cupboards of American Ceramic Mug Lovers everywhere.

 

 

~Liz Crain, who’s new ceramic process lets her synthesize form and function, process and product, pure play and productivity.

The top photo is of the endearingly local coffeehouse, The Ugly Mug, in Soquel, who gladly takes ANY donated mugs and uses them!

 


 

Share this: