New Jersey Potters Strut Their Stuff

The NJ Potters Guild is an interesting group of potters, numbering over 100 by now. I was there when the Guild started in 1987, a rank amateur, having just bought my first kiln. Although for quite a few years I kept a low profile in meetings, being the quiet type slowly finding my way with clay, this group has been an anchor for me in my professional life. Over the past 26+ years I have been seeing some amazing things from them. Here is a small sampling (alphabetically) of the work of several of my interesting and diverse peers. 

Barbara Fehrs

Iris Vase   Description: Red Earthenware clay, stretched slab construction. Surface treatment: Raised images with terra sigillata. Glazed on interior and exterior. 7"x15"

Lily Pillow Vase   Description:  Red Earthenware Clay, stretched slab construction. Surface treatment: raised image with terra sigillata. Glazed on interior and exterior   8"x8.5"

Barbara's work is available at m.t. burton gallery, Long Beach Island, NJ, and in Monmouth Museum Gift Shop in Lincroft, NJ. Her website is http://www.blackbird-pottery.com/.

DeBorah Goletz

Round Pocketbook Teapot, 6"x6"x3". Handbuilt stoneware clay, cone 6 oxidation glaze. Can be found on DeBorah's website: http://www.ForLoveOfMud.com and also found int he book 500 Teapots Vol. ii by Lark Publlishing: http:www.larkcrafts.com/craft-your-life/introducing-500-teapots-volume-2/

DeBorah designs and makes incredible murals in both ceramic and glass materials. (Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn- that's DeBorah's mural in your subway station!)

Fountain Glass Mosaic Mural, 9'x11'   Water cascades over surface.  Private residence in Austin, TX.   This and other murals can be found at http://www.ForLoveOfMud.com

Norma Messing

Mugs and Bowls, cone 6, oxidation. Porcelain inlaid with colored porcelain, by Norma Messing

Quadruple Bowls, stoneware, cone 6. Great for anything you like- olives, dips, snacks, side dishes, you name it! By Norma Messing

For more of Norma's lively work, you can go to her Flickr site.

Ellen Mulligan

 Two Goat Mugs, porcelain fired to cone 6,  with inlaid decoration, terra sigillata and glaze, by Ellen Mulligan

Possum and Babies, three porcelain mugs, fired to cone 6, with inlaid decoration, terra sigillata and glaze, by Ellen Mulligan

Ellen's beautifully crafted work is also found at Gallery 23 in Blairstown, NJ. She shows with Tomo Potters and Underground Potters in New Jersey. And for those who knit or sew, Ellen makes these porcelain buttons  as well. 

Su Nottingham

Su's Face Jugs are a large, varied family with tons of personality. They seem to name themselves as she makes them. Su makes other pottery as well, utilizing her painting abilities, but today we feature the fellas...

Su says, "The shot glasses shared mighty rolling giggles as they emerged. They never shared their names and I often suspect that even if they had names, they probably wouldn't ever remember them. Had I been certain that they were teetotalers and hold only toothpicks, I might have reconsidered that decision."

Su says, "This is Walter. He introduced himself right after he had eyes to look me in the face. We bonded over the grand mustache he told me he preferred, but he never got around to telling me his whole story. With his ship captain facial growth and his choice of green glazing, perhaps in another life he enjoyed rum... perhaps a little too much. " 

Su's entire family of Face Jugs can be found at  http://facejugsbysun.blogspot.com/. Other work can be found at http://sunottinghampottery.blogspot.com/ and http://www.icehousepottery.org/Icehouse_Pottery/Member_Gallery/Pages/Su.htm

There are many more potters with fine work in our guild. I recommend visiting our Guild site and seeing some more! 

Putting the Potter on a Diet (of Videos)

I'm on a perpetual intellectual diet of pottery videos. Education can go on in depth and indefinitely, via diverse videos from around the world, and old potters learn new tricks with the help of seminars, DVDs and my two free favorite sources, Youtube pottery channels and Ceramic Arts Daily.

The hands are mine, throwing a mug on the kickwheel I've used since 1985.

Simon Leach is perhaps the king of pottery videos. He has over 900 of them on Youtube, as well as a book recently published that happened as an outgrowth of the sheer number of his videos and the size of his viewing crowd. His vids are geared toward beginner to intermediate potters, but there are nuances in his teaching that benefit a longtime potter. For starters, he is super hardworking and has a seriously can-do philosophy. A third generation of the Leach family of influential British potters, he lives in Pennsylvania now and gives workshops in his studio periodically.  I took a workshop with him (when he lived in the Catskills in New York several years ago) just to get the heck out of my basement. He makes good pottery tools you can order off his site, too.

Dan of Ingleton Pottery, Wales, is really great to watch at work. If you're a dyed-in-the-wool American, like me, his Welsh accent adds some flavor to the adventure. The pots have a classic and simultaneously earthy vibe. He throws with so much water it amazes me, but he also throws so quickly that the pots don't absorb so much that they collapse. Some of the forms he throws on the wheel, like the tureen (terrine) in this video, inspire me to push my comfort zone up a notch and try different things. I will never throw as quickly as Dan unless I get myself an electric wheel. Which I might just do soon...

A favorite of mine for his perfectionism is Hsin Chuen Lin, a California potter (160 videos and counting) who throws all sorts of forms meticulously. In contrast to Dan of Ingleton Pottery, Lin uses very little water, reusing the slip created by his throwing, instead, and remains clean as a whistle after throwing an 18" tall vase. Lin expends extra care perfecting the curve of the belly and the angle of the rim, and the results are impressively classic, yet surprisingly lively. I look at his videos and think, "Slow down, self! This is what you can do with focus and patience!" It's a contradiction to what I'm seeing from Dan at Ingleton, but why not? It's all (as I say in rare posts about inspiration, on my other blog) grist for the mill!

I just discovered and subscribed to Mark Peters's channel. The videos that are of him throwing have good music, and instead of talking through the demos he intersperses notes where they would be helpful. The vessels are pretty cool and most of the videos fairly short. (As an aside- He includes Isaac Button videos on his channel; if you haven't seen them, they're wonderful old footage of a master potter single-handedly mass-producing wares in England about 60 years ago.) 

As for Ceramic Arts Daily, you can subscribe for free to receive excerpts of videos currently for sale, from all sorts of really good potters who also tend to be really good communicators. Although I haven't listed any women on my short list of three above, there are many excellent women potters to be found doing demos in pottery-making clips on Ceramic Arts Daily.  It's a great resource

Learning, learning, learning, no matter how old we all get!

Warped, or, Learning Curve Keeps Curving

This jar, which had a nicely fitting lid,

received underglaze decoration in the raw state

and I glazed it with Clear after I bisque-fired it, and fired it to Cone 6 (about 2232 Fahrenheit).

The lid was placed separately on the kiln shelf to fire in the glaze kiln, and it warped as it was heated to maturity. It no longer fit. What a shame! It was, in fact, one of 3 lids that did this. Here is another jar with a lid that warped...

Second warped lid. This one was spoken for, too. Back to the drawing board. I mean, the wheel.

And another one...

Off-round, jar 3. 

The reason the lids warped was probably twofold. One, my clay is a porcelain I only started using in the last year, and these are new lid forms that I may have made slightly off-round on the wheel. Porcelain is a delicate beast. Even if I corrected the lid shape while it was still soft on the wheel, it may have "remembered" (clay does) and reverted to off-round in the firing. This porcelain may "remember" more actively than my previous stoneware clay did.

Or, Two, while firing, the lids may have caught on minuscule rough spots on the much-used kiln shelf as they moved slightly during shrinkage. 

If the problem was Two, about catching on rough spots on the shelf, maybe I could fix it by putting something on the kiln shelf under each lid, to allow it to move in the fire, without catching on anything and thus distorting.

I tried it. I have a small bag of kaowool, a refractory fiber that withstands great heat. So I made four little wads of kaowool fiber and sat the first  jar lid on it, and re-fired it in the next glaze kiln. 

Amazingly, it worked! While the lid has to be put on the jar in a specific way in order to fit properly, it does work. There was a downside, in that some kaowool touched the glaze inside the lid and fired onto it, and I had to grind those spots where it stuck. So I'm thinking maybe I'll try something else as the "gliding agent" next time. And I will use the gliding agent (maybe a fine dusting of dry alumina, and only on the lowest shelf to avoid sifting down to other pots?) under the freshly glazed lids the first time they go into a glaze kiln. Who knows, maybe it will cut down on re-firing, which is a waste of my efforts and electrical resources, and an iffy proposition.

The re-fired lid fits the jar now. Kooky, rehabilitated Kookie Jar! 

Learning, lifelong! 

A Good Ole Chugging Head of Steam

Some jars that were a departure for me to make, made purely for the fun of it. I post them here because this blog entry needs a spot of color...

I was not surprised to read in the survey* that came out in November 2013 that CERF+ (the Craft Emergency Relief Fund) found that "only about 1/4 of full-time (U.S.) craft artists provide over 80% of their family income." In fact, the study confirmed my general conviction that it's the rare American craftsman who brings in enough bucks to really live on. "Craft artists do not rely solely on their craft businesses to support their families" rang true through everything I know from nearly 29 years working with clay, and now I know it to be true of craftspeople working in wood, glass, metal and more. "72% of full-time craft artists net less than $25,000 per year from their art-related income," the study finds. In short, most of us have another job as well, and/or a spouse with an income.

I respect and admire the great effort and ability to make a "go" by the other 28%. I've met some of them. They're amazing. They create their work for years and market it with tons of effort. They also teach in schools and art centers, travel around giving seminars, submit entries to museum shows and national and international competitions regularly, and really, truly give their all to their craft to make enough. They make how-to videos and write articles and books about their craft. They tend to be extraordinary people who are savvy and well-traveled, and I have really enjoyed spending time with those I have met.

Another figure arrived at is that 60% of craftspeople are uninsured should they suffer illness, fire or flood. Whoo! I imagine those do not tend to be the 28%'ers.  

So I have to ask myself, being one of the 72%, why do we do it? Most of us work with a medium that requires equipment we must maintain, often using heavy or unwieldy materials that are hard on the body to shape and complete.

A box of clay weighs 50 lbs. At my studio, we carry in a dozen each time I replenish my materials.

Potters like me have to be super conscious of maintaining body fitness and general health in order to keep going. On a non-physical level, we have a job of constantly educating people about what we do, which  is another sort of endurance run. Yet we keep going with dogged determination.

If you know us, you probably already know why we do it just as well as I do!

Dang, we love it. We love creative work so much we move mountains to make it happen. We really do usually have spouses and friends and partners who help us pay the mortgage and bring home the bread and care for the kids, and who also help carry things and set up things and, if we're lucky, talk about our work to people they know so the word gets around. We know we would be hard-pressed to do our work without them. So we look for small successes and good friends on a regular basis, and find enjoyment in them. The average craftsperson, like me perhaps, can't afford to crash and burn out. We need to chug along on a basic, enduring head of steam. 

(I wasn't sure about that exclamation point). Welcome to my website and gallery. For The Gallery Downstairs, call before visiting to be sure it's a good time.

*(The CERF+ study can be found at http://crafthaus.ning.com/profiles/blogs/cerf-what-3-500-american-craft-artists-are-telling-us)

A Pair of Glazing Shoes

Meet a decidedly unbeautiful pair of glazing shoes or, as one of my nephews said twenty years ago on espying my feet, "nasty gyms." 

Some grousing: There's not a lot I like about glazing pots. Not wearing the HEPA approved mask to weigh out dry, powdered ingredients on a gram scale, and not mixing the resulting recipes with water to make batches of wet glaze in 5-gallon buckets. I don't think I'm alone among potters when I dislike  sieving the heavy stuff from one bucket into another a couple of times to de-lump it. I'm not a fan at all of the inevitable splash-up while making glazes, or the dripping and spattering  and spilling while glazing the pots themselves. I'm going to have to sponge and mop tables and sink and floor and everything everywhere really well to prevent the glazes from drying there, where it gets raised as powder into the air whenever I walk around. It's fine, insidious, health-threatening stuff, the kind that lodges in the lungs and doesn't like to leave. Rolling up the sleeves yet further to get it all cleaned up in a must.

And a reality check: This work keeps me pretty grounded. Not a bad deal. I'm not big into the princess thing.

Back to the shoes: Part of the mess ends up on my nasty gyms. And so my shoes live in the studio,  never getting to pass the mat between studio and gallery, let alone go upstairs into the house.

An un-grouse: I may not like glazing. But that does not preclude having to do it well anyway. I sure like the results when my well-glazed pots come out as hoped! 

I'll post results early next week from the glaze kiln I'm firing now. 

Putting the Work Ethic on a Diet

An Achilles' heel of my work process in the past has been my sloooow work cycle. Habits of daily life for years as a full time parent and part time potter have been pretty firmly entrenched and ARE hard to break. But enough excuses!  I've been cleaning up my act. Old habits. Feh. It comes down to this: with my own venues available now- website and The Gallery Downstairs- and, face it, me not getting any younger, that nose to the grindstone thing is getting realer.

A snippet of to-do list from my blackboard easel. Some of it has been there for a while...

It's a challenge 'losing the laze'. It's like eating a certain way for decades and then finally understanding that a strict diet is necessary  because your metabolism has changed. In the same way, the time that passes between making and firing the work, then glazing it and firing again, is getting blessedly shorter. Trust me, this is a really good thing. I have to work smarter to get it all done, and "down times" away from studio and gallery and website have to be shorter, too. Grandkids to visit or not...

I always wanted a magic wand when I was a child, to get my homework and chores done with a fwhissh and a swooosh, but this is different. True, the creating with fresh clay is the part I like best. But unloading a successful kiln has grown to be as important as making the ware in the early stages. Because if I don't finish it and get it on the shelves and advertise it, it's not going to be sold. And then I won't have the wherewithal to make more.

Have to mix up fresh glaze batches, and glaze these tomorrow. (Colors already on them are underglazes, not topcoats.) Truth- I do not like glazing, but it is the sizzle on the steak.

And the office sure is a mess. New bags need a home and I need to decide to keep or discard the old chicken-wire  mug pyramid... Truth: I do not like organizing, but it keeps my head clear to work in an organized space.

No calling to chat tomorrow. I've got to be a lean, mean, working machine. 

Winter Snow, Kiln Thoughts

Wow, the kiln room is cold. It's January, and the kiln room is an unheated addendum to my basement studio. The pots have been sitting in it chillin' in winter cooldown while I was busy with our children and their sweet, beautiful new son. (How many times have you heard me say "Life intervenes"? I'm sincerely grateful for that, too.) The bisque kiln is ready,  full of thoroughly air-dried pottery. Tomorrow, it's back to business, and the warming of that room with a red hot kiln, firing the ever so patient bowls, vases and mugs. While the kiln will finally climb to over 2200 Fahrenheit, I'll be sure to go that first 200 degrees very, very gradually. I don't want to shock the ware with rapid temperature change, or it will go crackers on me!

When I unload the bisqued ware, I'll be ready to glaze it. I'm making two kinds of glazed ware recently. There's the pottery coated with the earthy, intermingling colors of my regular glaze palette. Then there's the kind that I put lots of color on in the raw state. Once it's been bisqued,  I glaze over the fired-on decoration with clear. It's the difference between this sort of color palette

Dipped, poured, sprayed and sponged glazes

and this.

Underglaze colors brushed and inlaid in the rawware stage, then bisque fired, then covered with clear glaze & fired again to maturity

Variety is interesting!

I love to see the cycle of make-dry-fire-glaze-fire become complete. It's really satisfying to put new work up on my website and on the pedestals of my Gallery Downstairs! But now...to the glaze buckets with the next group of pieces!

Pulling it all Together

In a push to the finish line, everything has come together. The Gallery Downstairs is assembled. Pots are on shelves and pedestals! Here is the sight you see as you come downstairs into the gallery:

Coming downstairs, this is what you see.

When I am at work, looking from my wheel out the French doors into the gallery space (aka The Gallery Downstairs), this is what I see:

Sitting at my wheel, looking through the studio doors into the gallery

I can notice whether I need some tall pieces or some bigger ones for the shelves and pedestals right as I work. It's very helpful in keeping me focused!

By the same token, the decidedly unglamorous space that houses my kiln is also off my workshop, away from the gallery, in a separate little cinder block room. When I load the kiln I think about what is needed to pack the shelves economically. Do I need skinny pots, or short or tiny ones, to fill in the spaces between bigger pots? If I'm not in a big hurry to fire the kiln, (giving the new pots a couple of days to dry) I can go to my wheel and make some things to fill those spaces on its shelves. With the gallery on one side of the clay studio, and the kiln room on the other, I am kept thinking in a far more linear way than I used to. All the phases of work, from raw clay to finished porcelain and stoneware pieces, are essentially within easy range.

Loading the kiln. No glamorous space, this! I've just added some skinny vases to the shelf with big bowls.

The gallery is a space I renovated over the last year and a half, after more than a decade of thinking and making sketches now and again. A new vinyl floor (eminently washable and with the look of wood), white walls and black ceiling, LED lights (good lighting is key), shelves and pedestals represent the bulk of the work that needed to be finished before I got to put pottery on the shelves. The French doors came into being because I needed to keep the dust from the studio out of the gallery as best I could. 

Here is a virtual tour!

View of the gallery from the right of the stairs, while standing at the French doors to the studio area.

View from the left of the stairs. I've blocked the under-area with furniture and pots to keep you from bumping your heads when you visit.

View from behind the stairs, including my photo booth where I take photos for my website.

The wall behind the stairs, with a shelf unit and a pedestal. You can just see a little of my office corner to the right.

Suddenly, with gallery and website in place, the working life has become so much more complete! 

Cookie Jars with Hats and Stems

Last week I made much needed mugs, as my inventory was low. Here are some, drying after just having gotten their handles. They are still raw clay.

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11 mugs

I also made cookie jars, if you want to call them that. I made them with lids like hats, or maybe like a cross between Russian onion domes and the tops of squash on the vine. Here's one:

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Domed cookie jar

These are all unfired. The clay is firm and  not yet dry.

I had a request for a different sort of cookie jar as well. I like the stem lid and jar handles, so I went with them.

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Stemmed cookie jar

I added some underglaze (glaze with high clay content that can be put on unfired clay) in green, let it dry, and waxed over it to prepare for the next step.

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Cookie jar with first underglaze color

I added peach underglaze, waxed over that, let it dry, and went to the next step: cutting through the waxed underglaze to add lines and leaves in another color. These, and additional finish decoration, were in black underglaze. 

Rawware cookie jar with underglaze decoration

It looks almost finished, but it still must dry, get bisque fired, glazed, and glaze fired. I'll post a photo!

Website and Gallery, Ready, Set, Go!

Remaking my space from cluttered basement, to construction zone, to The Gallery Downstairs, was an exercise in patience, planning, and sweat equity. We are now down to just finishing the office corner, that important final bit. Then, I do believe, some partying will be in order!

The third incarnation of my website is freshly launched. My son and I used a few basic design images from the other two sites, but we built everything else from scratch. This template did not require knowledge of code. This time I can manage the site without much help at all, adding and removing items; writing the text; taking photos of my work, editing them (correcting for color and cropping, mostly) and putting them up on the site. It has been pretty fascinating, occasionally frustrating, and now that sales have begun, rewarding.

What a rocky year this was! I did not write anything for this blog during illness and recovery or during renovation of the gallery space or building the website. But I’m happy to start again. Life’s about starting over and over, isn’t it? For me it is.

So I’m back at the wheel and the glaze table, making new pieces. Someone wants mugs, so mugs it is today. I do love to make them. But looking at my new empty gallery pedestals (came yesterday), I am also planning cookie jars, and matzah plates, and maybe, who knows, sculptural objects. Life has possibilities as long as you believe.

 Meanwhile, as I went about unpacking stored pottery and putting it on the shelves in The Gallery Downstairs last week, my best seder plate was nowhere in the boxes. Neither were a couple of other important pieces. Garage? Laundry room? Boiler room? Where did the box get put during the reno? Not anywhere. Was I losing my mind? I went by the last gallery where I had a show. The owner was almost offended; wouldn’t she have called me if I had left a box of my work accidentally? True- she would have. It was my husband who suggested I check a craft show venue from over a year ago. I never dreamed I’d left anything behind when I packed up after that show, but sure enough, they responded to my voice mail, saying they'd put the box in a closet after the show, assuming I'd be back this year. As the owner of that other gallery might have said, shouldn’t they have called me right away to come get it? I can't make everyone be a mensch, but wouldn't it be nice..? Looking on the bright side, I guess I’m supposed to go there again, for reasons unknown to me. I’ll cling to that thought, even as I drive an hour each way...

Welcome back, readers! Ready, set, GO!

Off the Drawing Board… Executing Those Stored-Up Ideas

I took an unexpected break for ill health, including surgery and gradual recovery, between June and October. Once I was happily (and most gratefully) well, I got back to the work I love. So…if you’ve missed my blog entries (and thank you if you have!) you now know why. 

It’s a fact in the life of a studio potter: In the absence of mechanized production, this is a slow process. It is utterly reliant on the ability of one person to be there to plan, explore, create and just plain work steadily. A break in the process can turn the pace to g..l..a..c..i..a..l...

Here are some of the new vessels I partly planned while I was out of commission, and partly did spontaneously as I worked. Liking the porcelain a whole lot! It throws like a dream, and lets me make what’s in my head and on my sketchpad without much fuss.

Glaze Tests Unloaded From the Kiln

New: Porcelain 213 from Standard Clay, Cone 6 white clay ("Cone" is essentially a temperature indicator; Cone 6 means the kiln will heat to about 2235 degrees F to bring this particular clay to maturity)

Old: Cone 6 stoneware glazes I've been using for a long time

Hypothesis: These stoneware glazes will work just as well on the porcelain as they did on the stoneware, since the temp is the same, except run a little more and be brighter on the denser, whiter porcelain body. Unknown: whether the glazes will craze (form little crackles) on the porcelain where they didn't on the stoneware; opposite might also be true- where the glazes crazed on the stoneware, they might not on porcelain.

Conclusion: Very slightly more running where two glazes meet. Colors brighter as expected. (Time to discard the Licorice Black which doesn't like the porcelain.) Underglazes have great potential for added color under Elaine's Clear. So far Elaine's looks like it isn't crazing on the porcelain...it did on the stoneware.
Gut reaction: Good!

an array of color

Dragon Lady was still at 255 degrees Fahrenheit when I unloaded the ware. Hence the gloves.
Except for the bigger blue bowl, these test pieces were all thrown from 1-lb to 1-lb 2-oz balls of clay. I gave the pots free-and-easy ridges and bulges for the glazes to find their way into higher and lower areas. Randy's Red got busy in the ups and downs and ins and outs of this bowl:

Randy's Red went all groovy

and Price Green had a nice time with this one:

Price Green with Randy's Red at the rim

Chinese Blue-Green and Nutmeg were quiet and soft on this mug:

Come upstairs to my kitchen, you muggy thang

I played with Shelley's Blue speckles (used a mouth atomizer) on the Chinese Blue-Green bowl. Shelley's Blue, as you can see from the topmost photo in this post, will knock your eyes out because the cobalt blue is so strong. Some love it, but I prefer just a touch of Shelley's instead. This looks like old-time spatterware:

Chinese Blue-Green with speckles of Shelley's Blue

This is the first of a group of tiny hand pleasers that I've glazed, with Randy's Red. Hello, hedgehog.

Little Hedgehog

I had 10 stripey test pots, which were cylinders thrown without bottoms and brushed with stripes of underglaze in various colors. Bright commercial underglazes used to be able to stand only several hundred degrees of temperature below Cone 6, but they are now being formulated to hold up to higher temps than they used to. Two that were especially good were a strong red and a strong orange that are true and glossy under the clear glaze. Several more, like chartreuse and salmon, stayed very slightly matte but I think they will be workable.

The purpose of these underglazes is to add otherwise hard-to-get bright colors to my palette. I am going to experiment with underglaze designs next, using paper templates and freehand brushwork. Stay tuned!

It's already been a very interesting morning in the studio.

Poetry Pottery

Rhythm

Purring like a cat, the heat pipes

gurgle on-and-off rhythm, a

breathing rhythm overhead

rumbling like a living pet

and music's on in the studio

while clay shavings peel away beneath

my trimming tool like

skin off an apple, and

the bottom of a cereal bowl

is shaped and smoothed.

Phone rings and I don't answer.

Rather hear the purring

of the pipes, my potter's wheel turning,

these blues thumping and wailing

than break it with nowhere chatter.

I love this dusty vault

this cluttered order

these spinning bowls one then

another. Conversations

between the senses.

(copyright Mimi Stadler 2012)

Waxing and Waiting...or, Little Pot Feet

The last thing I did in the studio was this past Tuesday...Just half an hour spent, to get these porcelain test-pot feet brushed with a thin coat of wax in preparation for glazing. That's all. This time of year, I'm all about prepping for a holiday instead. I'll be able to get back to the pots in a little over a week from now. ...They're so patient. Much more patient than I am!

1-lb porcelain test pieces

A Seder Plate

Busy cooking for the Passover holiday! There's nothing like a clean house and wonderful meals as the accompaniment to spiritual events.

Double-rim Seder plate, underglaze brushwork, cone 6 white stoneware, oxidation fired, 2012.

Here is a Seder plate of recent vintage. If you have patience to wait a whole 30 seconds (slow load) it's there in the Gallery>Judaica section of my website along with others, at www.mimistadlerpottery.com. (If you want this one, or any other works from my site, email me; my site is due for an overhaul.)

Working on a new plate design for next year, because ideas have to stay fresh to make the work most fulfilling!

Have a wonderful, spiritual season.

Roadside Seating

Taking a walk with my husband this evening, we came upon this little item, set out by the roadside for tomorrow's trash pickup.

roadside find!

It was in perfect shape. I rang the doorbell, told the woman of the house that I could use it in my studio, and confirmed it was free for the taking. It had lived in her attic, she said. She had sat on it maybe once.

H carried it home for me. It inspired him to tease about how he's lugged rocks for me (in my own defense, gorgeous rocks) down a few mountain hikes over the years, and boxes and boxes of clay down the steps to my studio.

It's an inch or so taller than I like- the cheapazoid, beat up wood ones I've had for a couple of decades are the perfect height- but this one's better looking. H might tease me about hauling home random stuff I find, but this one is really is more long-term useful than, say, the "texture objects" I bring home like tree bark and woven fabric and pieces of corrugated cardboard that get used only once or twice. (I tossed out four big bags full of "texture stuff" during the studio remodel.) This one promises to be useful for a long time.

Where Does the Form Come From?

Where in the potter- in the artist- is the source for what forms on the wheel?
I am not sure.

In the last 5 days of potting, I have been throwing 1-lb. balls of a clay that is new to me.

kitchen scale- indispensible

(As always, click on any picture for a bigger view.)

The clay is Standard 213, a cone-6 porcelain. I have only tried porcelain a couple of times. Yes, porcelain is clay like stoneware and earthenware are clay, but it is made up of finer particles, and it will fire white. I'm surprised to find that it works great on the wheel. It stands up to throwing and behaves as asked. It doesn't live up to its reputation for throwing like soft cream cheese.

I am going to experiment with porcelain for weeks. I think the source of the forms is going to have to be play!

Before I started with 213, the wheel and tools and boards had to be washed in preparation. to prevent the porcelain being contaminated with chips and bits of darker clay.

cleanest my kickwheel has been in ages

At first the forms were focused on an idea I had sketched a couple of months ago. The pieces would have a raised foot and an irregular edge. I started with crazy little cut-edged saucers that each stand up on a 2" foot.  (Will  make cups to go on these.)

top view of tall saucers

I wanted to run with this general idea. So I made some bowls with funky feet, with the feet cut as the rims on the tall saucers were cut.

I had an idea- but the result isn't graceful

The feet were funky, but the bowls were clunky.

So I went to 1-lb. 2-oz. balls of clay. I threw a more flaring sort of bowl, indented the sides, and funked up the feet. This clay dries FAST and can be altered and worked very soon after throwing.

So far, lots of fun.
But the next vases were a bit formal, because I didn't know what to make next and they are a sort of fall-back form.

They do actually stand upright. The camera distorts the angle.

I envisioned a row of these with daisies in them all down the center of a long table. I had more balls of clay to throw and I did plan to make more of these. (I still will.) But the clay was being so responsive that I let the forms loosen themselves up, and made mugs instead. (Handles, tomorrow.)

The first one is on the right. After that I decided to just loosen up.

Then I thought, I will just "feel" the clay, and make my favorite and most natural form, bowls. Though the balls of clay to start with are small and won't lend the forms much size, if I stretch the clay to its maximum...let's see what happens.

I closed my eyes and threw these blind. I knew I wanted lightness and roundness, and the rest was open. I sensed them. I just wanted to listen to Tedeschi and Trucks on the CD player and feel the clay move itself in my hands. When I opened my eyes, I gave each one just one more spiral in my hands, letting it find its own path. I didn't care at all about symmetry. These are the freest bowls I've thrown since maybe ever. I may or may not keep the one on the right- but it doesn't matter! They are more than bowls, they are experience combined with intuition and experimentation.

The source of these is certainly inside somewhere. I'm not going to analyze it, though. Not till I've made a lot of pots from this beautiful clay.

A Poem in Studio Potter Archives Online

Yesterday there was a meeting of poetry and pottery in the pages of Studio Potter Archives Online. I'm happy to be one of the writer-potters!

http://www.studiopotterarchiveblog.com/spablog/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Studio%20Potter%20Archive%

www.studiopotterarchiveblog.com

Momentum. Is. Hard. To. Get.

In the past week, I glazed pots that were made a couple of months ago and bisqued* three weeks ago.

This lapse in time between each phase of 1) Making the pots, 2) Letting them dry, 3) Bisque-firing them, before finally 4) Glazing them...

Disconnects me from them. It is ceramicus interruptus.

What we need here is momentum!

Here are unfired "oatmeal bowls"- remember these from a recent post?- as they were drying.

Before the bisque fire.

Below are those bowls, as well as some creamers (negative space experiments you also may recall), plus a few pots made by a visiting family (who had a Sunday activity in my studio). These pots have been bisque fired, heated to about 1830 F.

Bisqueware: dry, rough-textured and plain ol' nekkit.

Here are some of the pots, glazed and ready to load in the kiln for the glaze fire.

Bisqued pottery with raw glaze on it.

Lady Dragon, my kiln, heated up to around 2230 F over the course of 10.5 hours, and the dull raw glazes melted, fused and changed almost magically into colorful finishes. The glaze-fired pottery- now that I like.

Some glaze-fired pots, (Cone 6 stoneware)

 The visiting family made some nice things (below)!

Nice job, J family!

* (FAQ: Bisquing is where the pots are heated in the kiln, reaching a point of hardness where the pottery is still absorbent, but will no longer dissolve in liquid.)

I (Heart) Curtis Benzle's Message

Tuesday and Wednesday I went to a workshop taught by porcelain artist Curtis Benzle (BENZ-lee) at the 92^nd St Y in NYC.

Right now I hold in my hand a little porcelain heart that Curtis made and signed.

He gave each of the 17 of us a small velvet drawstring pouch at close of the last day. A surprise! I have been to workshops led by other wonderful potter-teachers, and always come away with the gift of their teaching, but I have never come away with a physical gift from teacher to students to thank us for our contribution to the experience. We found a beautiful nerikomi-patterned heart inside each pouch, with a small card that read “Follow your heart.”

Half a second later, I realized that sticking out of the side of the heart was a tiny scroll of paper. It was like a suddenly-realized secret, -a gift experience with still further discovery! Curtis had stuck a note into a passage bored through each heart. Mine read, "Make something wonderful-" and was signed.  Oh, the possibility of wonder! It is always there when you work with your hands, head and heart in unison.

 Curtis said to us, "Do not turn it into a necklace! It is not a necklace!" and told us to note that in the velvet pouch was another, blank bit of paper, so that we can write a note of our own if we desire, and give it to someone else in turn. I might.

The workshop was mostly about nerikomi. Nerikomi is a technique that uses colored clays to create patterns. The colored clay patterns are formed in rolls or loaves, that you then slice to reveal the same pattern throughout. 

A very simple, non-clay analogy to explain nerikomi is pinwheel cookies. 

image from Allrecipes.com

You make basic brown-and-white pinwheel cookies from two rolled-out sheets of dough, one plain and one chocolate. You stack the sheet of chocolate dough on top of the sheet of plain dough, roll up the stacked sheets of dough into a log, and then you can slice many identical cookies one by one off the end of the log, lay them on a cookie sheet and bake them. 

 If, before you started, you were to add food colors to the dough, you could make much more colorful cookies. 

image from cakewiz.com

Now- stay with me!- if you were to take those patterned cookie dough slices you've just sliced off the roll of raw dough, and placed them together touching end to end on one cookie sheet, you could make a whole patterned cookie–slab full of colorful circles. If you had laid out some chocolate-and-white and some colorful ones in a design, your pattern would be that much more complex.

Well, you can do the same with clay and call it, as the Japanese do, "nerikomi".  You can be more inventive, and press the colored and patterned clay slab into a form to support it (say, a bowl form), and fire it in the kiln to get a  complexly patterned and vividly colored vessel. And you can get ever so complicated with the design!

In glass and in polymer clay, this technique is called millefiori. This pendant is found on the Wikipedia page for millefiori: 

It is just one slice of patterned glass off a glass cane, but the cane itself was made from many smaller canes that were fused together. (This is a perfect example, because millefiori means "a thousand flowers" in Italian.)  

This much more complicated vase is in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London: 

You can see many millefiori slices that have been fused together very beautifully at high heat. I don't know how this piece was made exactly, but I feel very safe in assuming it was a combination of the latest molds, heat source and hand tools available to glassblowers in 1872. Forming this piece would still be an excellent technical coup for a glass artist today.

Curtis Benzle's work, originally influenced by the color and pattern qualities available in glass, is made with pure porcelain instead, infused with colors and utilizing nerikomi and other techniques in a very beautiful way quite personal to Curtis.

You can see Curtis’s work and some of his influences in this terrific short video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9QLk2m4qzY

As for me- I have to think about how to incorporate not just the methods but especially the feeling behind this technique into my own work. I have been glazing pots for the last 28 years or so, and I still don't much like that part of the job. And I am not satisfied with the glaze results I usually get in my electric kiln. But I am looking ahead as ever, embarking on a long-planned course of spraying my glazes (in layers) for the first time in order to achieve more surface complexity. And now, I have learned the rudiments of something special from a master; how to incorporate color right into my clay vessels- and how to consider wonder while doing so. Who knows where it will lead? An artisan’s life is very interesting. The years to live and work are short, but the ideas are long.

"Make something wonderful!"