Was I There?

I wish we could go to Lego Land.....

It's a beautiful dream, man.  The only kind of dream that a six-year-old boy can articulate as he works in a pottery studio trying to literally make lego bricks out of clay.  

He made the bricks.  He patterned them with real lego bricks.  And then he stuck them together to make a robot, which would have fallen apart had I not introduced the ceramic term "crosshatching."  He just looked at me with hooded eyes and gave a big sigh.

And yet....it was he, the dreamer of all things lego, who gave me the idea to not only print in the clay with the connecting side of the bricks, but to turn them the other way around so that they made hollow circle marks.  I was also thinking about my revelation when I took Denise Kester's workshop: that when you choose a medium-- say printing-- that you should explore what that medium can do and that no other medium can do.

So I was thinking about clay, how it takes the impress of the lego patterns.  How it can be carved.  How color can be forced into the indentations.  And I came up with this new magpie platter, which also has a kind of printed look, but also is very much a celebration of the stamping quality of clay.

And the title of it?  "I wish we could go to Lego Land...."

 

Giraffe Platters

Here are the raw giraffe platters I've been making, freshly carved.  I actually did them as a custom order for an etsy customer who has bought a couple of my pieces.

They were a fun challenge, particularly trying to fit them on a platter without making them too small (are we seeing a giraffe far off in the tundra?) or too boring given the elongated shape of the platter.

Note the cool tree and grass "handles."

And here's how I've been carving them first and painting in the engobe.

These beauties will be fired once, covered in a clear glaze and fired again to Cone 5.  And I really, really hope they turn out!

Back at the ranch...

And how did those cow plates turn out? Well, all I have to say is....Mooooo

Moo!

Moooooooooo...

Moo! Moo! Moo!

Wait a minute!  What the #@!! is that rooster doing in here?

Oh, we're gonna have fun this summer!

Ceramic Pillows

 

pillows by Djenya 

It is ironic that I am up at 6 a.m. on a gloomy, rainy morning, obsessed with ceramic pillows.  You have probably seen ceramic pillows in museums and thought, "How can anyone get a good night's sleep on that?" Or "This piece of pottery is so lovingly made and so intricately decorated it shouldn't be used for a pillow!"  

But let me tell you, even a cursory research brings up a whole wealth of information-- like how ceramic pillows are still used in some parts of the world or how ancient Chinese pillows were often decorated as a tiger, because tiger represents yin, darkness, inactivity--   things I should be embracing now.

Still.  I have been obsessed with ceramic pillows for some time now, particularly since I discovered the work of one of the most innovative artists on etsy-- stepanka-- who does wonderful inscribed wall pillows like these...

Honestly, the woman is great with porcelain.  

Another great innovator on etsy is Djenya, who makes "bookushions" which are clay pillows to use as bookends.  (See first photo in this post.)  Who would have dreamed of that?

And then there is artist Charan Sachar of Creative With Clay, who is the reason I am up so early.  I have long admired Charan's work too, but only got to reading his blog yesterday and came across a post in which he describes turning his idea for pillow clocks into the most amazing dishes.

 

I am still a bit muddled on how he does this. (Why does the clay not entirely slump down from the rim?) Nevertheless I am contemplating forming some ceramic pillows in the coming weeks, trying for my own take on them.  I think ceramic pillows interest me because the artist takes something so heavy-- clay-- and turns it into something so light.  A cloud.

 

New Cow Plates

In typical fashion, I couldn't wait until my new cow plates were fired to show them off.  Here they are.

Cows are hard to draw for me.  Kind of like owls, which are also difficult.  What's going on?  Is it the noses?  Is it the weird shaped heads?

Anyway, most of these are from photos of local cows that were peering through a fence at me one day.  I think their tags are hilarious; I know they are for marking the cows, but I got to thinking how they might be little bumper stickers of who they are.  Then I got to thinking about those snippets of language we use to describe ourselves, like "38 SWF" or "Type A."  

And then I got to thinking about texting, which I can't do... 1) because I'm not good at it and... 2) I was an English major and still feel the urge spell everything out.  I also still use capital letters and punctuation.

OMG!

Monday, Monday

Monday.  But two things are making me smile....Princess Beatrice's hat (did you see THAT?)  and the thought of chipmunks drinking cappuccinos.  

Dude, you're holding the mug the wrong way.

"Put A Bird On It" : A Tribute to Portlandia

"In Portland, you can put a bird on anything and call it art!" says one character to another in the new TV series Portlandia.  

Watch them make fun of the City of Roses (and etsy) here.

I doff my hat and bird to Portlandia with my new series of plates.

It might not be art, but at least it's funny...

Bunny Quasimodo...and some links

On Saturday, we went down to see the bunnies at the Northwest Nature Shop here in Ashland.  And Josephine was, well, a bit dubious about it.  So she sat on my lap. I held the beasts and she shyly petted them.

Guinea Pigs...not so scary but still not the type of animals you want to hold yourself.

I had a great day planned: all of us meet friends Fred and Fiona and Baby Benjamin for the bunnies, have lunch, go meet some teenager dressed as the Easter Bunny at another store and decorate some cookies.  What could go wrong?  Well, me apparently, for when we started down the street, my face started swelling up with an allergic reaction. (I must have rubbed my eye with a bunny infested hand.)  I was just about on par with this.

May I add that I was brave venturing out at all given the horrific cold sore that had popped up on my lower lip the previous Friday.  My bad back which made me shuffle along the sidewalk, the cold sore, and then the allergic reaction which colored the left side of my face a terrible red and swelled my left eye completely shut-- was it any wonder (and I am NOT kidding) that people looked at me as I walked down the street, and then looked quickly away?  And that a waitress, when I dashed into a local cafe to use the restroom, actually did a sharp, horrified intake of breath as she looked into my face?

Anyhow.  I made an emergency stop at the pharmacy and went home to wash all the bunny karma off of me.  

In other news, here are some cool Easter things to check out:

• the paper German eggs I ordered and intend to paint gold and use instead of Easter baskets
• Aunt Peaches' tutorial on how to dye eggs using tissue paper 
• chocolates from Maison Bouche-- not only delicious but I love their vintage illustrations.  Last year, if you recall, I did these little dishes with chicks in red polka dotted kerchiefs.  They had been inspired by a vintage cupcake topper.  This year, I'm quite interested in the chick with the veiled hat...

 or the bunnies dueling. Hmmm....

 

 

Do you know Jack?

Here are my new plates, which would be good for any time of the year, but which are great easter gifts for your pals with a sense of humor.  It all started with a drawing I made of a jackrabbit, which has the same gleeket look as my dog Hamish.

I know I shouldn't laugh at my own jokes.

Anyway.  I made these plates and other work because I was gearing up for the Oregon Potter's Association show, which is the last weekend in April, up in Portland.  Alas, I'm not going.  Why?  Because last Saturday I stood on one leg, sneezed, and threw my back out.

So here I am again-- bad back, pots all dressed up and no where to go except my etsy store.

I've been to the osteopath three times this week and have PT next week.  And FINE, FINE I'll admit the IRONY of it: I was showing my 5 year old son this thing called "moonwalking" via the first time MJ did it.  We watched it on youtube, we went back into the kitchen, I did a little moonwalk, just a little one....and that's when I sneezed.

 

 

Pumphouse in the Mists of Time...

Long ago, before the new studio, I worked in a pumphouse.

 A 6' X6' pumphouse, uninsulated, with the pump still in it.  

When I decided I'd like it for a studio, I spent countless hours removing the junk piled up inside and putting in a couple salvaged windows for cross ventilation.  The door wouldn't shut, so I found another one with a window in it, and painted the door bright red.  With blue-green dragonflies.

I traded some of my initial lopsided bowls for the work of a carpenter friend, who boarded up the ceiling.

Then I had a lean-to shed built to the side so my tiny kiln would be somewhat protected from the weather.  (Oh those days of trying to glaze while the rain poured down, or the sun sizzled down, or the icy wind flew sideways through the lean to opening.  I was actually learning how to mix my own glazes then and would often stand there motionless, ignoring even a light breeze, staring at an old metal scale, which I desperately willed to stay motionless so I could get a measurement of this or that exactly right, down to the last gram.)

Inside the pumphouse I wedged my mom's old wheel; this wheel actually sports a stone for the kicking stone along with a seat that looks like it came off an old tractor.

A couple shelves, a 3X3' canvas board atop an old kitchen cabinet (my platters were smaller then), some wooden boards to shove in the gaps in the floor where the squirrels crept in at night.  And I was ready.

I worked in that pumphouse seven years.  I had a lot of failures and a few successes.  But I knew I was on to something when the weekend would come and, no matter how bitter or blistering the weather, I'd find myself there.

The door to my current studio now gazes across the land at the old pumphouse.  And this is a true confession: the new studio is like a cream puff of a place compared to the old pumphouse, which has now been turned into a tool shed.

But I like the view.  I think it's good to remember where you came from, what you did for love.