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!"

The Germ of an Idea

Germs. One sort brings you colds. I was visited by this sort quite a lot this winter, and been kept out of the studio far more than I've been in it. But things are on the upswing for a healthy spring. And I may have been down, but not out. I have some new ideas of where to go next.

 So I'll share some of those efforts involving a different germ; the germ of an idea, and how it grows.

This is a bowl on a stand, Korean, 900 years old.  (It is celadon-glazed, Ru-style ware from the Ganjin kilns of the Goryeo period. I saw it at the Freer Gallery last week.)

Korean Ru-style bowl and stand, 12th century, at the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

What I like most about this piece is the raised foot on the stand. A simple in-curving bowl, functional but not assertive, is nonetheless "presented" on the flowerlike stand. The effect is to make you pause just a beat extra to consider it. I find the subtle presentation of this piece harmonic. 'Shy?' it asks. 'A bowl among other bowls? Dare to lift yourself.'

You may remember that I've been pondering havdalah sets, the practicality of making them in the first place, who the heck (if anyone) buys a whole havdalah set, and what wonderful design would justify going to the trouble and expense at all. I put a drawing or two on my Facebook pottery page.  (Please feel free to click that link, and Like my pottery FB page, a very easy way to stay in the loop of a basement potter's life in very short bursts.)

It all started (but really, I ask you, who knows when it really, really starts??) with a rudimentary sketch before I went to Washington D.C. early last week.

A candleholder, spice jar and goblet- aka havdalah set.

The three components were there, but no tray to hold them. So I redrew, still keeping those funky little brass-stud-like things, and adding a tray.

Playing with width of candleholder base; also, giving tray a shape relationship with the parts.

Still, there is nothing I loved about the design.
Then we went to D.C. and looked at Korean ceramics from the 12th century. The bowl on a stand-!
Home again, I drew this.

Presenting...drumroll...Havdalah! (Brass-studlike things & goblet stem are history.)

The son of a gun needed to be presented. Introduced. Harmonized. Asserted.

This design is also beginning to put out roots...

It is spreading to tableware. Love that "presentation" raised foot, and trying it on other designs.

Beating back bronchitis and raising the presentation level on the pottery.

Looking at Clay Art- So Much to Absorb!

A family wedding took us to Virginia. On our way back up north toward home, we took part of a day in Washington D.C. to visit the Sackler and Greer Galleries of the Smithsonian Museum. With so little time to spend, I wanted to see as much ceramics as possible, particularly Asian.

Struck as ever by the wonderful freshness from the hands of long-gone craftspeople, the artists of their times, I was also struck by a particular dichotomy. Ornate and expensively colored objects were for the rich, of course, yet these things tended toward utility for milennia. In the medium of clay, only religious objects, and objects reflecting long held traditions or recounting daily activities, or deeply functional objects were made. Today, objects made of clay can be pure decoration or pure self expression. Yet these older things resonated within my imagination, with their brilliant craftsmanship and assertiveness.

Within the framework of functional clay, imagination lent sway. Spouts of pouring vessels became, say, the beaks of birds. Bowls and drinking vessels might be incised with flowers, birds and vines, and inlaid with colors before firing. Workmanship was breathtaking and at its freshest, representing a range of influences from the natural world in form and decoration.

Forms sparked my imagination. A small bowl atop a high-footed saucer was like a simple lotus center on a many-lobed open leaf. One small thing like that- moved me!

In an tiny exhibition of Japanese ceramics 1930-2000, I saw a Shoji Hamada tall teapot, potted thinly from fairly coarse clay, not like the pieces on somewhat smoother clay with his strong, famous brushwork that I am used to seeing in books, but rather a soft and a little droopy shape. Very pleasingly showing the marks of the master (Japanese National Treasure) that Hamada was, this teapot was like a very fine, upright shar-pei dog, ever so friendly and a bit slumpy looking. I could see that Hamada had been happy with it! Like the older vessels, this modern one was all about usefulness, and also like them, encapsulated the obvious vitality of the hands of the maker.

Works in clay! How varied they can be! The day before, we had stopped at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. Among the noteworthy and large collection of American folk art at The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum there, we found surprising exhibition notes along the railings that were porcelain pages of children's book drawings. What a wonderful idea! There are so many ways to set up notes for a display. These got me thinking about my children's book illustrations from a decade ago (for a book that did not get picked up by a publisher), and I wonder whether I should make wall art out of them instead of written narration on paper or e-book!

porcelain children's book pages as exhibition notes

I can see a "wall bookpage" of the rabbit on the backhoe loader in the clay pit in Bunville!

Hypothetical Havdalah Sets

How do you meet commitments when you get really sick for 10 days, and you run a one-person operation? You have to notify your buyers that their order will be late, while everything grinds to a complete halt. In deference to the season, it occurs to me that you probably need studio elves to keep things going.

I was fresh out of elves the last 9 or 10 days, while I've been down with bronchitis. This stupidly debilitating illness has become a recurring issue over several years, and turns out to be more like asthma now. Finally diagnosed, I have a new medicine regimen that should keep it at bay. I look forward to being in the studio and taking care of business on all levels on a regular basis again by the middle of next week, having healed sufficiently and passed through seasonal and family events.

As a side note, I have ordered a quadruple-filter air cleaner unit for my studio, which should help me stay healthy despite the dust-producing materials of my job.

While I was down and out for the count, all I could muster energy for was sketching. Thinking about Judaica, I sketched variations of a havdalah set design. This would be comprised of a stemless goblet, candleholder and spice box with stopper, on a curvy tray made just to fit them together, an item used in a series of blessings that usher out the Sabbath. The design is coming together. Why was I thinking of this item? Because I get into the challenge of designing and making several components that interact beautifully as a group composition.

Design and execution of the objects are only the first important things to consider. Other questions must be considered fully and a plan put together before I do anything to even create a prototype set.   To consider these questions, I have to generalize and stereotype a little based on my life experience. (If you disagree with my assessments, let's discuss in Comments below!)

Who makes the havdalah ceremony? Usually, Orthodox Jews, who have kept the Sabbath since the evening before, are mindful of making a formal closure on Saturday evening before entering the rest of the week. There is a conundrum to ponder, though. Orthodox Jews already have a special cup, a kiddush cup, for the blessing over the wine on Sabbath, and do not need another separate one to conclude the Sabbath.

One of my carved kiddush cups (found on www.mimistadlerpottery.com).

They already have a spice box in silver or a base metal like aluminum that they were given for a typical engagement or wedding gift, or maybe they just open a jar of cloves from the spice rack to make a blessing over the heavenly aroma. And a tall braided candle is easily held in the hand (to make the blessing to the Creator), without a special holder. I just don't see the motivation to buy a handmade havdalah set here.

Who buys handmade stoneware Judaica in general? I'm going to suggest that it might be Reform rather than Orthodox or possibly Conservative Jews. Feel free to disagree,  but I'll take the liberty of saying that a broader secular education (with some art thrown in) tends to create a greater aesthetic appreciation for handmade objects. But even with enhanced appreciation for handmade things, (I could certainly be wrong, but let me risk a guess) since there may be less inclination per se to make the havdalah ceremony at all, there would still be little or no inclination to purchase or give a gift of a havdalah set, handmade or not.

Here is what I have noticed with another Judaica item, the washing cup.  Most Reform Jews whom I meet at Judaica craft shows ask me why that giant cup has two handles, indicating unfamiliarity with the ubiquitous Jewish ritual of washing for bread.  Orthodox Jews recognize it instantly, since washing for bread is a constant at meals. But, conversely, an Orthodox person may be quite happy using a plastic cup ($4.50, very light in weight) or a resin cup embedded with dried flowers ($20.00, trendy) which are really, metaphorically speaking, a dime a dozen. He or she might not even think about the option of using a handmade, carved stoneware one for $55.
I have to make that person think of that option.

A one of a  kind washing cup, or "Why does that big mug have two handles?" (Sold. Other carved washing cups at www.mimistadlerpottery.com.)

Where then should havdalah sets be marketed? I conclude it must be Jewish museum gift shops and high end Judaica galleries. That would bring them to the people who connect with Jewish history and ritual and love unique, art-infused, handmade Judaic objects. If these are the markets, then these objects need to be top notch statement pieces, and I must work that into the design from the start. They need to be signed, numbered, limited edition, and of finest quality workmanship. Of course, havdalah sets are just one item of Judaica. The direction of all of my Judaica has to change entirely to higher end.

Well, thinking about this kept one hand in the business while I was otherwise totally out of commission. Whether you agree or disagree with my stereotypical purchaser profiles, what do you think is a good market for fine, handmade Judaica?