Pottery

My favorite part of working with pottery is surface design! It’s a good thing I love it, because it also takes the most time. Each piece takes at least an hour to carve.

All of today’s designs were hand carved, using a technique, called sgraffito.

Since we are in the middle of the summer season, I have been inspired by one of my favorite summer flowers: the sunflower!

I have started carving a new porcelain clay, and it feels a little bit different from other clays. I found myself carving it a little bit different too. Because porcelain needs a little bet of extra care, I dry these REALLY slow. They might be ready to fire in a week or two. Stay tuned to see how they turn out!

At the beginning of June, I decided to make June a ‘pottery intensive’ month in the studio. Looking back at the month, it was a lot of fun, and I made some really nice pots. I fired the kiln twice. After each firing, i put the pots on the porch, where they sold out in a matter of days.

Pottery Intensive June was a success! You can see a gallery of each kiln load by clicking the thumbnails below:

July is going to be a little bit different. I am going to keep making pottery. But i’ll also take brakes to do some more printmaking and painting too. The big thing for July is that I am participating in the facebook boycot #stopHateForProfit by not logging into facebook or instagram for the month of July.

I am a frequent facebook user, so this is going to be a challenging month for me. One of the bright sides of this boycott is that I plan to give my personal website and email newsletter some TLC, so stay tuned for more art and updates!

I’m excited to share some of my latest pottery after last weeks firing. I’m as proud of the photography as the pottery. There has been a learning curve to photographing pottery, and I think I am finally getting a good representation of what the pots look like.

NOTE: I have already sold all the pots from this firing, but plan to have more soon.

My big, exciting event for this summer was going to be a week long pottery workshop at the Arrowmont School of arts and crafts. It was a gift from a friend, and was going to be a really special treat. To be safe during the coronavirus, the workshop was cancelled. I was really looking forward to visiting Arrowmont, and having a pottery intensive experience. My hope was to get better at throwing, and to learn a few new surface decoration techniques.

just because I can’t go to a famous arts and craft school, and learn from a popular potter, doesent mean I can’t still have a pottery intensive experience. I decided to give myself a summer of pottery making!!! So far, I’ve thrown about 20 mugs.

Most of them are being decorated in a style, called sgraffito.
If you haven’t already seen it, here is a short video explaining the process:

I learned a new technique to throw plates. Thanks @Dennis Allen ! So now I’ve been working on a few sgraffito plates.

This squirrel design is based on one of my linocuts.

Another plate…with BLUE underglaze.

These are works in progress…they still need to be glazed and fired, but I’m really excited about making plates…and hope to the have enough to fire the kiln soon.

Sculpture update: my little bird has gone from a white dove, to a red breasted robin, and now appears to becoming a blue bird. Just goes to show that sometimes the art tells me what it wants to be…especially on april 1st.

Hope you all are healthy and well. Stay home and make art if you can.