The Gallery: Clay 2
|
|
Text and Artwork:
|
 Mountain in Mist 6.5" H. 5" Dia. I love mountains and the earth itself. I love canyons and gorges where you can see the rock layers. A lot of that love can be seen in my coiled pottery. I often work, leaving the outer surface of the coils unwelded, revealing the layers of clay that have been built up to create the pot or form. This pot, Mountain in Mist, recollects early mornings in the hill country and mountains, when the birdsong is
the only noise in the stillness and the mountains seem to simply breath, waiting for the day to begin.
Pan Player 9" x 7" x 4.5" Pan Player has painting done with underglazes on three sides. The two long sides are glazed in clear transparent, the ends with a honey-colored glaze, and the interior with a glaze I will probably end up changing through another glaze firing. It was a new glaze and is much too bright and orange for me. But that is one of the joys (and frustrations) with pottery. What you see when you are working with underglazes and glazes is not what you will get once the piece has gone through the fire. Even glazes you have worked with a long time and are very familiar with can do unexpected things sometimes. Perhaps that is why I painted the young woman playing pan pipes instead of some other instrument. Pan
pipes, after all, evoke images of that wildest of ancient Greek gods, Pan himself.
 Boat of Dreams 3.75" x 6.75" x 5.5" Boat of Dreams also uses underglazes, but not in a figurative way, per se. The most representational parts of this pot are two press molded "flowers" in the interior, and the blue of the sea below the "water line". Like the painting, Morning Mare (in Conceptual Room 1), Boat of Dreams holds concepts of morning, renewal,
and the power of the unseen in our lives. These unseen things may be the intangibles of what makes us people --
imagination, thought, memory, emotion -- and it may also be the unseen of the spirit-metaphysical realm.
That is up to you.
 Copper Earth 7.5" Dia. Copper Earth is handbuilt using a combination of slab and coiling techniques. The copper carbonate I used really accentuated not only the lines of the coils and slabs, but also the inclusions of the grog that is in the clay body. I love this bowl and keep it on my desk to hold whatever odds and ends may congregate there during the day. |