Rosa C.

Same Time Next Year

2011-12-28T09:33:00.000-08:00

It's been over a year since I updated my little crafty blog. Why? I suppose it's because I started incorporating crafty stuff into my regular/personal blog. And also because my non-clay craftiness has been at a veritable standstill for the last year (!).

Should I delete this journal? Continue to let it limp along with a yearly update? Update it with clay entries cross-posted to my personal journal?

Well.

Monday Morning You Sure Look Fine

2010-12-06T08:00:00.001-08:00

I am still here. I still exist.

It's the end of the semester and thankfully I am only taking one class, because even with just that one class, I've been feeling pretty under the gun recently.

I'm here in the lab this morning, having a cup of coffee and printing out the paper that's due by noon. I actually finished it yesterday--which may or may not be a first for me in terms of term papers--and I got a full night's sleep which sounds like a good thing only I was being chased by a zombie all around my dreams. (He was a scary twenty-something zombie, but in the end, when he was attacked by a larger, scarier zombie, I kinda felt a little sorry for him.) So it wasn't a particularly restful full night of sleep, is what I'm trying to say.

I haven't written a blog entry in about a week and I feel rusty.

Also, my ear is stuffed up and hurty and I'm afraid I have some kind of ear infection. I probably should go over to the student health center and have a doctor look at it.

Let's see what else?

The car went to the shop this morning. It's been spewing some evil smelling, brain cell killing fumes into the interior whenever we drive it for longer than fifteen minutes or so. So that's a good thing, I guess.

And I got a lot of my Christmas shopping done at the arts and crafts show that was being held in the student union building last week. So that's good. Supplemented with some of our own pottery, I think we might be almost completely finished with Christmas shopping.

Christmas seems so far away, and yet, it's only, like 19 days from now. Right?

So you're wondering what my paper was about, aren't you?

Well, it was the final write-up of the tobacco experiments I did in botany this semester. I worked with three other people (although by using the verb "worked," I don't mean to give you the impression that they did anything except stay out of my way and weasel out of doing even the simplest tasks). Grrr.

So it's Monday. I'm going to make it through the day at least. That's something.

Swiftly

2010-12-05T07:01:00.000-08:00

I really have been working--lots! And Dave and I just participated in the studio show, where we sold about $300 worth of stuff, so that was nice.

4:00 P.M.

2010-08-21T05:09:00.000-07:00

I couldn't tell you what goes through my mind as I'm glazing--except today, when The Brain could not shake this little ditty about Cletus the slack-jawed yokel from an episode of The Simpsons.

This was my workspace circa 4:00 p.m. on Friday afternoon. On the left, you can see my muse, 44 ounces of diet Pepsi. Then there's an Empty Bowls bowl, a few glazes, and my glazing notebook. Behind that, my inspiration wall.

I work best in a bit of self-generated chaos.

Details

2010-08-02T16:02:00.000-07:00

These are some detail photos (taken with a cell phone, so necessarily blurry), of a piece I made years ago. It's called the hand, the eye, the word, and it doesn't exist anymore. On Saturday, after I took these photos, I had Dave fling it against a cinder block wall. (If you want to see the whole piece, intact, there's a photo at my non-craftsy blog, Rosa.)

This is the back of the piece:

The piece was built on this example of my very early carved work, a skeleton holding a trio of flowers. I made this piece first and it sat and sat and sat, waiting for me to be inspired enough to glaze it. I never did. Instead, it was pressed into service as the base that I built the rest of this piece on.

Here are a couple of things you might notice about the back:

One is that the piece was hung by discarded keys (glued to the piece with a two-part epoxy) and wire. I used two sets of keys because the piece was so heavy that I didn't want to risk one set. The other thing is that the whole piece was held together with glaze. Those heavy swaths of white glaze were actually acting as kind of glue to hold all the bits together.

This is my hand, a cast of my hand anyway. It was also held on with glaze. I used my hand at one end and the hand of a then-friend (someone who is definitely no longer in my life, hasn't been for a long time, and never will be again) at the other end.

This is that friend's hand.

I hated this as soon as I applied the gold patina to it. It reminded me too much of Lt. Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I do/did like the glaze effect on the background. It was a mixture of several different glazes, a glossy white, a runny gun-metal green, a crackle glaze, and a Chun red. It was meant to look like a turbulent, angry sky.

This is the eye part of the work. All those eyes belong to another friend who I am no longer in contact with. Again, I hated the gold patina on it.

You can also see examples of the words there, pages ripped from a trashed copy of a Dostoyevsky novel.

Here are a couple of close ups of those words:

I'm glad this piece is out of my life, actually.

Beads Beads Beads

2010-07-06T23:18:00.000-07:00

Yes, it really was May the last time I added anything to my little crafty blog. I have been working, I just haven't been posting anything here. Recently, I've taken up bead making. I was inspired by a pair of pottery earrings I bought from a street vendor in NYC and here is a bit of the fruits of that inspiration:

These are my little red clay, iron oxided beads, strung on some elastic thread until I can figure out what to do with them.

Most of them will be turned into earrings like these:

This is a photo of the inside of the kiln after my first bead tree firing. (A bead tree, in case you don't know, is a device that allows you to fire beads on high-temperature wire.)

The larger pieces around the bead tree are not mine. Those are mostly student and studio members' pieces and glaze tests.

Two firings yielded a nice bead soup that I've started to play with.

(I made the plate underneath the beads, too. Unfortunately, the glaze on the plate developed a common firing fault, dozens of tiny pinholes in the surface. But it's fine for using as a bead tray.)

Button Holed

2010-05-13T05:10:00.000-07:00

I made a few more buttons recently. These were not included in the buttons I sent to my mother for Mother's Day. These were made after that initial round and are smaller than the early buttons. Because they were so small, they were a much bigger pain to glaze than their larger brethren.

I photographed them against their entries in my glaze log so that I might have a bit of a record as to what glazes I used and what those glazes did.

This triangular button glazed with a turquoise glaze that invariably bubbles and pits, turned out to be one of my favorites. I like the texture very much when it's confined to the small surface of the button.

On the other hand, I expected better from this glaze combination. Oh well.

I like the simplicity of this "really red" button. It feels very handmade to me.

The light blue one might be a sleeper.

I should've done two layers of glaze, not just the stripes, because I like that strange mottled section where the glazes are layered.

Another sleeper perhaps.

This alabaster glazed triangle and the oatmeal glazed stars seem rather plain to me.

Ice blue is one of my favorite glazes. I just love the look of this glaze. It's not so impressive in this small photo, but in a larger photo (and in person), it's just a big, interesting glaze. Love this stuff.

My little Frankenstein button, a green matte experiment.

This waxy lavender heart is pretty enough, and subtle.

This is another one of my favorites, glazed with a single layer of espresso shino. Look at that! Unfortunately, its two similarly glazed companions crawled terribly.

Three Easy Pieces

2010-05-02T21:47:00.000-07:00

My favorite of the new work is this calavera:

Or maybe it's this diablito:

This one's not bad, either:

These are just three of the nearly twenty pieces I got out of the kiln I fired last night. I only had my cell phone camera to use for these few photos, though, so there should be a few more photos soon.

Flower Pots

2010-04-26T22:37:00.000-07:00

Flower pots, me-style.

A couple of weeks ago, I tried to make a flowerpot in the slump mold style that is taught to beginning clay students everywhere. I failed miserably. The thing looked so lumpy and misshapen that it ruined my night, clay-wise. (I did not take a picture, of course.) I walked away from it feeling sad and defeated. How could I call myself an artist--or even a potter--if I couldn't succeed at something so basic as making a pot in a slump mold?

The day after falling, I got back on my clay bicycle, so to speak. I went back with the same clay (reclaimed), and the same flowerpot mold, and I made these four pots. The next day I made another. Mojo reclaimed.

Chaos

2010-04-13T23:56:00.001-07:00

I find that I have a great affinity for a chaotic work environment--so long as the chaos is entirely self-created. In other words, if it's my mess, fine. If it's someone else's mess, it enrages me.

Luckily my little studio space allows me to be as chaotic as I want to.

This is the sight that greeted me this afternoon, my banding wheel topped by an upturned vase caught midway through the glazing process. (That vase is giving me fits, by the way. I want to get it done, but I want it to be perfectly done. This is always a dilemma for me.)

Squidly

2010-04-12T12:17:00.000-07:00

Heeeeee'sssssss coooooooommmminnnng fooooorrrrr yoooouuuu!!!

Giant squid plate in progress.

Testing

2010-04-10T08:10:00.000-07:00

I'm trying this new thing--no, not test tiles, but taking pics of my test tiles after they're fired.

The tiles are carved so that I can get an idea of how a glaze is going to break over a carved piece. Some glazes highlight carved details, some glazes completely obliterate carved details.

The other thing test tiles tell me is how a glaze is going to look over the kind of clay I use. Most commercial test tiles are done on smooth white clay to highlight the color of the glaze. I don't use white clay, I use a relatively dark red clay which has an effect on the color of the glaze. The "violet under osiris" tile, for example, shows this tendency. You can see that the violet comes through all right, but the osiris only looks blue where it's thickly applied, as in the crevices of the piece. Over the flat parts, it doesn't really look blue at all.

Sometimes, of course, it does look blue, as it does in this test piece:

Same clay, same glaze. Here, you can see that it did go blue on the inside of this vase. That's because it's very thickly applied. If I tried that on a flat piece, or on the outside of a tall piece, the glaze would run and possibly stick to the kiln shelf.

See, this is why I love glazing. I love building relationships with glazes like this.

It Takes As Long As It Takes

2010-03-24T14:29:00.000-07:00

Are you interested in the process?

This is a mid-carving pic taken January 7th. Carving a piece like this takes perhaps four to six hours spread over a day or two. After carving, it has to dry. I tend to let things dry quickly (quickly meaning that I don't cover things so depending on the humidity level, it takes anywhere from two days to two weeks), though things sit on my shelves for a long time waiting to be bisque fired. Since I don't like to mix my work in with the general studio stuff, I wait until I can fill a kiln with my own work. That can take several weeks, so really drying time isn't a very big factor.

This has been bisque fired and has had an application of iron oxide. I took this picture on February 17th, though the piece had probably had been sitting around my space for awhile after being bisque fired. (I'm lazy and will glaze easier stuff first, or I'll get a piece and realize I don't know how I want to glaze it and then will have to make several test tiles which can take weeks.)

Finally it was time to glaze it.

These are photos from March 6. I keep records while glazing, though they're often maddeningly incomplete. On this record, for example, I forgot to write down what glaze I used on the teeth. When I do this, I can usually make an educated guess, but I'm not always right. (After I reached this stage, the piece sat for a couple of weeks because I got hung up on what glaze I wanted to put on the outermost edge. I finally decided and finished it because I had a buttload of other work that I wanted to fire.)

Again, I don't like for my work to mix in with the general studio work. I'm not trying to be snobbish, but I will cop to being a control freak. If something goes wrong in the firing, I want to know that it was my fault and not the fault of whomever loaded the kiln.

The final firing was on Saturday, March 20th, and I took this picture after unloading the kiln the next day. So that's not bad; only about three and a half months for a finished piece.

Here's a funny thing: I don't consider myself to be a very patient person and so you'd think that waiting fourteen weeks for a finished piece would kill me. But actually it doesn't. I've learned that clay has its own timeline and I don't really have much say in the matter. Oh, I could rush things along, but why? I could force dry things and try to simplify my glazing techniques, but why? I could toss my stuff in the mix with the general studio stuff and it might shave a couple of weeks off the time it takes me to get a finished product, but I don't do that because it might mean having a few more pieces marred by other people's mistakes. That's not worth it to me.

I guess that clay is one place in my life where I'm not searching to maximize my use of time or to streamline my efforts to make them more efficient. I mean, art takes as long as it takes. It takes time in increments of hours or days or weeks or lifetimes, no?

Moving Forward

2010-03-23T14:53:00.000-07:00

Unloading the kiln on Sunday evening: a stack of plates, some platters and a couple of bowls. Vases and a couple of experimental pieces. Some good stuff.

I was talking with my aunt the other day at lunch about my practice of destroying work that I don't like or that doesn't sell. She's against it, but I explained that I do it because, man, that stuff has my name on it and I don't want work that doesn't meet my standards to be out there with my name on it. As far as the stuff that doesn't sell, some of it I keep but the stuff that I don't want to keep or store gets smashed. It's a way to keep moving forward.

Work In Progress: Kitten Embroidery

2010-03-05T21:36:00.000-08:00

A vase at the greenware stage. Dave threw it, I drilled holes in it. The pattern is a kitten playing with a ball of yarn, a vintage embroidery pattern. After it's bisqued, I'll embroider it.

We're Going To Need A Bigger Brain

2010-02-28T16:23:00.000-08:00

Part of a broken plate test tile (propped against a stack of bowls for the purpose of picture taking). This is the jaw of a calavera, glazed with light shino. The carved background on the left is mottled blue glaze. On the right is transparent gray glaze. I like the mottled blue and I'll use it again definitely.

Yesterday at the studio I was having a hard time focusing. I glazed a plate and fed the cat. I started to handbuild a vase then ended up throwing pots on a wheel. Just so you know, I never throw pots on a wheel. Or at least I haven't in six years or so. Ten-plus years ago, I started out throwing pots but after perhaps two lessons switched over to handbuilding and I never looked back. Sometimes, when I'm stuck or bored, I go back to throwing. It's just a way to jolt The Brain out of a rut.

Bottlenosed Dolphin

2010-02-22T05:24:00.000-08:00

Too dark, I think. Perhaps a reglaze. Behind it, several test tiles I made from plates that cracked in bisque.

Anyway, What Do You Think About Grasshoppers?

2010-02-13T21:22:00.001-08:00

This is one of three plates that I painted at the studio today. One of the others can be found on my regular, non-craft blog, which is here. This is my Squirrel Grasshopper Sampler Plate.

I blurred out part of my plate, the part where I signed with my full name. I did that because I was thinking about when I was learning to write in cursive and one of the first things I wanted to write (and did write, over and over) was my own name. I loved doing that for some reason. That was in the time before I had signed a gazillion checks and innumerable forms. My signature now is my first initial and my last name, run together as quickly and haphazardly as possible. Fastfastfast. I don't care anymore about the beautiful legibility of cursive. I don't care about testing out the capital G that begins my last name, writing it the standard way, or in lowercase writ large, or as a printed G would be, only followed by the rest of my name in cursive.

Anyway, the plates are not intended to have any particular orientation. Such is the nature of most plates and I wanted to retain that. The grasshopper is copied, but free-handedly so, from a coloring book. The squirrel is from a set of vintage embroidery patterns. The letters were burned into The Brain, courtesy of Mrs. Pedroncelli, my third grade teacher.

The Rape of Lucrece Bowl

2010-02-12T20:33:00.000-08:00

I'm a bit fascinated by Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece. This is a bisqued bowl with passages from the poem written on both the inside and the outside. The bowl will be covered in ice blue glaze and electric fired.

When Life Gives You Broken

2010-02-05T21:20:00.000-08:00

Everything was broken this week. Everything. In an uncharacteristic move, I tried to make the best of it.

For instance, I made test tiles out of a stack of plates that cracked in the bisque firing.

I had to bash the plates up a little bit, but it was therapeutic, really. I used a rolling pin and a plastic dry cleaning bag and I smashed away. Then I started to glaze.

You can't really tell by looking, but this bit has fifteen different glazes (layered, of course) on it--so far.

Normally I am loathe to keep records, but in this case I'm working with a library of thirty or more different glazes, only a handful of which are familiar to me and none of which I've worked with in over four years. So now I keep records.

My record keeping is very informal. I sketch the bit of plate, then scrawl whatever glaze is going where. It's funny, but this picture reminds me of a conversation I was having with my former biology instructors a few days ago. We were talking about keeping old notes and how one of the reasons to keep them was because it was still a way to connect with the joy of drawing and diagramming and labeling the biological structures that still, after years of familiarity, thrill The Brain. It's like, here's a record of that first time. I drew that!

Ha! I never put that together. But my glaze test notes resemble my biology lecture notes.

This, not so much. This is the other method of test-tiling that I do:

These are cut out of red clay with a heart shaped cookie cutter and glazed. This is twenty different glazes (most layered) on eight different tiles. I write the glazes I used on the back so that I don't have to keep notes about a million little tiles that all look the same.

It works until it doesn't work. (See how I forgot to write the glaze names on one of the tiles?)

Balaena mysticetus, Bowhead whale

2010-02-01T23:10:00.000-08:00

Bowhead whale, or Greenland white whale, or Arctic whale is a kind of right whale (perhaps) that lives on plankton, hence is also called a baleen whale. So many names for one creature.

They grow to 66 feet in length (20 meters) and can weigh more than 100 tons, making them the second largest species of whale (behind the Blue whale). The females are larger than the males and are believed to undergo a kind of menopause because they lose reproductive ability long before they die.

They do not, apparently, migrate. They spend their lives in the arctic. They break ice with their massive skulls so that they can surface to breathe.

Their population has been halved by whaling. Fewer than 25,000 of them are estimated to exist. There was once 50,000 of them.

Individuals are believed to live as long as 200 years. You know how scientists began to understand the lifespan of bowhead whales? By dating the harpoons stuck in individuals. A whale "caught" in 2007 had a harpoon from 1890 stuck in its neck.

Throwaway Bowl

2010-01-20T21:42:00.000-08:00

I call it the throwaway bowl. It's made from scrap clay, red of course, with a light iron oxide wash. The decoration--an excerpt from Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece--was painted with wax resist before I brushed on an ice blue glaze. Electric fired.

El Diablito

2010-01-14T07:35:00.000-08:00

Inspired by a painting, El Diablo, by Rufino Tamayo, this.

"We are tragic people; we have always lived under pressure, and when you live like that, there is no reason to be happy."--Rufino Tamayo

Nothing to Lose

2010-01-04T01:58:00.000-08:00

It was Everyone I Hate Day at the studio today, but I was brave. Fortified with noise-canceling headphones backed up with Ozomatli and Los Lobos, I decided to get on with things.

Albus helped.

I was painting my little calavera, a total experiment as this piece was still green (hadn't been fired yet). It is perfectly fine to underglaze greenware, of course, but it is not the normal pathway for my work. Normally I carve, bisque fire, iron oxide, paint or glaze (or both), then high fire.

Why do it that way? Because the iron oxide is heavy furniture color-wise. Iron oxide is nothing more than rust powder mixed with water and it makes everything rust colored. Which I like. Which is why I use it.

So why did I subvert the normal order today? For one, I was all carved out. Yesterday I carved three plates and a retablo. (Plates take from two to four hours (or more). Retablos take from one to six hours (or more). That's a lot. Even a simple design like this takes an hour plus--though this was not carved yesterday. Yesterday I carved for about eight hours.)

So today I picked up my carving tools and The Brain just rebelled; nothing doing.

When that happens, I usually can kick The Brain into gear by looking through the reference materials I have on my shelves at the studio. I started with my old biology textbook. Then I looked at Albinus on anatomy. Then I got desperate and read some Shakespeare. (Yes, I have always always always had my Complete Works of Shakespeare on my shelf at the studio. Sometimes The Brain needs a little Titus Andronicus jump start.)

pencil marks, which burn out in the firing, as guidelines

No dice.

This was a throwaway piece, this little calavera, (throw away because I carved it out of a slab of clay that had gone far too dry to carve without wrecking my tools in the pursuit of failure, so I cut away the dryest bits and wetted the rest down over the course of several hours until it could hold a simple design like this).

I could concentrate on painting simple mendhi-ish designs in black and white (with a red border added hours later), and that's what I did.

I'm not fond of the border. I may paint it out with black...

The rest of the time I made a few small plates to paint with what I hope are going to be some fairly interesting old-school tattoo designs. I also used a cookie cutter to cut out a bunch of random hearts. Then I reorganized my shelves. And I fed Albus. And I hung out at the studio.

New Work

2010-01-02T22:31:00.001-08:00

Calaveras!

I was perhaps a third of the way finished with that calavera. I told Dave that I was carving flowers in "because I hate carving flowers," and he laughed. Yes, I dislike carving (and drawing) flowers, and I feel that that's an irrational dislike, so I'm trying to overcome it by carving more flowers.

See?

Speaking of irrational dislikes, when I showed the pre-carving design for this calavera to Dave he said that he doesn't like hair on skulls. He thinks it's creepy. Of course that meant that I had to carve it.

On some scraps of clay, I carved these little retablo-ish type things. Can you even tell what they are?

The one at the back is a very plain calavera that is going to get a lot of Dia de los Muertos decoration painted on. In the front is a very stylized depiction of a plant cell. The large heart-shaped bit in the center is the vacuole.

These are all very much unfinished pieces. Eventually, all the calaveras are going to be bisqued then underglaze painted with Dia de los Muertos designs and then (maybe) clear glazed and high fired. I'm not sure which direction the plant cell will go though.

Christmas Gifts (Part II)

2009-12-31T22:52:00.000-08:00

Colibri retablo for Kevin:

I thought it looked kind of like a penguin. Kelly and Kevin thought it looked more dolphin like. Kelly suggested that it had "a lot of personality." (This is why I don't carve birds so much.)

A small calavera platter for my younger brother Marshall and his girlfriend Ardith:

I wish I had gone with my first choice of glaze (Chun red) instead of the paler sea grass. Oh well. Live and learn, I guess.

Christmas Gifts: Retablos

2009-12-30T19:15:00.000-08:00

For my aunt Char and uncle Elmer, Nuestra Senora Reina del Cielo. (Carved, bisque fired, painted with acrylic paints and sealed.)

For my stepfather, this Gabriel. (Bisque fired.)

Ornamental

2009-12-22T22:41:00.000-08:00

As Dave and I unloaded a kiln the other night, I joked with a fellow studio member that I wasn't going to have enough time to glaze my pieces before Christmas, so I was just going to use spray paint on them. It hasn't gotten to that point, but I did use acrylic paints on these calavera Christmas ornaments.

Little Things

2009-12-19T21:10:00.000-08:00

These are small carvings inspired by the drawings in a geology textbook I have from 1924.

I'm trying to get better at smaller, more detailed carvings.

Sometimes Failure Is The Only Option

2009-12-17T20:56:00.000-08:00

There are consequences to impatience.

This is a plate I carved.

What is it?

It's this:

I've been a little obsessed with the heart recently, so I decided to carve the arteries of the heart onto plates. To get a strong relief feeling to the carving, I tend to start with a thick plate and carve away at it. That's fine, usually, but this time I got impatient and tried to dry the thick plate too quickly.

Goddamn it. One side of the plate was slightly thinner than the other and the thinner side dried more quickly and pulled at the thicker, slower drying side.

That's just a back view of the crack.

Not repairable, sadly, though I may fire it anyway to see if there's any more to this lesson.

What It Became, The Demon

2009-12-14T21:55:00.000-08:00

This is a Lynda Barry rip off, one of her one hundred demons. I was looking in her book for inspiration, and this little demon suggested that she was that inspiration. So I carved her into clay.

Another new thing:

What the hell is it? It's a stylized carving of a nuclear pore complex, the structure that allows proteins to pass into eukaryotic cell nuclei. I took that drawing from notes from a cell biology class that I took ten years ago when researchers had just published the first structural studies.

Try New Things

2009-12-12T08:49:00.000-08:00

Here are a few new things I've done recently:

This is a tiny little face carved into a larger piece.

I've never carved a bird before and this hummingbird made me very nervous. I meant for it to be very simple, and it is, but I wish I had the courage to carve a few more details in. (Of course, I was working from memory and from a very poor, blown-up photocopy of a drawing of a bird from a bird identification book. Under the circumstances, I think it came out very well.)

I've also never carved a mermaid before, not with any detail. This is a progress photo. You can see she's not complete; I had yet to add her scales.

For me, the lesson has been in stepping away from the known to try something new (even when it takes a lot of time to do something new) even though I am in a rush to get some Christmas presents finished.

Try new things. Even though time is short, try new things.

Works in Progress

2009-12-05T03:19:00.000-08:00

I went down to the clay and ceramic supply store today to pick up some new carving tools and a bag of clay. I was waited on by the listless transvestite who works there. So there's that.

This is a photo of a work in progress, the left side nearing completion, the right side just underway.

This I suppose is an overview of the act of creation:

A handful of my many tools and brushes, a biology textbook, a spray bottle that used to belong to Ellen and which now belongs to me.

This is my set of shelves, loaded with works in progress.

This is a screed type of screed. You can read it or not:

Je Je Je, estupida!

So I've recently returned to the studio and as much as I enjoy working there, there are a few things that are making me sad.

With a single exception, most of the true artists are gone. That makes me sad because I used to get such pleasure in looking at all stages of true artist's works, from lumps of clay to glorious end products. I used to get such pleasure in talking to those people, not just about their work, but also about their world views. Interesting minds bring forth interesting work.

All that is gone.

What's left is a bunch of the type of people who are bringing with them a plague of ugly beginner bowls--ten years into their pottery foray. Yesterday, talking to Judi (she was one of the artists who left the studio), I described these people as potato-like. They look like potatoes. They make work that looks like potatoes. And there is not hope, because of the quality of their lumpy, malformed thinking, that they will ever make work that looks like anything other than potatoes. The true salt of the earth, that type of potter.

But so what? I can soldier on and make my own work in the absence of a culture of inspiration. So that's what I do.

The other thing that makes me sad is this:

At the studio sale last weekend, a very, very white person came along and set up her table of wares to peddle. Most of it consisted of ripped-off Native American designs, crudely done. The same weekend, another white person decided that he was going to rip-off a Native American wedding vase design.

Sigh.

Last night, as Dave and I were leaving the studio, I made a comment to Dave about the wedding vase, citing it as an example of cultural appropriation, which I consider to be inherently racist, and someone else asked what we were talking about. I shook my head at him, not wanting to get into it with this stranger (a stranger to me, given the conditions of my exile from the studio), yet another white guy, who happens to be a friend of Dave's. Of course, it wasn't enough to put off this white stranger who piped in with a triumphant, "Well, I've done the same thing," proud that he'd also ripped off Native American culture.

I said to him, "Congratulations, then you are also an asshole."

And then Dave got pissed at me.

So, here's a few things I'd like to say about pottery, cultural appropriation, and racism:

1. When you purposefully ape (or attempt to ape) an aspect of a culture that is not yours (especially if that culture is one that has been colonized, ripped-off, devalued, decimated) and you do are it for your own gain, then you are engaging in cultural appropriation, which is racist behavior.

2. When a person of color (in this case me), calls out someone on racist behavior (such as cultural appropriation) and you defend the behavior and defend the racist? Then you are also racist.

3. If you claim that you are doing it because you appreciate the culture, well then I'd like you to read this little comment. It relates to the appropriation of Japanese culture, but I think you can make the leap:

Regarding the appropriation of Japanese culture in particular - I wonder if there is a generational aspect. I was born in 1982 and I totally grew up playing video games of Japanese origin, or watching anime series right alongside whatever American culture I consumed. At that age, I didn't really question where stuff on my TV came from. (This is not an "I'm white, I did X, can you absolve me?" post - just a statement of my experience.) As an adult, I recognize stuff from my formative years and have that nostalgic, emotional "That's mine" reaction - but as an adult it's also my job to recognize when, in a lot of senses, something really isn't.

What is so poisonous is the idea that "But I love such-and-such aspect of a culture. How can I be racist?" Well, I dunno, did white appropriation of black music end racism? In fact it frequently does precisely the opposite. By attempting to divorce the culture from the people who originated it, it is frequently an attempt to render the actual human beings in question superfluous and unnecessary. And the fact that the person engaging in this kind of cultural appropriation may have genuine feelings of happiness and affection, makes it all the harder to recognize when it becomes toxic.

So my two cents is that no, it's not automatically wrong to eat korma or watch anime or whatever. The mistake is in assuming your affection, no matter how sincere or deep, will cancel out your privilege. --mercaque, commenter on "When Cultural Appropriation Goes Too Far" at Feministing.

See, here's the thing:

That the studio has become a hotbed for this kind of racist behavior is truly disheartening to me. There used to be several Native artists working in the studio, and I think it curtailed this kind of appropriation of Native culture. But they're gone now and the the studio is mostly a white-bre(a)d stronghold so it's almost a badge of honor to rip off Native culture. It's like these potato people believe that they're "real" potters if they're aping some of the most talented pottery artists that the southwest has to offer. They're not. Instead they're indulging in the same kind of colonialization, racist behavior that privileged white people have been engaging in for a long, long time. And they're so engorged with their own privilege that they can't see that they're doing nothing but cranking out the shittiest form of pottery and, in the process, wrecking their own art. That's what I mean when I said above that the quality of thinking they exhibit keeps them from ever truly becoming artists.

My commenting on that to Dave led us to have an enormous fight, with Dave arguing from a kind of Stockhold Syndrome sufferer's vantage in which he defended the racist behavior and attacked me for being angry and antagonistic toward the people who perpetuate racism. Seriously. I don't know what kind of knot you have to be tied up into to defend racism, but it must be one of those Gordian types that one sees so often among racist thinkers these days.

I don't have the energy to explain why people of color get angry when they're confronted with racist behavior. (Should I have to explain this?)

Later, Dave asked me what I was going to do about it (What am I doing?? What are you doing?) and, with a sigh, I had to explain that, because I am a minority and a woman of color, even just putting myself in the situation where I am the sole person of color is my doing something about it. I'm tired of having to explain that I'm actually putting myself on the front line just by entering such a place.

Sigh.

I need to remind myself to go and watch this link to Jay Smooth's video "To Catch A Racist" before confronting racists. And to read Nezua's Glosario to remind myself that sanity is a real thing.

On the Way

2009-12-03T08:04:00.000-08:00

On the way to the final glaze firing, a few carved ornaments.

I'm trying out some new glazes, textured glazes. Most of this is done on what I call junk clay, clay that Dave had laying around. Since it was still soft enough to use, I used it. Unfortunately, some of it turned out to be a speckled clay called Appaloosa, which I don't like. Ah, well.

Studio Time

2009-11-27T03:30:00.000-08:00

I'm trying new and old things at the studio, doing as much as possible to prime the pump, so to speak. Some of it is good, most of it is not. But the important part is that I made it. I did it. I was working, always working on it.

This is a blurry picture of a fat little robot being with carved features:

This is the detail on a box that I smushed together:

This is a larger-ish view of the same box:

The rate at which work moves is an important one, I think. If you are an artist or a craftsperson, that's what you should be doing is creating art, crafting. If you are just planning or just thinking or just talking about it, then you are not an artist or a craftsperson, you are a planner. You are a thinker. You are a talker. You are not an artist because you are not working on art.

That said, I'm always working. Always. Studio time is very important and for the most part I want not to squander it. If I'm not working, I'm preparing to work or I'm cleaning up after working. Because to me, that is what it means to be an artist.

The hands and the clay relate in ways that only ever let me and The Brain tag along. That's good.

The Gift of Complexity

2009-11-23T02:39:00.000-08:00

My return to the studio has been relatively smooth, happily, though there have been a couple of bumps in the road. If you've never worked in a communal studio that is open to any paying member (or, indeed, been the member of any group that purports to have a common goal), you'll know what I'm talking about. There's always that one person who is so ridiculously clueless, no? Or who is not particularly serious. Or who can't imagine--and think you agree--that they aren't the center of the universe.

So there's that.

But this makes it so worth it:

Paradise, right? Well, yes, it is. That's not a joke. As far as I'm concerned, that is a pretty luxe set up as far as spaces in which one can teach oneself how to be happy.

Right now, I'm handbuilding. (I can throw pots on a wheel, but I never much enjoyed doing it. Everything was too wet and too cold and all the results were always too round. I knew when I began learning how to throw that The Brain wasn't going to put up with that for very long, and I was right. We stuck around long enough for our first throwing teacher, Martin, to teach us two things:

One was that when we did finally manage to make a bowl that we really liked, we should take our wire tool and cut it in half. "One," he said, "it'll get you used to losing them. Which you'll be doing. A lot. And, two, it'll let you see how a bowl that you like is made. How thin or thick the walls are and how they curve up."

The other thing Martin taught us was that we should never throw bowls with the intention of improving them at the trimming stage. "Don't try and carve a bowl out of what you threw," he said, grimly.

But, Martin, I like carving!)

This, for example, is one of my carved Christmas ornaments. Yes, it's a squid. Yes, The Brain thinks a Christmas squid is just the thing. (Other Xmas ornament motifs approved by The Brain: a flounder, a kitty, a skeleton in a Santa Hat, a jellyfish, The Venus of Willendorf.) It's not my finest carving, but I'm still finding my way back to whatever limited skill I had when I put down my carving tools almost five years ago.

Another thing I'm working on, carved frames for mixed media pieces:

This one is called "The Gift of Complexity." (When I'm finished, I usually carve a few words that come to mind on the back of the piece and that's what came to mind when I finished my little coconutty baby there.)

These little frames are made from a bag of Dave's old clay that I rolled out with my old rolling pin and cut into discs with a 3-inch round cookie cutter that I bought while estate sale-ing with Kelly First. (I know in my bones that the old woman who owned that cookie cutter used it to make biscochitos. I know it the way I know any true thing; I know it with my heart.) I didn't plan for those little clay discs to become what they became. They suggested it to me after they reached the stage where carving them made sense.

Yes, The Brain and I have come to the understanding that the clay has the larger hand in what it eventually becomes. Yes, I have tools to work the clay, but most of the time, it is the clay using its tools--me and The Brain--to get to where it wants to go. That is the most pleasurable thing about working with clay for me.

That leads me to something else:

A few nights ago at the studio, I spurned working in favor of talking with Dave and Mike. Somehow, our discussion came around to the online dating service they use, and I asked Mike if I could look at his profile. He agreed so we used the computer at the studio to look at the site. On his profile, Mike was talking about his likes and dislikes and all that stuff that you put on a dating profile, and one of the terms that he used was "my art." (As in, "I like to spend time working on my art.")

Now I don't know about you, but the phrase "my art" makes me cringe and feel embarrassed for the person using it. (Which I told Mike, which I suggested that he change, which he did change.) Here's why: There is no such thing as ownership of art. Art is a thing that exists in and of itself, outside of your efforts, outside of your attention. To refer to art as "my art" is as silly as referring to the universe as "my universe." ("I live in my universe"? Ugh. Self-centered. Delusional.) At best, you learn with time and effort how to tap into the force that is art, but does that make it yours? No. Does that mean you're actually creating art when you put forth the time and effort? No.

Trust me, I have lots to say about that, but I'll stop there. Except for this:

Art is not something you own, not even through doing; Art is something that, if you become skilled enough, may eventually deign to own you.

My Backside!

2009-09-12T23:17:00.000-07:00

That's my backside! The backside of my frog embroidery, that is.

When I embroider, I don't worry about the backside--much. I worry, when I embroider towels, about stiching so that traveling stitches won't snag on anything. (Traveling stitches are the stitches on the back that get you from one part of the embroidery to the other. You can see a lot of them in that photo, mostly in blue.) I sometimes worry about a dark color showing through the light colored fabric. But that's it.

Some stitchers never make knots because it makes the front kind of lumpy. There are a number of advanced techniques that allow you to begin and end without tying knots. But I don't care about that. I like making knots and they're useful, so I make them. Some stitchers are so careful that their backsides look almost the same as their fronts. I don't care about that either.

When I was a little girl, one of the things I loved most about the embroidered kitchen towels that my grandmother had was, yes, that they were well-used and useful things, but that they bore the mark of the maker. In an increasingly manufactured landscape, these were things that someone had taken the time to beautify by hand, and even as a little girl that impressed me. Turning them over to examine their backsides was part of the wonderfulness of the thing.

Freaky Frog Vintage Embroidery Pattern

2009-09-09T16:12:00.000-07:00

Ah, back to basics. Like embroidery. Like this freaky frog embroidery that is based on one of the vintage patterns that Kelly First scored at an estate sale and passed on to me:

That's the original pattern. Look at that freaky thing. He looks like he wants to slip you a roofied martini and take you back to his pad. (Get it? Like his lily pad.)

(Well, I thought it was funny.)

Anyway, because I wanted to preserve the original pattern, I didn't iron it on. Instead, I photocopied the pattern on our printer and then used the graphite method of transferring it to the napkin I wanted to embroider.

Have you done that graphite transfer thing? No? Here's how I did it: I cut out the pattern (very roughly), coated the back with a very soft drawing pencil. Then turned the pattern over onto the napkin and traced over it, which transferred the pattern.

It didn't leave a very heavy mark, so I went over it with my blue marking pen.

Then I embroidered it. It took about an hour to complete.

I like him. He's freaky.

Creative Me

2009-08-26T18:13:00.001-07:00

Some of the things I believe about creativity:

my work/space

I am a creative person and furthermore I believe that most people are creative, too. Call it the Creative Bias.

polymer clay jewelry blanks

I like to create things and to wrestle with the act of creation. I like the how as much as I like the why or the what. As far as creativity is concerned, where? and when? are always answered with here and now.

hand-painted ofrenda

I am fond of the Picasso quote: "Inspiration exists, but it must find you working."

embroidered bacterium

Building castles in the air, in other words, is not a creative act. It is an anti-creative act.

hamsa shrinky dink charms

So get to work!

Casting About

2009-08-17T20:18:00.000-07:00

I jarred my 2003-2004 altar. That is, I literally packed up the altar into a small jar.

It's been in storage for a few years, but I unjarred it yesterday to use it in resin cast pieces.

There were feathers and dice and old leaves in there. There was a string of vertebrae, chicken I think. There were beads and some clay calavera ornaments I made. There were fortunes from fortune cookies, screws and bolts I used to pick up on my walk to school. There was a plastic turtle.

This is one of the pieces I made using polymer clay, bones, watch parts, and miniature glass beads.

Here's Dave, casting some of his own stuff. We tried out two kinds of resin, a polyester resin and a polyacrylamide resin. Both are quite toxic. The smell gave me a headache even though we were working outdoors.

Ah, this is another piece, this one made of polymer clay, acrylic paint, photographs, and bones.

Altered Books

2009-07-31T21:19:00.001-07:00

This is aaaaalllmost finished. It's at the point where I know it needs some finishing details, but I don't know exactly what they are and if I do too much it'll end up being...wrong. So I don't know.

Limited Success!

2009-07-23T04:56:00.000-07:00

I've been meeting with limited success recently with the pieces I've been making.

I like these woven pieces (I've made two), though I'm not sure where they're going. I'm thinking of adding a cut paper design to them, and last night I did my first cut paper piece (which I won't show because it is not very good). I found an child-like elephant online at Sarah Jane Studios that I like and may try to recreate to add to this piece. Or perhaps an octopus. I like octopuses. I think they would read if they could.

This medallion was made from my old journals, just folding and gluing half-inch strips of paper.

I think I'll add a pinback to it. I don't wear pins, but I like them, so maybe I'll start.

This is one of my mixed media shrines, made from an internet-harvested image of Frida Kahlo, my old journals, and text from an old paperback book.

The text reads: "The one thing I was afraid of was that you'd walk out like everybody else has."

This, the strangest of my mixed media pieces, is also my favorite.

It's an image of a married couple that I cut from a tourist-oriented magazine, text from two different paperback books (one a science fiction novel, one a non-fiction book about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and my old journals.

Shrines and Discovery

2009-07-19T19:35:00.000-07:00

I'm still on a kick to make something or somethings--some art--out of my old journals. This is the next thing:

It's a tiny little shrine made out of one-inch squares cut from pages from my old journals, a Catrina that I found online, some glass marbles, and a resin-ish product that goes on cloudy (as it is in that photo) and dries clear, as it did in this, the first layer of the shrine.

I don't know why I call them shrines, except that I want them to be shrines. I'd like, eventually, to incorporate things that are important to me, but what those things are, I have yet to discover.

Personal and Transformational

2009-07-14T21:29:00.000-07:00

What part does art/craft play in personal transformation? For me, it's essential. What part does journaling play in personal transformation? For me, it's essential. What do art/craft and journaling have to do with each other?

These simple bracelets are made from paper beads that I made out of my old journals. There is something to be said for paper blogging. It provides fodder, eventually.

Glass Marble Magnets

2009-07-11T14:59:00.000-07:00

I must be the last craftster on the planet to try my hand at these magnets made from magazine cut outs and the glass marbles from the floral department at the craft store. They're all over the place, have been for years, but I took my cues from Not Martha's tutorial.

I used images from some of the magazines that Kelly First donated to the cause.

It's a fun project, and easy, though it takes a lot of patience to cut out all those little pictures. Some craftsters use a 1/2 inch paper punch, but I'm a masochist, so I cut mine out by hand. Then there's the gluing part. I used Mod Podge Hard Coat, but some others online use E-6000 which is seriously fine stuff, but which smells like it's going to burn the hair out of your nose and destroy all your useful brain cells. Other people use silicon glue. I had Mod Podge on hand, so I used it.

That's Helena Christiansen's giant Photoshop-enhanced eye. Glorious, no?
That's a lovely black and white hand from a Harper's fashion layout.

I like these crazy little things!

Paper Bead Tutorial

2009-07-09T12:41:00.000-07:00

I'm not much of a technical writer, but I wanted to document this--my--way of making very basic paper beads.

Here are the ingredients:

This is scrapbook paper I purchased at Target. It's pretty thick and hard to wrangle. I would suggest that you try some thinner paper first, like magazine pages or newspaper.

I prefer to use already used paper, but I'll mix it up when I feel like it; I've used paper from paperback books, origami paper, magazines and newspaper. I like using paperback books best, but the stark black-and-white print on this scrapbook paper appeals to me, though most of the pattern is going to be lost when the beads are rolled up.

Toothpicks. You don't have to use round ones, you can use square ones. Or you can use none at all. (You can just make a tiny 1/16 inch fold at the end and start rolling the paper from there.) Or you can use a chopstick or the handle of a small paint brush. I like using toothpicks because you can stick the rolled bead into a block of styrofoam to dry. (If you don't use toothpicks at all, I would suggest laying the beads down on some wax paper while the glue dries. The wax paper won't stick to your glue. Mostly.)

You will need glue. I like this Scotch Wrinkle-free Glue Stick because it really is wrinkle free. I suppose it's wrinkle free because it has a low moisture content which, as you will see in a moment, is not always a good thing. But it's what I have around. (I've also used Aleene's Tacky Glue, and I like that, too.)

A Styrofoam block. This is a bit from some old packing material. I tried using florists' foam, but it disintegrated as I used it and left little bits of itself in the varnish. That made me sad.

A papercutter. This is also not strictly necessary. I also like to cut the paper freehand with scissors. It depends on how precise you feel like being.

This does cut some nice 3/4 inch strips of paper.

Those strips can be cut from one corner to the opposite corner to make long triangles.

I don't cut too much paper at once. I have a short attention span, so this is about my limit for bead rolling for one kind of paper. I expected to make eight beads from this, but I actually got ten.

The long triangles, by the way, make the bead shape on the left. The rectangular strips make the bead shape on the right. I like them both.

After you cut your paper, roll a bit around the toothpick and then lay down some glue on the end of the strip. I probably cover about 3/4 of the strip with glue, roll, roll, roll, then add more glue to the last 1/10th of the strip, the very end, just in case. Then I hold the end in place for a bit.

If I don't feel like holding it in place, I put one toothpick next to it, to keep the end from unwinding. (This doesn't happen as often with the long triangle beads as it does with the rectangular beads.) Glue with a higher moisture content seems to lessen the chance of the bead unraveling while it dries. I imagine it's because the water in the glue "remakes" the paper a bit, so it curls better at the end.

Simple, no?

I made a forest of beads. Well, I made ten beads anyway.

Oh! Right. The eight to ten thing: So, scrapbook paper is pretty thick, and when I wound up the rectangular beads, they too were pretty thick (in diameter). Because I don't want them to be terribly thick, I cut the long strips into shorter strips (halved them, to be exact) and made the beads from the shorter strips. Only, since I had already rolled up one thick bead and it needed a partner (I use the beads to make earrings), I rolled two thick beads and four thin ones (and four triangle ones).

A note about varnishing the beads:

You can varnish them if you want them to last longer. I use Duncan indoor/outdoor waterbased varnish (or just the indoor stuff, which has a slightly more matte finish). I don't use Mod Podge, but I suppose you could. Some people just use glue, but I think it leaves them a bit tacky (not as in bad taste, but as in sticky) and then the beads stick together when I store them.

I put on 2 - 6 coats of varnish, paying attention to the edges. I wait until the last coat doesn't feel tacky anymore (20 - 60 minutes, or whenever I think of it.) I usually let the varnish dry for a couple of hours at the end.

So that's it!

Update:

Check this out:

That's a "Craft Star" that I got from the folks at Craftsource (if you click the picture, it'll take you to their site). I think I also got three wishes with it, but I'm not exactly sure how that works.

Playing With Paper

2009-07-08T12:55:00.000-07:00

Today I'm playing with paper.

These are a couple of collages that I did on scrapbook paper using images cut from old magazines. They'll be turned into small stab-bound journals.

The text on this says: "I look back at the time before and think how self-centered my life was. Then when I knew what was wrong, I grieved for my own dreams." The flamingo is from an tourist ad for Florida. The "egg" is from a jewelry ad.

This is a bit of a small collage on watercolor paper. The work was inspired by Kathy Cano-Murillo, the Crafty Chica.

Robot T-Shirt Stencils

2009-07-06T22:13:00.000-07:00

Plain white t-shirts, masking tape, scissors, and fabric markers.

Happy Birthday, Dave!

As Long As You Ever Can

2009-07-05T10:46:00.000-07:00

I don't know when my Grandma Josie embroidered this pillow. I suspect it was not too many years before she died, when her eyesight was failing but before she had to switch over to "embroidering" with fabric paint because she couldn't see well enough to thread the needles.

This is the complete pillow with the ruffled edge that she sewed on.

Here are some details.

Red strawberries with purple seeds and pink and purple flowers.

Sunflower detail with a filler stitch.

Roses, worked in reddish-orange and a pinkish-red.

I wouldn't necessarily say that I come from a crafty family, although my grandmother, mother, and I all do some sort of needlework, with my mother being the most industrious.

Unhappiness & Dissatisfaction As Inspiration

2009-07-02T18:20:00.000-07:00

Creativity Takes Courage

I'm not entirely happy with these earrings that I made.

Yes, they're mismatched on purpose. I used origami paper beads that I made myself, and glass beads and metal findings that I purchased. My intention was to make big, Latina Chica chandelier earrings. That was what I set out to do.

But I'm not happy with these. They're...missing something. They're just not elaborate enough and they're too visually heavy. So there's that. But here's the thing:

I'm happy to be unhappy with them.

Huh?!

I'm more happy being unhappy with something than I am being happy with something. Does that make sense? When I'm happy with something, that's the end of it, but when I'm unhappy with something, there's opportunity there. I'm not happy with these earrings, so I have the opportunity to go forward and explore ways to make them better, to make them into something that I am happy with. I'm very comfortable, in other words, with being dissatisfied with the process.

So as in art, so as in life.

Heaven

2009-06-24T22:09:00.001-07:00

I know what heaven looks like.

It looks like this tiny corner of my work space.

It looks like hours of uninterrupted time to work on what presents itself.

It looks like paper and glue and scissors and paint and it smells like Sharpie Markers and varnish.

It looks like this cluttered, messy space that allows me to clear my mind and just work.

It looks like a place where nothing could ever get done.

And where everything happens.

This is what heaven looks like to me.

What is your idea of heaven?'