Bittersweet Graduation

The studios are empty.  The halls are quiet.  There is no one throwing wads of clay at the ceiling fan.  Finally, things have calmed down from this crazy last semester at the Hartford Art School and the class of 2012 has graduated.

These past four years have flown by so quickly, but I expected they would.  I've been dreading graduation since freshman year knowing that this university would become a favorite place to be and to develop as a person and as an artist.  I've met many great individuals who've become my closest friends and it's also the place where I was first introduced to my love, George.  The University of Hartford had many firsts for me: first acceptance into a juried show, first time traveling abroad, first experience doing laundry, and first time staying awake all night to finish work to name a few.  I will miss the faculty and staff who've helped me develop who I have become today and will continue to guide me as I fly off from my undergraduate career. 

Graduation was a rush.  With such a packed family weekend with a wedding the day before and health problems to attend to of someone close to me, I barely had time to comprehend what was going on.  Line up.  Roll call.  Here!  Walk.  Sit.  Stand.  Get your diploma.  Shake the hand of Tom Bradley, the Assoc. Dean of the Hartford Art School.  Graduated.  Graduation is not the time or place to properly say goodbye to your friends.  With the crowd of family members from every graduate in the lawn and faculty dispersed throughout, I know that I didn't get to give hugs to some people before they left for who-knows-where.  I've know some friends for my entire four years here and some of the faculty have also become some of my best mentors, valuing their guidance and advice like religious scripture.  I'm still waiting for the moment when I fully comprehend graduation.

Although my time here at the Hartford Art School has sadly come to a close, I'm looking ahead to my future.  I want to continue making art and meeting new people.  I never want to stop learning or stop creating.  Things will not be easy as an artist, I know that, but I welcome the challenge.  Something that I've picked up at the H.A.S. is passion and drive with a side of confidence.  I will work hard for for something greater, always trying to make the next piece better than the last.  Through mistake and failures comes education and success.  Even if I don't make it to where I want to be right away, I will not be deterred.

In the near future I'm looking for positions within ceramic programs that I can become a part of or finding an art related job and continue to produce work at a local studio.  I'll be moving to Boston in September and trying to make it.  Boston is a tough city for arts since there are many old rich families here that already have their homes filled but there is a small new market that perhaps I can fit myself into.  I don't know how long I will be in this city but I plan on making the best of it.  What else can you do? 

Snow Apocalypse

A freak storm blasted its way through Connecticut and Massachusetts a couple days before Halloween.  With it, it brought heavy, wet snow that toppled trees already heavy with foliage.  Its been said that we may have gotten well over a foot of this wet snow.  Trees and limbs came crashing down, taking power lines with them, damaging cars and houses, and blocking roads.  I think I heard something like 90% of Connecticut without power.  We lost power at my apartment on Saturday, last Saturday that is, and it was finally restored yesterday morning, Monday.  That's a total of nine days without electricity and heat.

The second day without power at my apartment, I fled to Boston with George, who was with me in West Hartford for the Halloween weekend.  We were zombies.  However, when leaving West Hartford, I had no gas in my car and we had to fill it up before getting on our way.  The problem was that entire towns were without power and the gas stations were affected too.  I've never had to wait more than two cars in line for gas.  This time George and I waited in a line that continued down the street more than two dozen cars in length.  The gas station had run out of gas when we were about 10 cars in line.  We drove to another and waited again in a long car pileup.  Luckily we got a little gas before they too ran out and made it safely to Boston.

George and I as zombies.  I did the makeup for us.  I was actually a zombie from the 80s to be more clear.

I packed a total of three outfits, including one I was already wearing.  Only one pair of jeans.  I only expected to be without power for maybe three days, but I was wrong.  The University of Hartford canceled classes for the entire week as 1700 students were without power and displaced from campus.  Gyms, libraries, and other large community centers opened their doors for people to warm up, shower, and charge their cell phones and laptops.  The mall looked like a refugee camp.

I ended up spending the entire week in Boston with George.  While I'll admit it was a welcomed break from working in the studio, I couldn't help at being frustrated at this waste of valuable time.  So much can happen in a week in the ceramics studio.  This is a crucial time for the ceramic majors to be producing work for the Holiday Sale opening on December 2nd.  A lot of us depend on the sale of our ceramic work during this time so that we can afford to go to the NCECA conference at the end of March.  And of course cash is always welcomed in a student's bank account.

While George was at work for the week, I had the whole apartment and Boston to myself.  I spent this time catching up on sleep, cleaning the gross apartment shared by George and two other guys, cooking, watching TV shows and movies on Netflix, and dabbling in some painting.  There is a large art supply store right next to George's apartment where I found many many supplies that I both needed and wanted (way too many for me to afford much).  I picked up a small set of gouache paints, some nice watercolor brushes to use for regular painting and ceramic glazing, and some aquaboards, which are hard panels with a special coating on them that work best for watercolors and gouache.  It was really nice to simply paint again.  I lover ceramics but that does not mean clay is my only love!  Originally I fully intended to be a painting major at the Hartford Art School.  However, after taking a couple ceramics courses, I fell in love with clay and the ceramic making process.  I never lost my enjoyment of painting and drawing.  To put it simply, I switched majors because I believe that I have a good understanding of painting but when it comes to ceramics, I knew very little.  In this short time as a ceramics major, I have gained such an incredible amount of knowledge of the complex world of ceramics.  I do not regret my decision at all.

As a senior now, I have almost unrestricted freedom to do whatever the hell I want.  I realized towards the end of last semester as a junior that I do miss painting.  I want to combine the two and the best solution I have come up with is majolica.  You have seen my majolica work in my latest blog entry online.

Anyways, now I'm back in West Hartford.  Classes were canceled again yesterday but the art school was still open.  It's hard to get back into a normal schedule and to get motivated again to complete new work.  Everyone has been affected by this freak and unpredictable storm.  It will probably be a week before complete normalcy returns.

Until next time, stay warm.

Stress makes my face break out...

A sneak peek of some of my recent work!

Across campus, it's the week of mid-terms.  Usually this is a stressful time for many students as they are trying to cram in last minute study sessions before an exam.  I, however, have been able to be back at my apartment by 7:15pm this evening after some leisurely hunting in the grocery store for great deals and clutching my Big Y gold coin like it was actual precious metal (I found an incredible deal on pistachios with a gold coin!).  I was able to do this and make food for the next day because I'm a ceramics major.  Compared to other art majors, ceramics requires weeks and weeks of preparation and planning to have work completely finished by a deadline.  Because of this planning, I have everything thing done in advanced before it's due.  This is compared to a drawing or painting that I could work on until the last five minutes before a critique.  I was even fortunate enough to think that my critique for advanced ceramics was two days earlier than it actually is!  After class today I went to the gym today, took a run around campus, shaved my legs, and enjoyed some hot cock-a-leekie soup that I made with my love this past weekend.  I feel so liberated and relatively stress-free...for now.

Going back to what I said earlier, some of you may not think that that getting back to my apartment at 7:15pm isn't something to celebrate, especially since I typically arrive at school between 8:00-8:30am every morning.  However, for over the past few weeks, I have been INCREDIBLY busy.  I can't recall a more stressful time in my life so far.  The past two weeks especially, I've been pulling many late nights, sometimes not getting home until midnight, the latest being 3:30am.  I would then sleep a maximum of 7 hours, one time 5 hours two nights in a row.  It was not healthy.  I was able to actually watch my immune system break down in front of my eyes one evening and I threw in the white flag that night and slept for 11 hours straight.  I was only at my apartment to sleep, shower, and eat breakfast.  The entire rest of the day was spent at my studio.

You may be asking yourself why?  Although I may be free right now, ironically, during the week of mid-terms, the process of making ceramic work is demanding.  I believe I've talked previously about what I do in the studio but in short, I have to make, test, and fire everything I create.

I think in pictures I can explain this the best.

In process shot of making a plaster mold.  I already cast the first side and I'm preparing to cast the other.

I'm taking a mold making class and we had to make four molds of cups: one that we make out of clay, an object that we found, a natural wood/vegetable object, and a machined wood prototype.  For each mold, I must solve the problem of how best to cast the object.  Each one is different.  Some have undercuts that I have to consider or a lot of texture that could be problematic when casting.  The maximum amount of pieces to a mold I have is four but someone in my class has a seven piece mold.  For each piece, you have to block of sections with clay, make key holes, brush on a mold-release soap on the surface of the object and on the plaster so it doesn't stick, clamp the piece in place with wood boards (you see me using them below), line the edges with clay so it doesn't leak, mix up a small batch of plaster, and finally pour it and pray that it doesn't leak or cause any problems when you go to open it later.

I use boards to prevent the plaster from pouring out everywhere.  You can see that I just poured this plaster.

I had a few technical difficulties with a couple of my pieces but nothing TOO terrible.  I can't really complain.  I was able to make molds of all of my cups, even if I don't like one it's at least done.  My professor also asked that we make casting slip and make four casts of each cup, totally 16 cups.  I lost a lot of pieces because I tried to take the mold apart before the casting slip was dry enough and I ended up splitting the piece inside.

To make a cast, you hold your plaster mold together with either a large rubber band or belt and pour in casting slip (basically watery clay with some sodium silicate in the recipe so that it's plastic with less water).  The plaster will absorb the water from the casting slip and will start to create a wall.  You can see this wall by either blowing on the edge revealing the thickness of the wall or by gently shaking it.  Since the plaster is absorbing all of this water, the level of the casting slip drops and I refill it up the top constantly throughout this casting process.  When I deem the thickness of the cast is appropriate, I pour out the liquid slip back into my bucket of casting slip which I later re-mix and use again.  Just waiting for the slip to be thick enough can take between 35 minutes to well over an hour depending on the mold and slip I'm using.  After the extra slip is poured out, I then wait again until the slip is dry and stable enough for me to release it from the plaster mold by taking it apart.  Every mold is different.  Some I can release within an hour and others I have to wait at least 2 or 3 hours.

Part of a tree section I cut and a perfect wood piece that acts as the handle that I found outside the ceramics building.

This is one of the pieces I've cast.  I stumbled across this interesting chunk of wood outside and almost stepped on this absolutely perfect curved piece that is the handle to this mug.   I had to make plaster molds of the cup and handle separately and then I attach the two pieces together when they come out of their molds.  This is by far my favorite mold and it's surprisingly one of the easiest molds I have when it comes to releasing the cast from the mold.

The banana is for size comparison.

I've also been concentrating on low-fire terra cotta work.  I'm working on a small series of work where my forms are jars and my surface treatment is majolica.  The photo above is the largest surviving piece I've thrown.  You will see it completely finished further below.

This is what has been keeping me up late at night.  This terra cotta pictured above has a large percentage of sand in the recipe.  I did not think of how the sand would feel on my hands when I was making the clay.  After hours of throwing, the sand would make my hands raw.  After days and days of throwing with the clay, I could feel it removing layers of skin from my hands and it became incredibly painful to throw.  I absolutely had to stop working with this clay for the time being since I had much more to throw and I created a new terra cotta recipe of my own design.

A small bowl made in the clay I designed.

If you compare the picture of this bowl above with the jar, you will see that there is a color difference.  I chose to make a darker terra cotta clay with no sand.  It's beautiful to throw with and the color is fantastic when I put majolica on it, which is a very thick and opaque white.

However, this bliss was about to end.  That huge jar a couple pictures up was thrown with 17 pounds of clay.  My teacher Matt Towers LOVED it and demanded more.  He wanted five large jars from me fully glazed and lustered by mid-term (this Thursday).  So I agreed and began to throw more large jars.

I hit a string of bad luck.  I made 200 pounds of this new clay I designed very wet in hopes that it would become plastic more quickly.  I was throwing between 13 and 17 pounds of clay.  It was an entire body workout.  I would throw a cylinder close to 22 inches tall, have my arm past my elbow in a piece...and I would lose it.  There would be a slight wobble in the clay, an air bubble perhaps, which just increased in intensity the further I pushed the clay.  My work would collapse right in my hands.  In agony I would tear the clay off my pottery wheel, slam it on the plaster table next to me, weigh out another 15 pounds of clay and begin again.  This happened to me three times in a row.  Mind you it took me half an hour just to center each piece of clay before I even began to throw.

A few large pieces did make it though.  But I'm hit again.  While trimming one piece, I go right through the bottom.  Another one mysteriously forms long horizontal cracks along the belly and falls apart.  Another one just recently formed severe cracks and broke while during the majolica glaze firing.

I then gave up entirely on the big jars and made tiny jars just so that I would have work to show for the mid-term critique of all of the senior major's work.  I was feeling so frustrated that I was spending days and nights in the studio with hardly anything to show for it.

My glaze is also not satisfactory for me.  My majolica is pin holing and you can see it in some of the photos.  Although I don't think it detracts from the subject of each piece, it is a technical difficulty that I have to work out right now.  I'll be testing new batches of glaze in the coming week.

Surprisingly I do have some work!  I'm simply exhausted from all of this typing and I really just want to get some sleep.  Here are a ton of photos for you to enjoy!

"Resentment" Terra cotta, majolica, luster. Small jar.

"Crazy Hair Day" terra cotta, majolica, luster. Small jar.

The back of each of the two small jars.

"Fall from Before" terra cotta, majolica, luster.  Large jar (you saw this one above!)

"The Coming Departure" terra cotta, majolica, luster

"The Coming Departure" (reverse side)

Detail shot of "The Coming Departure"

"Flowers of Cortona" wood-fired porcelain with black slip.

"Breaking Boundaries"

Painting by an eight-year-old - Thanks Dad for the photo!

As I've said before, this summer I was a childrens art teacher.  Parents would sign up their child for a week of camp at a time Monday thru Friday 9-4pm everyday.  Each week was a different theme, such as acrylic painting, ceramic sculpture and potter wheel, mosaic furniture, plaster mache animals, and others.  At the end of the program, the Village Center for the Arts host an art show of the work that was produced during the summer.  It's a fabulous event for the kids to come with their parents all dressed up and really feel like artists at their own show opening.  The opening was this past Saturday, September 10th and many, many people showed up and it was great to see all of my students again.

This took her most of the week to complete.

I'm very proud to have worked and continue to work at the Village Center for the Arts.  At times it's very trying and stressful but the end result of happy faces and beautiful art work is worth it.  I get to give children a taste of real art making and I push them to think outside of the boundaries to create something unique and meaningful to them.  More importantly, the student's walk away from the VCA with new knowledge that they will hopefully keep with them for years to come.  We, at the VCA, would rather student's work thru problems and difficulties than do something they are already comfortable in doing.  There would be no growth if people did not try new ways of doing things and learning something in the process. 

This coming summer will most likely be my last year working there.  It's sad to think about but I'm also ready to move on to a new community.  The VCA will figure out a way to continue as they always do and I will continue experimenting and producing work.  Hopefully one day I will get my Masters of Ceramics and have the lucky position of being a university ceramics professor.  I love learning and I really just want to keep on taking classes for the rest of my life and never leave.  I love the environment of being in my studio surrounded by other people who are just as passionate about their work and art making as I am.  We ceramics majors feed off of the energy of everyone else and it feels so comfortable here in the ceramics building. 

This was made by a nine-year-old.  His favorite thing to do with this is to stick his whole arm in the mouth of the turtle.

So as I say farewell to the Village Center for the Arts for the next nine months I embrace the mess of the clay, the heat of the kilns, the long hours of hard labor, and the dry skin that always accompanies this art making process.  - Until next time!

Getting Back to the Grind

My studio space before the havoc of senior year starts

I'm back at the University of Hartford for my final year of college and I'm still debating whether or not I should be happy or sad about this.  I still remember my first few days on campus freshman year learning where my classes were, working on my first assignments, adjusting to living with a roommate, trying to make sure I wouldn't go eat food by myself on campus for fear of looking like a loner, and doing the first load of laundry of my life.  Time does fly but I feel as though I've really matured and my work has progressed greatly in that time and I do not linger on the past as I begin my last year.  I'm still unsure of who I am as an artist still but I know it will come in time.  All I can do now is practically live in my studio space and just keep producing work.  My teacher Matt Towers told us on the first day to jump in and just make something, anything, even if you don't even know what to make.  This will be my busiest year yet as I prepare for my senior show at the end of the school year in April or May.

These are the courses I am taking this Fall 2011 semester:

• Advanced Ceramics I:  This is the senior class for all ceramics majors.  There are 6, potentially 7, of us total.  We ask ourselves what direction we want to work in and are guided by our professor Matt Towers who gives us instruction, questions our thinking, pushes us more than we want, and critiques our work on conception as well as craftsmanship and dedication.  You can think of this class as a trial and error situation where I will be experimenting with different clays, glazes, and sculpting and throwing functional vessels.
• Mold Making & Slip Casting:  In this class I will be further my education of plaster molds.  I will develop clay, found object, and wood prototypes and then make plaster molds of them.  From there I can pour slip, which is liquefied clay, into the empty cavity in the plaster mold left from the prototype and get an exact duplicate of whatever I made.  I have to account for a 10-12% shrinkage rate of my clay after firing so I have to make my prototypes larger then what I want the final object to be.
• Glaze Calc:  This class is two parts with one consisting of a lecture and the other of working in the glaze lab.  I will learn the chemical composition of clay and the many different variations and from there develop my own clay body.  I will be taught what ingredients in glaze make them melt at certain temperatures, what causes glazes to be opaque or translucent, what actually happens to clay inside a kiln, etc.  In the lab we will create hundreds of test tiles to test clay bodies, glazes, and slips and discuss the results after each firing.
• Introduction to Pyschology:  Not a ceramics class obviously but one nonetheless that I'm very excited about.  I've always been intrigued about how the brain physically works, how the mind stores information, how we memorize things, what happens in the unconscious part of the mind, everything!  It's already giving me wonderfully fantastic ideas for future sculptures.

I'm only taking those four classes so it may seem like I have plenty of free time, but let me make this clear: that is a fallacy.  I am at school from eight in the morning to no earlier than eight at night.  However I am not working twelve hours a day in my studio.  My ceramics classes meet twice a week and every class is three hours long.  I just started a new job at the Study Abroad office on campus for ten hours a week.  When I'm not in class or at my job, I am at the ceramics building.  I am doing things like throwing pots, making test tiles, making glazes, making clay, cleaning my studio space, trimming pots, sculpting, glazing my work, loading/firing/unloading/cleaning kilns, making/eating food, hanging out with my classmates, researching ceramic artists, reading books, wishing I could take a nap, listening to music, doing work for our clay club, and browsing the internet on my laptop.  There is always something to be done so the possibility of boredom does not exist.  I've learned the past three years that the only way I can get work done is if I am actually in my studio space for extended amounts of time (surprise!) so I spend as much time as my body will allow me everyday to produce work. 

Some small boxes.

My work isn't without injuries so far.  I hurt my back last week lifting clay upstairs so I've been taking it slower than I normally would and on top of that I banged up my big toe real bad when a couple large wooden boards fell on it.  I also received a lovely splinter of wood under my thumb nail last night while pushing a plate I made farther back on one of my shelves. 

It's in the works.

Right now I'm working on a few things.  For my mold making class, I'm producing a line of cocktail dress cocktail cups.  I will slip cast a basic dress vessel that I threw and then alter each piece as it comes out of the mold by adding details such as buttons, lace, bows and sashes.  I will then glaze and decorate the surface of each differently.  For my advanced class I'm working on two different projects.  I still haven't decided to work on figure sculpture or on functional vessels.  Matt Towers told me to work on both simultaneously and said that eventually one will pull me more than the other and I just have to go with it.  I'm creating a series of cylinder boxes with different handles as well as plates and other functional dinnerware pieces.  I will use underglazes for my high-fire work (porcelains) and majolica for my low-fire (terra cotta) work so create a painterly surface consisting of patterns and narrative paintings.  I'm also working on a small scale figure sculpture of a woman from just under the bust and up in a relaxed pose as if she's leaning on a table and supporting her head with just the tips of her fingers from one hand with the other resting on the table.  I'm not sure what I will do for surface treatment yet.  Glaze calc hasn't given me much work yet except to just make a couple test tiles for an ingredient called Grolleg, which is a substance that is derived from granite from millions of years of erosion.  It's very fine and pure and used in most all porcelain bodies.  It's very glass-like when fired and I'm testing the shrinkage rate by drawing a 10cm line on a slab of clay and it's being fired in a kiln as we speak.  When it comes out of the kiln I can measure that line and see how much it shrank.

It's getting late and I must get some sleep tonight for I have to be back early in the morning, probably before eight again, to start raising the temperature of some kilns that have candling right now (that means that have the kilns on low so nothing blows up and I'll start to jack up the temperature in the morning and finish firing by the evening).  I vow to write more blogs soon so have some faith and come back for more!

So much work, so little time

Hello all, I'm back from the dead!  Camp has started since last I posted and it's keeping me very busy.  I work at the Village Center for the Arts five days a week from 8am-4:30pm.  This week's theme is pottery wheel and sculpture and we have 17 kids enrolled!  That's three more than the maximum we have for pottery wheel weeks and it's hectic.  I even teach private pottery wheel lessons after camp some days and today was one of those days as well.  So my schedule for today was 7:30-4:30pm clay camp, 4:30-7:00pm private pottery wheel lesson, and when I got home I worked on my own private ceramic projects in a studio I set up in my basement.  SO MUCH CLAY.

Working at the VCA is difficult and trying at times but rewarding in the end.  I teach children between the ages of 7-14 various media depending on the theme of the week.  There's a huge range of talent between the children in any given week and I have to be on my toes at all times.  I have a lot more appreciation for teachers, especially teachers for young children, than I did before I taught.  I enjoy it but at the same time I would really like to work with students who are older and who are most interested in art and conception.  I am so passionate about art that it is disheartening to watch children completely lose interest, destroy, laze about, and lack ambition when it comes to their project.  However, sometimes I do get a challenge and that is when I am most excited about working with a child.  I am there to teach them and when I get a chance to really make a powerful suggestion to make their project successful, it is entirely worth it.  As much as I love children, I could never make a career teaching them.

News Update:  If you haven't read into it by now, I have set up a small ceramics studio in my basement.  After taking over a corner, I finally organized most of my supplies and worked with my dad designing a plaster wedging board and a few storage shelves and table.  I have an electric wheel set up and now I'm producing work.  After a long day at work it's hard to jump right into the pottery wheel but I'm working in some time here and there.  With only a little over a month left of working time for the summer, I have a lot to accomplish on my quota.  I'll be posting some photos of my studio and the work I create throughout the summer.

Until next time!

Website Face Lift!

 

www.katielinke.com

I spent many hours yesterday working on bringing my website to clean and more organized look.  I still have to upload many new photos of my work but I thought I would give it a test run today.  Please check it out and let me know what you think!

With today's electronic world, it is essential for a striving artist to be active on the web and promote themselves to the general public.  I'm working on making my website also easy to navigate on smartphones and tablets so I can stay ahead of the game and get my name out there!

I am working on setting up a fully functional pottery studio in my basement right now.  I will have photos of my studio and work as it nears completion.  I begin working at the Village Center for the Arts this coming Monday and it will be the start of a very busy summer for me.  I will be working full time during the week, throwing pottery after work, and seeing my boyfriend on the weekends.  

Ready. Set. GO!