"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!