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!

Finished pieces

 

Teapot 1: Clay: Cone 10 VC Porcelain #1. Glaze: Sweet Sexy Chun Red Reduction. Slip casted and thrown form.

As you can see, the bottom of the teapot is broken.  The glaze I used is very runny and it ran so much that the glaze made a pool around my teapot and welded it to the shelf.  My professor knocked it off with a piece of wood and this is what remains.  The spout and handle were slip casted from a mold I hand-built. 

Teapot 2: Clay: Cone 10 VC Porcelain #1.  Glaze: Turquoise Celadon Reduction.  Slip casted and thrown pieces.

As much as I love this teapot, the lid is sadly welded to the top because a little glaze ran into the crevice.  Same handle and spout as previous teapot.

Untitled.  Clay: Cone 6 Porcelain.  No glaze.  Hand built pieces and original packaging.

Hand built McDonalds meal out of porcelain.   There is a previous post about this project but here is a more professional photo.

Rising.  Clay: Cone 04 White Stoneware.  Glaze:  Linda Arbuckle's Majolica.  Hand built.

This is my first figure sculpture.  She is half to three quarters life size and built hollow.  I was rushed into building this in three or four days when I would have ideally worked on it for a couple weeks to perfect it.  I learned a lot while building her and I cannot wait to start a new one to make it even better.

Where to even begin...

Yes, I'm still alive, thanks for asking.  The last couple of months have been extraordinarily busy and energy draining that I've been kept away from blogging, and I apologize.  On a good note, I have finished the spring semester of my junior year at the Hartford Art School!  Now, officially a senior, I am taking a summer workshop where I am learning how to construct a wood fired kiln.  The first day of class was today and will last only a couple of weeks, then I will finally be able to come home!  For how long, who knows, but I just need a few days rest!  I had my very first "lazy day" last week where I didn't even go to the ceramics studio but besides that, I am working constantly.  I'll give a couple more detailed posts about specific projects that I've completed shortly.

3800 mussels, 940 blades of grass, and 500 brown dots on my hands

My teacher, Dawn Holder, is having a show in Tampa, FL for this year's NCECA (National Council for the Education of Ceramic Arts), which is next weekend.  I have been one of her busy little helpers getting everything made for this show and I have to say...NO MORE MUSSELS! 

Theme provided by NCECA for about ten of these installation shows is migration.  Dawn's project is about these invasive mussels from China that are not inhabiting the waters near Tampa.  There will also be clusters of sea grass that are native to Tampa but are now invading Chinese waters.  These will be displayed in a ten by twenty foot gallery space.  She is also bringing with her giant logs that she will cover with clay and then place the mussels into the clay just as they could come out of mud in the water.    The picture on top shows these mussels with a coat of pearlescent glaze on them before firing and the picture on the bottom is after they have been fired.  To make these mussels, Dawn and I made press molds from actual mussels in plaster.  Then small bits of clay could be pressed into each mold and after the clay stiffens up a bit, the two halves can be attached.  Before being bisque fired, they are given three layers of color sliped, turquoise, brown, and black to imitate the natural colors of mussels.  Then after the bisque firing, they are dunked into glaze and given a final firing.  The same process was used for the blades of grass.  The small patches you see on the glazed mussels are where we had to wipe away some glaze on the bottom before putting them into the kiln because otherwise they would glue themselves to the kiln shelf.  That can latter be patched up with clear nail polish.  

I also noticed this the same day I was unloading the mussels.  I currently have many many brown dots the size of the head of a needle clustered on the tips of my thumb, index, and middle of my right hand with scattering every where else on my hand and palm with a small cluster also on my left hand in the pouch between my thumb and index finger.  These spots do not itch or wash off.  They seem to be embedded into my skin.  I was beginning to freak out a lot last night and wasted a couple hours researching online about what it could possibly be but I could not find an answer.  There are plenty of people online who have posted on forums that described exactly what you see in this photo but no one had a clear answer.  I showed this to my professors today and we have found the culprit: silver nitrate.  I was making a cone 10 in-glaze luster recipe with a couple other students for my surfaces class and I was handling toxic materials.  I'll pause for a moment and just say that I work with around materials that could harm my health and I especially have to be careful with the air that I breath and wear a respirator when I am adding particles to the air around me that could get in my lungs.  This glaze called for 50 grams of silver nitrate, which costs about $100 and comes in small 25 gram pill-like bottles.  I was wearing a respirator and goggles but for some reason I didn't wear gloves while opening these bottles and emptying them into the glaze buckets.  For the rest of the glaze making process where I was in direct contact with materials, I did wear gloves.  I guess since I thought that I wasn't actually touching the material inside that I wouldn't get any on me but there must have been traces of the material on the small jars.  Silver nitrate has real silver in it and it is toxic and corrosive (which I later found out by experience).  The metal can leave stains on skin and can even leave burn marks if really grabbed by the horns.  The little amount that I came into contact with will not do any harm to me but I will have to suffer with "dirty" fingers for few days to a few weeks.  My teacher, Matt Towers, has experienced this before himself and assured me that I will be fine but this must be a lesson to me to always wear gloves!  It looks like someone dipped a toothbrush in brown paint and then ran their finger over the bristles so the paint flicked off onto my hand in the tiniest of flecks.  These spots also accompany a slowly fading rash on my wrist that I got from mixing glaze the other day...I promise to take better care of myself!

Some days are not good days

Not feeling it...

  There are days where I can't throw.  Throwing is like playing a sport or instrument; the longer I go without practicing, the more I need to catch up to get good again.  Well it's been a while since I've just sat down and thrown a few vessels and well, it didn't turn out so great as you can see!  My problem is that I like to throw thin and I don't think I was taking enough time to center my clay perfectly before making my cups and they were off center.  Even if you are just the tiniest bit off center while throwing thin, your cup will begin to wobble and it can quickly become a disaster.  However, these were good warm ups for me as I was really intending to throw a new body for my urn that was previously destroyed (note a previous blog where I showed a failed urn that I had made for those who don't remember).  The picture on the bottom shows part of my urn that I had thrown (the large one closest to the camera on the left).  This is one of two damp boxes that I made earlier this week which took 2 hours to make!  It will make my life so much easier since I won't have to run the risk of potentially ruining a pot by covering it with plastic and these pieces will stay wet longer in the damp box then covered by plastic.  A longer drying period is essential for more difficult pieces where I attach clay, such as handles, and need more time for the clay to dry evenly so nothing cracks.  You can see from this picture that this is the stage of clay before I trim the bottoms.  Trimming will take away much of the excess clay and I can really define edges and clean up the surface when the clay is leather hard. 

Seems so long ago...

Almost two weeks ago now was a mid-term critique for my malleable object class.  Finally, after many weeks of work this project is now complete and this is what it looks like displayed on a wall.  It was so relieving to have it completed.  I wish the wall was in better shape but it will have to do until I get a better picture of it.  I was one of only a handful of people who had both of their projects completed in time for the critique.  My teacher, Dawn, was not too happy about the lack of effort and work put in by most students so hopefully our next and final critique will be much better.

To me, this piece is an inspiration for future pieces to come.  I really enjoyed using the majolica technique to paint on the surface of these tiles and the concept is really cool for me.  The center figure/creature is how I would picture myself if I were to be a combo-animal figure.  I could definitely see myself creating many more of these "plates" and displaying them together in a gallery.  The idea behind this is almost purely decorative.  I am attracted to patterns and bold colors and I am also a perfectionist.  This project allowed me to use all of that and I am a very process driven person with regards to my work.  I dedicate a lot of time to each of my pieces and I want to make it as clean and perfect as I possibly can.

My other project was casually placed in the studio on one of the tables that I would normally eat at on any given day.  This is just porcelain fired to temperature without any surface treatment added to it.  I didn't want to trick the viewer into thinking that it might have actually been real food by painting realistically because that isn't the point of this piece.  I wanted to call attention to the physicality of the clay and how even though it may look like something you would eat, you could not have it.  Also, being drained of all color is a metaphor for the lack of nutritional value that this meal contains.  I tried to make this project as detailed as possible.  I feel like I can almost smell the french fries!

The pieces are finally coming together!

My projects are slowly being completed since this is mid-way through the spring semester.  It's been a busy first half but I enjoy what I am creating.

So colorful!

These are just a few pieces of my 61 tiles that will be mounted to a wall to resemble an Italian majolica plate.  I attached velcro to the bottom of each tile so it is ready to be mounted.  The image to the left shows a progression of how I made these tiles.  I first made the design on paper, transferred it to thicker acrylic paper so it wouldn't get ruined by wet clay, traced and cut the image out of a slab of clay, cleaned up the edges, bisque fired (first tile on top left), painted with Linda Arbuckle's majolica base glaze (top right), applied colorants mixed with gerstley borate (bottom left), and then finally fired (bottom right).

So shiny!

Detail

This is a collage relief of images I remember from Italy.  There are decals and lusters on top of the glaze.  Please click on the pictures to see a full size image so you can see the detail!  That's real gold!  I didn't like this at first but after the decals and lusters, it started to appeal to me.

Such a beautiful glaze, no?!

 This is my favorite casserole dish that came out of the kiln today.  The kiln over-fired by one cone but this glaze came out beautifully!  I've never tested it before but the name "Val Cushing's Satin Mat Black" sounded appealing so I made it and sprayed it onto the piece for an even finish inside and out.  Everything was thrown on the wheel, even the handles, which were simply cut from a thin, bottomless cylinder that I threw and then altered.  It still has a little shine to it but it's soft and velvety.  I will absolutely be using this glaze the next time I do a cone ten firing.

Sharpie for size comparison

VOMIT

This casserole dish did not turn out so good.  The image on the left shows a seemingly harmless large vessel but the inside...barf!  Literally, I think it looks like puke.  On my beautiful white porcelain this color is a delicious jolly-rancher bright apple green but on this darker stoneware, and even with white slip on the inside, it turned into vomit.  This glaze is very runny and pooled to the bottom and gave it a swampy, thick feeling that I do not like, and neither did anyone else who saw it when I opened it.  This is Martin's Moveable Feast, Chartruse cone 10 both inside and out if anyone is interested.  Nice on the bare clay but just awful over the white slip.  Maybe if I had applied a thicker layer of white slip on the inside I could have blocked out the color of the dark clay completely.

More pictures to come in the next couple days!

Irresponsible Lowlife

I did not receive a phone call or text from that kid last night saying that he had made it to the ceramics studio to watch the kiln, Satan, by one o'clock in the morning.  I had slept for an hour when my alarm at one went off and after repeatedly calling him and sending texts with no reply, I had to drive back to campus at 1:30 am.  I was NOT happy but I had to go back to watch the kiln.  When I got there, the kiln only had a dull orange glow on the inside which meant that it probably wouldn't reach temperature until 4 or 5 in the morning.  I was NOT about to stay awake for another four hours watching a kiln with work that wasn't even mine.  This was this kids responsibility to take care of this kiln, and what was he doing?  Sleeping.  I was able to get my ass out of bed after an hour of sleep and drive all the way back to campus.  This kid should have finished making his pieces over a week ago, NOT the night before causing ten hours of candling!  I was so furious when I was at the ceramics studio that I vented everything to two younger students who were there working and wrote a nasty note for the kid to see in case he ever ventured back to the studio.  I made the executive decision to pull the kill switch in the middle of firing and stop it all together.  Now his work, a classmate of mine, and a younger student's work were behind schedule.   I also left a note for my teacher saying I was going to be late to class in the morning and walked out.  I re-fired the kiln today with no problems, but still, it was mostly me firing again. 

In the morning, everyone in the studio knew I was pissed.  All of my students saw the note that I left behind and they said they could feel the hatred oozing out of the paper.  The kid got reprimanded by two teachers and myself but I don't think he even was aware of what was going on or how inconvenient it is to even have him in the studio.  Description of Jacob: he shuffles his feet, wears sweatpants to jeans at a ratio of 6:1, long floppy hair that covers most of his eyes, mumbles, leaves large messes, and reeks of pot.  I will never fire with him again and I don't think that he should be allowed to be a ceramics major.  He doesn't deserve the title.

No rest in my sleep

Tonight should be interesting.  I loaded a bisque kiln with another student who is a hopeful sophomore ceramics major.  He never fired his own kiln before and had signed out our largest top loading kiln, "Satan", who can only be shut off manually (mind you this is the only electric kiln out of our nine that doesn't have a trip to stop it).  I woke up at 5 this morning to finish a paper due today and was at the studio at 8 to load this kiln.  I wasn't aware of how very last minute his projects were that he wanted to bisque and I was expecting to candle the kiln for four of five hours (which means holding the kiln's temperature at around 200°F to get rid of all moisture.  If there is water in pieces after it passes 212°F...BOOM!).  However, the student, Jacob, didn't finish his pieces until the PREVIOUS NIGHT!  His excuse was that he kept it in the hot box overnight but they are large pieces and it takes usually a good week and a half to two weeks to fully dry out work.  So instead of candling for four hours, it turned into ten hours, which means that the kiln didn't actually start to get going until 6 o'clock TONIGHT.  Satan doesn't turn off on his own; someone needs to watch the kiln through the peep holes to check the cones that tell you if the kiln is reaching temperature.  ("Cones" are ceramic material literally shaped into cones that have a specific firing temperature.  They range from cone 020 to cone 12.  When you fire something in a kiln, you make a "cone pack" consisting of usually three cones: the actual cone you wish to get to and one above and below to help judge temperature.)  What I'm trying to get to that you cannot go to sleep when you are firing a kiln like Satan.  Jacob said that he would watch for the night shift since he had some work but I was just at the studio an hour ago and he wasn't there.  I texted, called, and left instructions in my studio about finishing the firing process but I haven't heard a word.  I NEED to sleep.  I told him to call or text me when he gets to the studio but I have alarm set for 1 o'clock this morning and if I don't hear from him until then, that means that I have to go to the studio...there's no way around it.  Someone has to shut it off otherwise we risk pieces melting.  NOT excited but there is nothing I can do.  I just hope he's taking a nap and waking up to get back to the studio.

I would have otherwise posted a very nice blog about what I'm doing but I was so swamped yesterday working on my paper until midnight and then waking up at five to finish that I'm too exhausted to stay awake any longer to upload some photos!  Tomorrow is another day and I finish classes at noon.  I foresee a nap, reading, and hanging out with some friends before spring break gets here.  I'll let you know if I have to be at school at 1 o'clock in the morning.  If I do, I'll have time to post a new blog while checking the kiln!  Silver lining... 

Accepting the consequences

It's come down to the point that I just cannot finish some things in time for class.  My surfaces projects are due tomorrow and I have not yet completed half of what I would have like to accomplish.  Instead of worrying about it and pulling yet another all night tonight, I am going to get some good sleep, work a little in the morning, and deal with the consequences face to face with my teacher.  I will eventually complete the projects, probably by next week before spring break but I cannot put in more work into ceramics then what I already do.  I do not want to kill myself, and where would my art go if I was dead?  For the sake of art, I'm getting some sleep tonight.  But here is what I was doing today:

Left:  This is my wall piece that will look like a majolica plate when displayed.  This is about 1/5 of the total pieces.  These are unfired so until Friday, I will not know what the colors will look like exactly.  It's going to be fun!

Right:  This is my urn that collapsed in the kiln the other day.  You can see that the supports are now fused to the bottom and it's hard to see but the it has sunk into them as well, causing the lid to also warp and lock into place.  However, the wings look really nice, don't they?  I'll be making a new and better one in a couple weeks.  Hopefully I will have learned my lesson from last time.

This is part of my surfaces project I mentioned before.  I have only a small Tupperware container filled with slip casted bullets.  I'll have more pictures coming as this project develops later.

That's all for today folks!

Utter Exhaustion

This is how I felt all day.  Yesterday I woke up at 7:30 a.m. and didn't get any sleep until 5:30 a.m. this morning.  And even then, I only slept for three hours to go to work study at 9.  I was working on one of my Malleable Object projects in which I am creating tiles that will be arranged on a wall to resemble an Italian majolica plate that I saw.  I have a kiln signed out for Thursday and I need to finish glazing all 61 pieces.  I glazed about 40% last night.

Some people seem to be able to hold it together when they have little sleep.  I know some students here who love pulling all-nighters to get work done.  I, however, am not like these people.  Maybe I was able to stay up later the first two years of college but now I go to sleep at 11 and wake up 7:30 almost everyday.  I'm on a sleep schedule.  Staying awake for 22 hours, then sleeping for three, and working for another 9 or 10 hours destroys me.  I barely have my eyes open now as I type these words. 

I get really emotional when I'm exhausted like this.  I made an urn for myself for one of my classes.  It's made out of beautiful white glassy porcelain with inlaid turquoise slip patterns around the surface.  I also made delicate wings as the handle to the lid.  The urn is very smooth oval with no foot on the bottom so I am making a base of realistic intertwined clay branches that will support the weight of the urn.  I fired the urn last night on three stilts to keep it off of the bottom of the kiln since I had not made the base yet but we were going to apply decals during class today so it had to be glazed.  I opened the kiln this morning and I was devastated.  The urn was too thin at the bottom and at such a high temperature, the porcelain warped and melded into the stilts I made and completely bound itself to them.  The urn warped so much that it even trapped and welded the lid in place which was really startling since it was too small of a lid before I even fired it.  Well I just stood there, urn in my hands and cried.  I'm already so stressed out as it is to get all of my work finished in time and this was just the icing on the cake.  I hesitantly showed my teacher Matt Towers and I did my best to hold back my tears as he looked at my piece.  He was wonderful.  He said that he would rather see me take big risks like this and fail then to play it safe.  He has had many many failures but he learned something from each one, and I have learn a lot from this collapse.  Still, it broke my heart.  After spring break I'll be making a larger, better, and more awesome urn then my other one ever dreamed of. 

P.S.  I was so tired today that I took at ten minute cat nap on the toilet...I swear it wasn't intentional.

Am I really "lovin' it"?

Unsatisfied.

I am recreating a classic McDonald's meal as my next project.  I must begin with some hard research...which lead me to a McDonald's drive-thru to get the most classic of all meals: the Big Mac.  I also threw in a medium fry and four pieces of Chicken McNuggets.  I must admit that some nights when I'm driving home late after working in the studio, the last thing I want to do is spend time over the stove so I have been known to purchase a McChicken from the dollar menu to fill my tummy for a $1.06.  I do try my best to eat well besides that and it really helps that I don't have a meal plan on campus so I must cook all of my own food.  It's been a while now since I've gone on a mission to indulge in fast food so when I bought this "reference material" for my project, I had to take a bite of everything...and you know what?  I was not impressed.  I have never eaten a Big Mac and upon opening the box expecting to find that perfect of all burgers with three buns holding in beef patties with the works so succulent and divine pictured on billboards across America, I was almost brought to tears.  This so called burger in front of me was nothing more than a sad attempt at deliciousness.  It actually appeared that the burger had been deflated of all happiness and was nothing more than a lowly, crushed, wilted, and spongy sandwich of high cholesterol and saturated fat.  Tasting it was no better then just evaluating it's looks.  I felt sad just taking a bite.  The chicken nuggets were not crispy and were so bland that only when completely covered in BBQ sauce was I able to swallow one.  Worst of all, the fries were soggy and limp!  Who wants to eat limp fries?  I've had great McDonald's fries before, or at least I thought I did, and this was just awful!  I'm not sure if this was just a bad batch of fast food or just that I've never examined a McDonald's meal this in-depth.  I saved what remained for dissection.

Now to create a trompe l'oeil (which is French for "deceive the eye").  I have made a miniature portrait of each individual fry that came with my meal out of porcelain.  I then coated each fry with fine white grog (it's like sand) so that it gave them a rougher salty texture.  I have already made the sat-on top bun and in the next two days I will be making the rest of the meal.  I'm even going to pour slip (liquid clay) into a coke cup and fire it so that even the drink is porcelain.  After firing, the entire meal will then be repackaged in the original paper boxes and bags and displayed as if someone had taken out their McDonald's meal only to find that they cannot eat it and walked away from it.  I will show pictures later this week of it.  I am going to make it as realistic as possible.  No glaze, just bare white clay.  I hope I can get across how limp the fries were, how sad the burger was, and how tasteless the nuggets were.

These are not my hands

Look at this finger.  How old is this finger?  60?  75?  Can you believe it's actually 21 years and exactly 30 days old?  This is nothing compared to what it usually is.  This is after washing my hands with soap and water so there was a little moisture soaked in.  My hands are stained from clay, dry, cracked, scarred, unnaturally colored, flaking, itchy, rough, and wounded.  This is a ceramist finger on an okay day.  You know when you're eating cheesy popcorn or messy chicken wings or anything delicious enough to lick off your fingers?  There are cracks deep enough in my hands to store some of this heavenly goodness for later when I get hungry.

My hands are used and abused everyday.  They are constantly being soaked in water or wet clay and dried again either by a dirty towel or with dry ceramic material.  They throw pots on the wheel, roll slabs of clay, stir up settled glaze in buckets, break bone dry clay into tiny pieces, delicately paint on slip, unload hot kilns, spray on glaze, hose down the studio floors, sweep dust into pans, and are plunged into thick clay buckets of reclaim.  Somehow they also function normally outside of my studio but I am embarrassed to show my hands to people in public.  I even kept my gloves on in the post office today for fear that my hands might cause alarm.  I need to take better care of my hands!  Putting plastic gloves and tubs of moisturizer on the top of my imaginary shopping list.

Black Jelly Beans on my Chicken Drumsticks?

No, they were not jelly beans.  Jelly Beans are sweet, sugary, delicious, and colorful.  I am talking about something quite the opposite of Jelly Beans...

I'm not sure how I'm feeling right now, both mentally and physically.  I'm sitting besides one eaten drumstick and two untouched ones.  I baked these in the oven a couple nights ago and kept them in the refrigerator for later.  Now is later and after reheating them in the microwave in the ceramics studio, I quickly devoured one while I was waiting for a netflix movie to load (Letters from Iwo Jima if you were wondering).  Grabbing the second I noticed a black gooey bean sized (I hate to say it) growth or protrusion on the side of the drumstick.  Even worse, the third had a similar spot.  All I can imagine a slimy fungus slithering down my throat, cackling with pleasure knowing that it's destiny is to spread rapid disease and infections throughout my body, starting with my stomach.  A few laps in the chicken/stomach acid juices of my belly will probably suit it just fine and then traveling through my blood stream it will eventually consume my body and soul.  I swear my tummy hurts right now, but I know that it could be a trick of the mind.  The black eyes of the chicken fungus are watching me!  I must put an end to this madness and dispose of this chicken immediately and simply pretend this never happened.

This is what I get for cooking food ahead of time so that I don't have to leave the studio and stop working.

As my mother says, my stomach is percolating...

You can sleep when you're dead.

My studio. Behind the curtain is another table.

I wish weeks were eight days long and each day thirty hours.  I think then I might be able to accomplish all that I plan to and still have a normal social life.  Yesterday I was up at 7:30 and didn't leave the studio until 12:45am this morning.  Thankfully I met my mom and my sister for lunch, otherwise I think I might have gone insane.  I can't even recall everything that I did yesterday.  When I get so tired, I go into zombie mode and it's hard to get a decent conversation out of me.  I was simply in solitude in my studio, cutting creature tiles out of slabs and cleaning them up.  There are 61 pieces for just one of my projects and I had to finish making all of them yesterday so that I could fire them this morning.  Right now they are in the kiln, probably at 800º and needs to get somewhere around 1700° and I need to stay here until it reaches temperature, which might take another six hours.  I make all of my own clay, slips, glazes, and fire my own kilns.  Tonight might be another late night with throwing teapots and making a power point presentation due tomorrow.  I'm writing down in my planner right now to sleep in Saturday morning!

I wish I framed it.

I didn't mention this on Monday because I didn't think it was important but I smashed my pinky right at the side of the knuckle between a concrete block and a kiln.  I was loading our largest top-loading electric kiln affectionately called Satan and to reach the bottom of it, I need to stand on a concrete block.  This thing is a giant cube, not those wimpy building concrete blocks with openings in the center.  Since it was too heavy to carry or drag, I was wiggling it side to side across the floor and BAM, pinky between concrete and the hard sheet steel of a kiln shell.  It was but a patch of skin scrapped off for a second but quickly turned into a small bloody mess.  Why is this important now?  Because last night, in my stupor of exhaustion, I was sketching out new creature designs for my huge 61 piece ceramic wall art project.  I had removed my band-aid earlier in the day thinking that it would be fine but I think the friction of the paper against my minor wound caused it to reopen the hatchways.  Upon lifting my hand to take a look at my drawing, I noticed this startling other drawing made by the blood of my pinky.  Well it made me smile but I had to start on a new sheet of paper with a band-aid covered pinky once again.

My pinky is no longer bleeding as of today, thank you for your concern.