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.

Tuesday is the new Monday

Everyone hates Mondays, well I hate Tuesdays.  As you can see it's now Wednesday afternoon and yesterday has already foiled my intentions of posting everyday.  On Tuesdays, I have work study from 9-12:30, surfaces from 1:30-4:20, advanced throwing from 4:30-7:20, and art history from 7:30-10 at night!  It's absolutely horrible and so as hard as I try to do some work after art history, I am usually so exhausted that I can barely function.  Last night I drove home in a stupor and planned in my mind the fastest and most satisfying dinner I could think of.  I dreamed of a cream cheese bagel with scramble eggs on it, diced onions, tomato, and avocado.  In reality, it was cream cheese smothered onto a piece of toasted bread, horribly scrambled eggs (because I decided to scramble the eggs in the hot pan on the stove to save time and an extra dirty dish) with cut up onion and sriracha chili sauce.  I don't even think I tasted it because I was so tired, which probably saved my evening from total food disaster.


As for the actual work I was doing yesterday, I helped my teacher Dawn Holder with her big installation project that will be on display at the NCECA (National Council on the Education for the Ceramic Arts) which will be at Tampa, FL March 31-April 2.  NCECA is a yearly event and takes place at a different location every year.  Everyone who is anyone in the ceramics world attends and it's a great chance to meet upcoming and established artists from around the country.  There are plenty of exhibitions and shows ceramic supplies to purchase.  I would love to go this year but I cannot afford to do so, but I fully intend to go next year (it's in Seattle!).  Anyways, Dawn's installation consists of 5,000 mussels individually made and glazed out of cone 2-6 paper porcelain and 2,500 blades of sea grass.  I was helping her apply colored slips onto some of the mussels yesterday.  It's a HUGE project and one that I hope will actually be completed in time!  The theme of the installation shows in NCECA this year is migration so Dawn proposed to create work that showed the invasive species of mussels from China that are taking over the waters around Tampa.  The blades of grass are from the Tampa area and are now invading China. 

In my surfaces class, we are doing a gold, red, and blue luster firing which will produce a metallic opaque finish on any surface in the kiln.  Our assignment was to come up with a body of work that plays on at least one of the words he provided: Glamorize, Stylize, Propagandize, or Memorialize.  I chose "glamorize" and this is my idea:  I hate war.  Despise it.  What was once honored and respected in other cultures is now shown as entertainment in current America.  We as citizens are desensitized by violence and what would have been too grotesque and horrible to show in movies decades ago is now shown daily in news reports and video games.  My idea is turn war and violence into something that cannot cause harm.  To do this, I am feminizing weapons.  I'm making bullet bracelets, pistol hairbrushes, nuclear bomb lipstick, grenade earrings, sniper riffle necklace, army tank jewelry box, land mine powder box, etc.  Yesterday I created plaster molds from some bullets I pick up at a riffle supply store and I should expect some miniature toy guns in the mail any day now if not today.

In advanced throwing, my teacher Matt Towers introduced our new assignment to us, the teapot.  It consists of 5 forms that we must make and put together: the body, the lid, the knob, the handle, and the spout.  AND they must all fit and look good together.  We have to make two prototype teapots by next week and we will chose which one we like and make slip cast molds of the spout and handle.  I'm not sure yet what I will be doing.

I have to get back to my Intro to Ceramics class in which I am the teacher's assistant.  I'll be getting my camera charger from my mom and sister this afternoon and hopefully I can upload some pictures of my work in progress.

Ciao! 

Haystack

I just finished my application for the first workshop that Haystack Mountain School of Crafts has this summer.  It is an exploration of pottery form class instructed by Matthew Metz and Linda Sikora.  Both of these artists are also professors at the renowned school of Alfred University, which my current professor Matt Towers has attended.  I applied for the workstudy scholarship and I should know in a couple months whether or not I'm accepted into their program.  It looks like a beautiful and secluded place that I can focus on ceramics.  I hope I get in!!

Day One?

I guess everyone has to start some where.  I'm not sure what "Day One" would mean to me in regards to this blog but it seems fitting.  I'm beginning something new and mostly something that would keep me sane.  Being an art student can be exhausting (both mentally and physically at times).  For me, it's mostly stressful.  With deadlines and critiques happening at a regular basis, it's hard for me to actually have any free time, and when I do have free time, I tend to waste it on non-essential things, like World of Warcraft or "pretend" online shopping.  This will be a blog for me to record what I am doing day to day as a ceramics student and hopefully this will keep me motivated and push myself to really commit to doing the best I can possibly do.  So really, this is for me; I'm not planning on anyone actually reading this but if there is someone out there who is still reading this, I commend you for your devotion.