What to make

this is probably the fifth or sixth blog post I have started in the the last few months. Maybe I will finish and publish this one. What to make? I just realized as I stirred my dirty gin martini that it dd not really make sence to drink out of an espresso sized mug. Usually in the evenings when I sit around and have a night kap it is bourbon or a martini drank out of a ceramic cup, go figure, and mostly it is out of a rocks glass or a large shot glass. Every now and then, like tonight, I grab one of two small mugs that we own. It is either a Beck Evans or a Laura Williams is Laura Ashley I guess that is. It always seems weird, but I keep doing it. At a certain point the indented purpose does not really matter. I think I have drank more hard liquor out of these two cups than coffee or espresso, and that is ok.

The past few weeks have been a battle to decide what to make. One day it is sculpture, another day is pottery and then on to sculptural vessels another day. So what to do? Who knows. I figure if I keep it up and think about things and find reasons for why things are not working, it should play out in the end.

Woodfired Ceramics: A Contemporary Approach @ University of Notre Dame

2011 and counting.......

It is a new year for all of us in St Pete. A lot has changed over the last few months and they just keep getting bigger and bigger. Went to a christmas party where I got a bottle of Basil Hayden, so that is pretty sweet. Enjoying some right now as a matter of fact. If all goes well tomorrow we will begin the building the new salt kiln at SPCC. It should only take a couple of days.

Too many cords of wood to split, and too many bricks to move.....

Yet still, I need to find more time to make more work. The shelves are getting empty and I am looking to spread around to some galleries. It's weird, every now and again I think about how I used to be more sculpturally oriented. The last few I made just felt forced, but who knows.

When life hands you limes.....

start drinking Coronas and decide to live in Florida for the rest of your days. Or act like the Chavi and put limes into the silver bullet. Any who, it has been a busy past month or so. If you have not heard, Matt Schiemann and I purchased St Petersburg Clay Company, (SPCC), and are ready to take it to the next level. SPCC is already a great place. A dozen or so electric kilns, two gas kiln, soda, a train, an anagama and in a few weeks a brand spanken new salt kiln. Let me not forget to mention the great members and artists in residence that make the place pop on a daily basis. Right now we are getting ready for a big holiday sale and a members show and that should rap the year up pretty well. Let us not the big pre-NCECA workshop we will be holding with the Morean Art Center for Clay.

Tomorrow morning we are going to upload the train kiln from a workshop led last weekend with Matt J-gel and myself, while Elmer Taylor taught a brush making a surface decoration workshop. Should be good.

On another, and totally different note, I found out this past summer while teaching summer camp that I am still not the best drawer in class. It is weird, as a youth, I never thought I would be an artist because I could not draw realistically or replicate comic books. These days I still can not, but I now don't care. It is not what I am about, so why would I need to? Here are some sketches for an instillation based on an amusement park theme. The soda shack and hot dog stand are my favorites.

another tea bowl post......

here is an assortment of tea bowls I have made lately.

When is a bowl not a bowl.....

...when it is a cup. Or a tea bowl that is. Tonight I made my first tea bowl since before graduate school. So, like four years. I stopped making them because I lost my interest in tea. Hot tea. Never had good, hot, traditional tea. I have had the blacks, whites, greens and mints. Maybe there was a flaw in my method of tea bagging, but it always just seemed like hot water. This was also the after undergraduate school where I was making a point to be more healthy than my malt liquor and taco bell days of Miami undergrad. Needless to say, it did not carry on.

Now five years later I randomly decide to make a tea bowl in the studio. Truth be told, I have thought about it the past few day while trying to expand my functional vocabulary. My resistance to tea bowls started when I tried to label what I was and was not as an artist, ceramic artist to be exact. Tea bowls can seem cliche. An easy answer for the ceramic process, something with an automatic historical context. Turns out it is like any other functional form, where there is a will there is a way...or purpose.

What made me think about making tea bowls again? Every morning I walk into the living room and notice the two tea bowls we own and are on display in the living room. Almost a decade of ceramics and I only own two tea bowls, strange. A Don Reitz tea bowl sits on a shelf below a shelf with a John Balistreri tea bowl. One I got for doing slides of Don's recent Anagama work from St Pete Clay, and the other for firing John's refires in the salt kiln along with Schiemann. As they say, it is always in ones best interest to surround themselves with people smarter than themselves. I am still very young in my ceramics career, to young to dismiss forms for weak reasons.

In the end it is just a shape, a vessel that hold liquid. Right now I am drinking bourbon out of a small mug by Beck Evans. The lips a little too fat and round and the handle is a little odd. It is the funky oddities make pottery special. It has a deep brown clay body with a hell of a white shino wrapped around it.

second billing????

Just kidding. Second billing is fine, as long as it is alphabetical. Ha Ha. Well this is some of our new work. I have been focusing on hand built functional work with somewhat random surfaces, while Melissa has been slip casting and painting for hours on each piece. Good times they are. I think this card is for a show we are submitting for in a few months, we shall see. I might be able to see if a flicker site is around...http://bit.ly/cYqpZd .

I am not to sure where this line of pottery is going. For the first time I am building pots like I build sculptures. Mostly with coils and out of an earthenware body. This started a few weeks ago, and so far I think they are the best pots I have made. Luckily, it should go that way. Since starting at SPCC I have tried to focus more on functional ware. Three years of graduate school taught me that I loved making sculpture and growing a concept, but making pots is what brought me to the medium, passion as they call it. One of my first goals was to throw pots on the wheel that did not look wheel thrown at first glance. After awhile I realized that my proficiency at wheel throwing was holding me back. I was making things to fast, not enough care was being taken. Now, hand building each pot slows the process down to almost a snails pace. So far people seem to be favorable about the pieces.