Pitchers

In this blog, I have shown pitcher forms before, but have not gone into detail about how they are made or how the form has evolved during the making.

This is a very small free form hand pitcher made from a slab with impressed design using a swizzle stick, a sea shell, and a bit of styrofoam packing material.

To make the pitcher, I cut out a bottom freehand in an oval-ish shape, then curved the body of the pitcher slab around the edge of the bottom to fit. I used the clay worm method to seal the sides and bottom together, closing the form with one seam at the front where the spout will go.

I cut a V shape in the front to fit the small hand-formed spout. I left evidence of the cut. I liked that and made a note in my mind to repeat it.

The glaze is celadon and the body is porcelain.

This is a later version of a more distinct surface treatment. This time I added two new patterns; a combed effect. The checked texture is from a scrap of plastic that I picked up in a parking lot. Must have been a part of a tail light….

The basic construction is the same as the hand pitcher shown above, but the body shape was drawn out on a piece of paper before assembly.

There is only one seam in this pitcher also under the spout. This is the beginning of new thinking about spout shapes.

During assembly, I decided there was too much stress on the dip area between the spout section and the back section, so I added a reinforcement 'button' to keep it from splitting. It makes a nice transition element in the design.

The hand fits nicely around the back of this pitcher with the curve resting easily on the hand between the thumb and fingers.

The body is porcelain and the glaze is a semi transparent rutile.

This little guy is also small. It is one of my first tries at hand formed pitchers. Unfortunately, (or fortunately) I sold it. But at least I did have the gumption to photograph it.

In this case, I made the seam down the side instead of under the spout and cut a hole for the spout.

The same technique of cutting out the base first, then forming the body from one slab piece was followed and the spout is also hand-formed.

I pooched out the bottom a bit to give it weight.

This piece served as a glaze test as well. I liked the texture of the slab roller matt showing under the glaze. I named this piece "Black Nose" in my mind.


Another look at an earlier slabbed approach. Basically taking the same form and making two vessels into a creamer and sugar.

The forms are a bit more free and I was playing around more with altering the body and adding feet made of rolled clay.

It is also a glaze experiment using a white body and drizzling a dark brown glaze over edges of the form.



This is a medium sized pitcher and a very early piece. My main experiment was working with the relationship of the handle and the spout.

I wanted them to be the same size and I used the same trusty texture-making tools here. But the difference is the weight and thickness of the glaze. So the pattern comes off a bit more muted.

And the handle is the beginning of thoughts about using rolled clay and the attachment process for a vessel.

















This is a larger pitcher form, but here in the the watering can version. I am still experimenting with the spout and handle idea and also using texture on the exterior.

The thicker glaze mutes the surface more than I wanted, but the ideas of spout and handle are still being explored.

This piece is also in porcelain and the glaze is a version of weathered bronze.

The seam is still at the front of the piece and the spout is cut in and attached.

A new approach; using a thrown form and keeping the handle/spout forms only refining them. This time I'm cutting both the places where the handle attaches to the top rim as well as where the spout attaches.

I again used the reinforcing 'button' at the split for the top of the handle.  The spout is laid into the front split and blended into the body of the pitcher.

The new spout form is an imitation of a tropical leaf form; designed to shed water. It works very well.

I love the break in the glaze. It is Coyote Crocodile glaze fired at cone 5 OX. This is a slightly larger pitcher and it's a keeper.

The next pitcher is the same technique and form, but what a difference a glaze makes!

A slight modification to the form is the elevation of the base with the use of a bevel tool at the end of throwing. It improves the overall look of the piece, I think.

The clay is porcelain and the glaze is three different shinos.

This is one of my favorite pitchers.

Dippers, Scoops and Ladles--Spoons Part VII

We all know what a scoop looks like.

Generic, plastic, universal.

But a Clay scoop has soul.  Note:  The third of this grouping may have been made from a gourd or carved from wood, but it doesn't matter. The form and decoration is why it was included.

The difference between a dipper and a ladle or a scoop is hardly discernible and the shape is almost identical. Perhaps, a ladle has a bit more tilt to the bowl.

Doesn't the one on the great striped fabric look like you could just pick it up and use it right away?

This nest of dippers or scoops could even be soup bowls, depending on their size.

And the same goes for this group. They could be from measuring spoon size to cups. (My measuring spoons are in a drawer; my measuring cups are in canisters where they function as scoops. Saves hunting them down.)

The thongs through the handle holes is a good idea. There would all look great hanging up on a bar in the kitchen.  

The holes could make firing a lot easier--string the dippers along a thermal wire on a jewelry firing tree: 

Just use the top bars or string your own wire between two horizontal stacks of kiln posts to whatever height needed.

Or, if the dipper is larger, fire it on a stilt.

These scoops look great hanging up. The same could be made of clay using a slab roller.

Here's some dippers of my own. The bamboo handled one is meant to be used, but the ones with the African porcupine spines would be a bit more tricky to use.

I would recommend it's use as decorative only.......

Playing Around with Design

Even though I don't have a studio right now, I never stop thinking and studying ceramics.

Some time ago, I made small templates of basic forms: Round and square plates. The forms are small enough to dash off a sketch or toy around with a design and variation. I can run off a copy on my printer and expand the idea or upload it into my computer.  

Here's an example:

The first one is a bit busy on the right side. And I would remove the small connecting lines at the bottom of the branch like figures.  

All in all, I think this would make a good wax resist platter. It would be interesting to try this in scraffito too.

 

   Here's a positive and negative of the same drawing.  (The darker snake is the original drawing.)  Although the snake image is about the same, the second image seems more of a 'fat snake'.

The third variation seems more dynamic just by adding another outline.

A lot of people do not like snakes. I'm not crazy about them, but I find their image fascinating. 

Maybe no one would want to eat an hors d'oeurvres off a plate like this.

Using Architecture as Inspiration

I once took a Lana Wilson workshop on building boxes. She is an expert and I learned a lot.

I searched for an image of one of the boxes on the web and couldn't find any. But I remember it vividly.  At first glance, the finished piece looked like a standing sculpture with applied panels and images. But those of us who watched her build it, we knew that each feature hid a secret compartment.

A flat panel with a face sculpture applied to it slid out to reveal a drawer. Rotating to the back revealed a window, as in this piece, but the window was really the backside of another drawer located on the front behind another panel.

I also recall a jewel box that had what looked like a raised column on the lid, but if you  pulled it up, you found that the column was really a long compartment that fitted into the lid. 

I've had a photo like this one in my files for years---because I want to build a complex box sculpture based on Tibetan monasteries.

I want to make little secret compartments and hidden drawers, lids that don't look like lids that open, pull-up pieces that conceal hidden chambers, sliding panels and surprises.

It's fun to just sit and diagram or plot out designs.

How many hidden rooms and passages do you suppose are in here, if at all?

Interpretation

Featured Tiles:  I like to think of this set of tiles as an example of relationships:

The tile on the left is the opening statement:  "This is what I am; This is the standard."

The tile on the right is a variation or response:  It takes the example of the above and elaborates as if it were saying, "I accept your statement and respond. I am an elaboration of you." Or, "I see your bid and raise you one."

Also working in this design dynamic is the shape and strong black framing of both tiles, bouncing the eye back and forth toward the center. The outer curves work in the same way, leading the eye back and forth between the tile: The left tile has a larger outer margin on the far left; the right tile sweeps toward the far right border, but a similar strong outer border on the right and the strong vertical in the center of the image stops the eye at the far right. 

The tree-like center designs are isolated as images, but relate to each other in motion toward the center, also bouncing the eye back and forth, yet slowing the flow by corresponding dark verticals.

How wide the center division between the two tiles is also important. If hung too widely apart, this dynamic would not work as well.


I don't think these things as I am working. These design elements are almost subconscious and are part of an artist's "eye". They either look right or they don't.


This same back and forth happens a lot in music:  Theme and Variation and so it can be in clay.

So, what do you think is going on here?

These guys are fun to move around to get different impressions.

Inspiration can come from anywhere......

This is one of my favorite movies.

And when I finished the piece below, I named it, "Count Olaf".

I chuckle every time I look at it.
















The piece is about seven inches tall, made by slabbing out some porcelain, impressing it with pieces of styrofoam packing material, a sea shell, comb, and a palm-sized piece of car tail light picked up in a parking lot.


Really, I started with a freeform teardrop shape for the base.

For the sides, I made a pattern drawn on newspaper and cut out makes the shape for the two sides of the piece.

I join the two sides using a score tool and clay worms and coax it into a standing form. This has to be done by using a very light touch because I'm working with rather wet clay. I prefer to join these kinds of pieces while they are soft. It makes for better seams. I have to be very careful not to disturb the outside design.

I shape the spout, making it bulge at the base, roll the back over and smoothing it out.

I put the flattened ball of clay 'button' at the point where the form makes a radical change. This is really to reinforce the change of direction that stresses the clay. And it makes a very good design element.

I also manipulate the form mostly from the inside with dampened fingers, pushing it in or out to manipulate and emphasize the curves. And I lightly support the outside while I'm doing it.


The glaze is an iron glaze with a creamy rutile liner and the piece is fired at a cone 5/6 oxidation.

Medium and Large Sized Bowls

Seems as though people make either small bowls or really big bowls. I hardly see medium bowls at shows. Yet, these bowls are sometimes the most useful.

It may have to do with kiln fit--small bowls can be placed around the perimeter; big bowls take a lot of kiln room, but are more impressive and therefore can be more expensive. Medium bowls are sort of misfits.

"Geographic Bowl"

This is a bowl I made in another studio setting than my own. It was an experiment with a different clay and different studio glazes. It's good to work with unfamiliar materials sometimes.

(Unfortunately, it is no more--lost when we had the flood and the packers didn't know how to pack pottery.)

It was about 6-7 inches across and of medium depth. Very handy size.

"Snowflake Bowl"  

This is another glaze test mostly. And it is a slightly bigger and deeper bowl than the previous one. The white glaze was poured in first, then the maroon glaze rolled around the rim. Great contrast where both glazes overlapped and were poured out.

"Gold Leaf Demo"

I love this bowl. It's totally useless, but I just like to look at it.

I was doing a demo about how to apply gold leaf and used this earthenware bowl to show the contrast in surfaces.

Come to think of it, since this is a non-utilitarian bowl, I wonder if another surface application like acrylic paint would be added to either the leaf or sealed earthenware???

Could be interesting.

"Flower Bowl"

Here's where painting with glaze works. The base is a yellow matt glaze. I decided to add green organic-like leafy applications and then use a stain for the darker cobalt blue and brown accents. 

This is a medium to large bowl, quite shallow, but with a larger circumference. This bowl barely left my hand in one of my first shows when it was snapped up. 

"Great Wall of China"

This very large bowl was a challenge. It is a monster. All hand-formed, it was made using a big, awful orange plastic mid-century salad bowl as a mold for the top and a paper pattern for the base. I worried quite a lot about getting a good fit between the two parts and about firing it, but it all went well.  This piece is still in my collection. It is worth an encore, I think.  

The glaze is Coyote Shino. It was murder to glaze; very cumbersome.

"Big X Bowl"

A very early piece, this is another bowl made using hand building over a form. Early in my claywork, I used mostly white or clear glazes, focusing mainly on form. It was quite large. The black glaze was slapped on using a big paintbrush. A second layer of a plumb brown glaze was laid on over that with a smaller brush. 

I made this after working on another piece that required very detailed and meticulous work. It's good to lash out on something else a bit, just to release that energy.

Not pictured here are bowls made using a blowtorch while throwing on the wheel to hasten the drying of the clay. Although a bit frightening at first, the Ken Turner workshop I took some years ago dispelled all that fear and I love to make whopper bowls using this method. Ken is doing a workshop on foil sagger firings right now. You can find him on the web.

The good thing about medium to large bowls is the opportunity to work with a bigger pallet and surface; make a bolder and a more eloquent statement. And, as in the "Snow Bowl" and the "Flower Bowl" expand experiments on a larger surface.

Funny Little Pot

So here's a variation on two themes:  Surface treatment and the handbuilt pot.

I used a sea shell, a shred of some kind of plastic car-light part picked up in a parking lot, a wooden stamp, a piece of styrofoam packing and the end of a dowel.


The handbuilding was intentionally un-square.

It was okay to overlap the celadon glaze.

I have no idea what it could be used for.  But that's for the buyer to figure out.

P.S.

Remember the Racer?

 Here's what it looked like prefire.

I like the way the edges ran down the corners and pooled in the corners of the small square. I'll remember that the next time I make this form.

The mold for this is an el chipo plastic 1960s dish I found at the thrift store. Great place to look for clay forms. The good thing about this is I can lay a slab down on the plastic which I line with damp strips of newsprint, and just let it dry. The recessed center makes a good foot on the dish.

A "Racer"

In every kiln firing, there is usually one piece that comes out better than you dreamed. Some people call them "Racers". 

Here's my racer.

This thing has been setting around on a shelf waiting to be fired for a long time. It's big. There hasn't been a firing that allowed a free shelf, so this piece got put off and putt off. 

But this guy made it into the OVERFIRE kiln. Yikes. All these glazes are supposed to be good up to cone 6. I don't know how hot the last kiln got because the thermocouple malfunctioned. The chances of duplication? almost nil.

I do know that this is celadon and iron applied over it.

 

It did blister a bit, but no explosions or craters. 

I just love it. It's a keeper.