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.

Mr. DeMille, Oh, Mr. DeMille

I'm ready for my close-up.


What is it with camera lenses?

This little "Viking" bowl just doesn't photograph well. Somehow, the camera distorts it. It's body is so much more rounded than it appears in shots. The has more of a smooth transition from flare to the tilted up points.

I've tried to take a good photo of this piece several times and so far, this is the best it has shown. I've set it up with a paper drape backdrop, used special full spectrum lights, tried every angle.

These shots are done just on my kitchen table with natural light from the adjacent window. Sheesh!

The glaze is a shino, fired in oxidation at between a cone 5 and 6. The glaze is from Coyote.

The bowl was thrown on a batt made from a sink off-cut --the piece that has been cut out of a kitchen counter for the sink. Or at least that's how the batts started to be made. I think now, they are just made as batts in the first place.

The slick finish on the batt allows me to let the porcelain dry on the batt. If I trim the outer edge of the foot at the time of throwing, I only have to burnish the bottom for a nice, smooth finish.

Perfume Pear

A customer who had bought a salt and pepper pear set asked me to make a "perfume pear".

It was an interesting problem. Neither one of us had ever seen such a thing, but she explained she wanted a pear with a stopper that fit into the top much like the old fashioned glass perfume bottles.

So, I made a pear with a closed bottom, a long dipper with a stem and leaf handle. The dipper part of the top was waxed to keep it in bisque during the glaze firing. The inside of the pear was left in bisque also.

The stem was fired with a kiln post support--the stem stuck in the hole in the post. Both were liberally waxed.

The customer already had a tiny funnel, but it would have been interesting to make a matching one to use to fill the pear.

The whole thing worked well with an added bonus--since the inside and stem were bisque, the part of the perfume was absorbed into the body and it exudes a faint whiff of perfume. So it can act as a very subtle room deodorizer as well.

Luckily, there has been no leaching from the base--that would be a disaster, since it would ruin a varnished surface.

The next time I make one, I think I'll make a matching tray for it to sit on, just in case.