When I'm creating, whether it be with fabric or clay or even food, one thing is common. My work is feverish, focused, intense. When I'm free-motion quilting, the whole house shakes. When I'm on the potter's wheel, chaos can surround me and I won't hear it. It's a great way to really understand your medium, but sometimes I get so focused on what I'm doing - I'm so in the moment, that I forget to step back and consider what I'm doing.
What throwing pots is teaching me is that I need to slow down. When I first started working with clay, I would be speeding around the studio, knicking the clay with my fingers, dropping things, making mistakes that could have been prevented by just slowing down. I'm learning how to harness that passion, and be a little bit more reflective of what I'm doing.
For example, take my two whimsical pots. I threw the body of the teapot at the end of one class where I was using a clay pad for trimming; the pad became the pot body. The next week I threw four or five spouts and a couple of lids. I loved the teapot's shape, but the plate was just an excercise in carving; I was trying to disguise a lopsided plate with a bottom that was way to thick, thus the carved bottom and egdgework. The week after I was working on carving the sunflower plate, and in the last five minutes of class, decided to carve the floral top on the teapot. The next week I painted the yellow and red and green with underglaze -- many coats. I was so excited to glaze them and start using them.
When I came in the next week to glaze, my teacher, Lizanne Donegan, suggested that I glaze the sunflower plate first with the opal glaze and see how that came out. I only take classes once a week, so this was hard advice for me to follow; I wanted to glaze that teapot! I dipped the sunflower plate in opal (using tongs) and then painted on randy red in swirls in the center. I was thinking it would be a very transparent glaze, glossy, with just a bit of bluish-purple sparkle. But when the plate came out of the glaze kiln, it was much less translucent than I thought it would be, but I do love the results.
The teapot, now that's a different story. I loved the fleshy shape of the pot -- like Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast. We even named her, Flossie. I tried clear on the teapot, which came out great. One problem, which you can't see in the picture is that where the clay is thin (on the spout) and the underglazing is thick, the glaze had trouble sticking.
The teapot pours without dripping, and holds at least four good-sized mugs of tea. My daughter and I had a wonderful tea party with Flossie during the premiere of America's Next Top Model. What could be better than that?
No comments:
Post a Comment