Photos

Here are some photos the wife took before and while I was firing.

Fingers crossed. I had about 20 student pieces in this firing.

I think this was at about 1800 degrees. Notice Willem Gebben in the bottom right corner keeping me company.

Check out the dangerous nails sticking out of that guy!

I tallied up my total involvement for this firing including: shelf/post cleaning. wood gathering/sorting/chopping, loading, firing and the grand total was 25 hours. Not too bad for a wood firing I think. One of my students asked how it's possible to have the drive and energy to put that much work into something. I was running on empty and said something along the lines of being excited about what you do. The truth is it is a labor of love but it is also a job, there are times when I grumble-usually when chopping wood or loading at 3am. Seeing the finished work feeds me, right now I'm going crazy because I have to wait until morning to get into the kiln. I can't imagine not being excited about firing, I suppose if I ever get that way I need to start looking for something else. I can put 25 hours into a firing and if I get one good pot that brings me to my knees I'm happy with it, it's worth it to me. I have discovered that this is the way my pots have to be finished, nothing else is as satisfying, maybe later in life my direction will change but for now this is it.

That's all I have for now.

Beauracratic rant.

I apologize for going off on a tangent here but I'm a little frustrated. This weekend the 3 Abilene universities are hosting the Tasa(Texas Association of Schools of Art) conference. The university I teach at has been giving the art bldg a bit of a makeover the last few weeks. The ceramics room has never looked so clean-they even washed the 12' windows floor to ceiling. They cleaned my office which has stuff piled up everywhere dating back to the eighties. Fair chance that it's never actually been "cleaned." This is all good and fine and makes sense to me. They repainted all the walls in the building for a pretty penny(thankfully it didn't come out of the dept. budget) though I'm sure we could've had it done just as good or better for much cheaper, but I'll even let that go. What I won't let go is what's in the photo below. I asked for a dozen new kiln shelves last semester that we really needed and was told it wasn't in the budget but maybe next year we could get them. Today I walk into the bathroom and notice a plumber replacing all the faucets(worked perfectly fine) and drain assemblies to these fancy(=expensive) faucets and chrome drains. This is where I draw the line. I understand that this comes out of the univ. budget and not the art dept but how can they possibly justify dropping $2000+(my estimation for the bathroom work) on something as unnecessary as fancy faucets but I can't get a few hundred dollars for something that my students actually NEED.

Rant over, my apologies.

Blither

I fired off the wood kiln yesterday, it seemed to go well. I try to fire to cone 9 with ten just bending, I was able to achieve that throughout except for ten flat on the bottom back side. I tried to extend this firing a bit and ended up right at 9 hours, it amazes me how fast this kiln wants to go. We had some major wind gusts the last few days averaging around 30mph. I had my concerns but figured that I'd be ok since the kiln was for the most part sheltered. The wind blowing across the top of the chimney can affect the draft of the kiln making it pull stronger. We had one gust around noon that lasted for a good 5 minutes. I had 03 falling throughout and freaked out when I saw 01 and 1 fall and 3 start bending on the bottom in a matter of minutes. I was able to even it out but it was a little stressful for a minute.

I had a class from one of the other universities out visiting the firing in the morning and my advanced class out in the afternoon. This is the first time I've ever had visitors and I must say that I prefer to be alone while firing. It is very easy to get distracted and lose focus when there are a lot of people around. I had a guy come out in the afternoon to do a little filming. I have to have this short little video produced for the gallery that I'll be showing at in may. He tried to do some interviewing but it didn't go too well considering the constant attention the kiln demands. He has some other things to film so maybe we can redo some of the talking stuff.

The night after I finished loading I laid awake in bed for a long time stressing about what was in the kiln(this is typical of the type of thing that stresses me out.) My slipped work looks best at cone 9 while my ash glaze likes a strong cone 10. The middle of the kiln always fires a little hotter so that is where I stack the glazed work. This load was about half slippped/half glazed so after loading I was having a bunch of "what were you thinking?" moments. Why would you put those together in the kiln? Should I fire to cone 10 and let the slip look muddy but have good glaze melt? Or should I fire to cone 9 and have underfired glazes? I opted for the latter knowing that I can always refire the glazed work if need be. I'm sure there are some that will turn out nice but I'm 99% certain there are many pieces that are going to be that bland, matte, underfired surface. My decision is from now on to alternate firings. I will fire slipped work in its own firing and I will fire glazed work in its own firing so that I can give both the proper atmosphere and temp that they require. In this firing I soaked at cone 9 for almost an hour in hopes that it would assist in the glaze melt, so I guess we'll see.

Enough blither for now. I'll be unlaoding wednesday am. (I sealed the kiln up super tight and am letting it cool for 48 hours, remember the slip cracking thing?)

Cheers.

redux.

I fired off the gas kiln the other day and had quite a few pots in it. I needed to fire a dinnerware set and I had a student that needed to fire some work for a show but between us we still didn't have enough so I glazed some demo pieces from last semester, some more plates, and brought some pieces from the last woodfiring that had some pinholing issues. The firing was successful though I lost some pieces to runny glazes.

Here is an interesting enigma: both of these teapots have the same glaze from the same bucket. The one on the right was slightly underfired from the wood kiln and had some pinholing so I thought I'd pop it in the gas kiln and see what would happen. The extra pooling I credit to being fired twice but I don't understand why the glaze comes out so much darker in the wood kiln. They're both nice though I wish they could all look like the one on the right. The plates in the background are part of the dinnerware set.


These sideways plates are with the new batch of ash glaze. Same formula as the previous photo but with 1% less red iron ox. This batch of glaze is much runnier than the previous. Half these plates are going to need some grinding and will probably end up on the seconds table, that's ok-it's looking pretty empty right now.

That's all I have for now, everything else in the firing was pretty bleh to me, some of it will end up on the seconds table as well. Oh well. I guess I'm proving yet again that the gas kiln is not my calling. Woodfiring on monday so you may not hear from me for a few days, cross your fingers.

Cheers!

Sweet Ash.

Hello all, here is the post I promised yesterday. I've been busy getting pots ready for a wood firing taking place monday. I'm also firing the gas kiln at the univ. this week with a dinnerware set and a couple of platters, the rest of the kiln will be rounded out with student work. I've found myself making more pots for glaze as opposed to slip lately. I think I'm needing some variety. My last couple of semesters in college I exhausted myself with ash glazes, both pots and testing-I must've tested in the hundreds of glazes. I picked two that I liked and have used only those since college, funny enough one of the best glazes then and still now is one of the simplest and oldest, the old 442. You can see it a couple posts ago. So anyways, about half of the wood kiln load will be glazed. I'm a little worried, actually a lotta worried about how they'll turn out. I thought maybe I would just fire them in the gas kiln but to me that feels as if I'm doing the work an injustice by taking the easy/reliable way out. Sure I may lose more pieces but the surface on the pots out of the wood kiln just puts the gas kiln to shame. So why, you may ask, am I firing a dinnerware set in the gas kiln? I don't have enough kiln shelves to stack all those plates individually. Way it goes.


It's been a looooong time since I've glazed a platter. Actually that's not true-I did a shino platter last fall, anyways... I have had trouble finding large containers to be able to dip large platters/shallow bowls into. They either require too much volume of glaze(rubbermaid storage) or are cost prohibitive(restaurant suppliers). I saw a photo of Guillermo Cuellar somewhere glazing a platter in the lid of a trash can and I thought to myself: Brilliant!


Here are a couple slipped platters I decorated a few days ago. They are both tile6 slip-the one on the left has a contrasting slip brushed on one side and a brushwork pattern that is supposed to resemble birds, I don't know how successful that is but I like it all the same. I hakeme'd(can that be a verb?) the guy on the right after I poured on the slip. The hakeme pattern is korean via hamada via shimaoka via phil rogers, though maybe I'm the first to use a flashing slip, eh?

This bowl is about 12" across, I'm particularly fond of how well the jigsaw blade pattern came out.

Today has been one of those days that makes you want to pull your hair out, nothing really going wrong, just frustration after frustration. I was feeling a bit pissy and made a post unfairly critiquing someone who as far as I know is not here in the blog-o-sphere. I enjoy a healthy critique as much as the next fella but it's not fair when the person being critiqued can't defend themselves. So for those of you who read that before I deleted it- I apologize for my doucheness.
I was thinking this afternoon about potters who have reached a certain sort of tenure in the pottery world. It reminds me a bit of The Emperor's New Clothes, draw your own conclusions.

That's enough blither for today. So long.

eek!!

Someone posted this on clayart yesterday. I thought it was interesting. I have another post on the tip of my mouse for later that is clay related. I'm off to teach some glaze chemistry to my advanced students and I'm hoping that it all comes back to me...

Cold potting.

Today I woke up to cold rainy weather and had to fight the urge to stay in bed a couple more hours. I made it up to the studio where it was also quite chilly. Today will be filled with mostly trimming and slipping so I think I can handle it.

The last couple weeks we have had unusually warm weather, 70's & 80's even hit 90 a couple days. Texas is generally warmer than everywhere else but we still should be in 50-low60's. Yesterday it dropped from 83 down to 41 in a matter of hours and started raining. Some of you may be thinking "40's aren't so bad, it's not even below freezing, what are you complaining about?" It's not the actual temp that bothers me so much as the drastic change which is commonplace here. It's fairly normal to shift 30-40 degrees in a day in the spring and fall, annoying. Anyways, moving on.

I've been steadily potting the last few...well yesterday actually. It's nice to get back into the clay. I was hoping to get a firing out before my show in Houston on Mar.27 but that is going to be a bit of a longshot. It takes about 200 pieces to fill the kiln and I have about half that ready to go(stacks of bisqueware in background). So I have to produce another 100 pieces give or take which can be done over the next couple days but getting them dried and bisqued in time is what makes it a longshot. I have enough pots to show with but it would be nice to draw from a larger pool of work, so I'm ok either way.




I fired a little test kiln yesterday with some ash glaze tests. I've used the same formula for my basic 442 green ash for a few years but the color is far different than what it used to be. I don't know if it's the ash changing or the other raw materials. So the first row here is the base with no colorants and then starting with .5% up to 2% RIO, the last tile is 3% red clay which strangely enough is lighter than the base with no iron. I've been toying with the idea of an ash glaze that ran and pooled but had the color of a celadon blue. The first idea was to simply try adding small increments of cobalt to my base glaze, I was fairly certain this wasn't going to work but I had to try. These are .1%-.5% though I'm fairly certain that those measurements are not entirely accurate. I mixed 100g test batches which means I was trying to weigh 1/10 of a percent for the cobalt. Eh, what can you do. I have a few different ideas but I'm really trying to keep the number of materials in the formula down to 4 or 5 ingredients. I like things simple, I hate it when a glaze formula has 17 ingredients in it. Just a personal choice.

That formula for anyone interested is:
4 Wood Ash
4 Potash Feldspar
2 Ball Clay

Back to work.