Etsy

New pots on etsy! You can see them here.

home.

We're home after a grueling drive. The drive home from shows always seems to be the worst. Houston is about 7 hours away which isn't an awful drive, but after a long day of selling and packing up it is pretty much the last thing you want to do.

I'll preface the following with this: despite the fact that Houston is home to headquarters or big offices to many of the bailed out banks and mortgage lenders(and AIG) Texas has not been as affected by the "economic gloom" as other states. The Bayou City Art Festival is a huge festival, last time I checked it was #7 on Sunshine Artists top shows in the nation. There were artists from all over, florida, michigan, tennessee, etc. They have this show twice a year and this is the first year out of four years of applying that I have gotten in. Crowds were huge and they were buying. We had the best show that we have EVER had(that's not saying much since I make "brown" pots, but you get the idea.) Another potter I know from Austin said that this was the best show he had in five years. Hope has come through, and hopefully shows will continue to do well this year. I hope that's some encouragement to folks who have been stressing like me. That's all I have for now.

New pots on etsy this week!

Cheers!

we're earning this one.

We arrived yesterday to a torrential downpour. The weather forecast looked good so we decided to load up the truck with no tarp but ten minutes out from the show we got dumped on. We had to load-in in the pouring rain because all of my display is wood, so we had to get it in the tent and dried off asap. Aside from stressing about the display the weather was nice and I haven't been out in rain like that since I lived in Minnesota, it actually felt very invigorating. Today was fair for a friday, we had some sporadic showers and humidity that was so thick you could see it. The weather folks promise that the next two days will be sunny and clear, hooray.

We were in a bad spot to leave today so we decided to walk around until most of the other artists had left. As we were walking back to the artist parking I heard Saybra(my wife) scream "Oh my god!" I heard a giant crash and saw a flipped truck and immediately took off and jumped on top to get the door open. Thankfully the guy was ok, I broke his door handle getting him out and I feel a little bad about that but I suppose he's got bigger issues to worry about.

That's me in the green shirt.

Cheers!

Bayou City Art Festival

Any of you in the Houston area should come out to the art festival this weekend. It's open 10 am to 6 pm friday - sunday. There's a $10 entry fee, but there are 300 plus artists, so it may be worth your while. Besides, there will be some awesome pots from abilene.
Come on out!

Pots!

All in all this was a very good firing. I was right about the ash glaze being pretty bland but I'm going to take the pieces that didn't turn out and fire them up in the gas kiln. Several of them from the middle turned out quite nice.

Here it is with most of the first stack unloaded.


Nice flashing.

I don't understand why blogger flips these sometimes. The flashing turned out nice on this guy.

Large vase with some nice spotting on the bottom half.

Casserole. Some of you long time readers may noticed that I've gone back to knobs. I stopped doing knobs when I was raw glazing because there was weird expansion issues and I always had stress cracks where the knob met the lid, so I started doing strap handles. Now I'm bisquing so it's back to the knobs.

New jar shape, I like it.

Dessert Plates. These came out pretty darn fantastic. There are 8 in all and 8 dinner plates to match that have a little more ash.

Hakeme'd tile 6 slip. I like this a lot but it seems a little too structured to me.

A little ruggles & rankin inspired decoration on the rim.

Ok, so this glaze... I did a bunch of testing for a static ash glaze that could take some iron brushwork and this was it. What I didn't anticipate was how the glaze would react over a white slip in a wood/salt kiln. Whoops. What a happy accident though, I love the way these came out with the iron bleeding everywhere. If you look closely you can see the brushed slip underneath the glaze, mmmmmm. I have about a dozen of these with varying iron patterns.

Here is a "well fired" ash glaze piece. I'm guessing that it's the wood ash that makes it turn that sort of yellowish color. I dunno, I haven't decided if I like this or not. You can see what it's supposed to look like here.

This was glazed with the old batch, it was leftover from the previous work cycle.

This is how everything towards the back turned out. I think refiring it in the gas kiln is the way to go.

Well, that's all for now. I'm off to pack all this stuff up for the Bayou City Art Festival in Houston this weekend. Leaving about 6am tomorrow, so you won't hear from me for awhile. First show of the year, eek!

Cheers.

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.