Out of the kiln!

I didn't get a chance to actually work today because I went along to Bartlesville to see Price Tower (Frank Lloyd Wright design) and the new exhibit in the Arts Center titled UK/OK: Exploring Traditions in Contemporary Design. It was definitely worthwhile. I'd actually never been to a Frank Lloyd Wright building before.

On the way back I did pick up two pieces fresh out of the kiln! I'm fairly pleased with how well they turned out.

Slab-built jug for Geoffrey:







Coil-built bottle with red iron oxide stain:

Caves

Rock formations have already been an important inspiration for my work for several years now.

See, building my sculptural work is really like building a playground for my mind. I always see it as if I'm a little person, walking around down there in those spaces (as if I were walking through a canyon or something). For a few pieces I did in college I was actually trying to mimic actual land formations:



(Hope that looks like a canyon to you.)

Others are less obvious, but still those are the sort of spaces I had in mind.

This came out of a trip I took long ago with my family to the Southwest. We saw Arches National Park, the Grand Canyon, and so on. It took several years to incubate and come out in actual work.

Then in college I took a trip with the Geology Club to Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. I'd never been in a cave before. Man, was that a trip! I knew that I'd found new inspiration, but I still don't really know exactly how it's going to come out in my work. For the last piece I did (seen a few posts ago), I DID have in mind cave interiors (deep shafts and things like that).

It's hard to photograph caves because they're so dark and vast and flash only goes so far, but here are a few shapes I think are really amazing. I mean it's just awesome to think about this rock being carved over years and years by water:



Howe Caverns, New York




Floyd Collins' Crystal Cave (inside Mammoth Cave National Park), Kentucky
(This cave is actually closed to the public. It once housed the remains of Floyd Collins, caving legend, and was open for tours. But now it's only opened to special cave people. My group was incredibly fortunate to be allowed in.)




Howe Caverns, New York

A little progress, not much

I've been lazy this week. I've got excuses, but they're too lame to report. Every so often I've gone into the studio to rewet the tile, but not to do much more than that.



It's wet now, but next time I see it, it'll be relatively dry again. You can see that all I did was start building up the speech bubble and Pip. I was sick that day and gave up quickly. Still don't know if this is going to be a final product or just a practice.

When I first pictured this project, I imagined a much greater level of neatness and perfection, but what I really get is a lot "sketchier." One artist I usually list as a favorite is Pablo Picasso. The reason is not necessarily that I like his art. Several years ago I visited the Picasso museum in Paris, and one of the things I came away with was that Picasso was very prolific, but not necessarily neat. It was a bit of a relief to me because it made me realize that I could be making good art even if it isn't pristine and perfectly neat. (Not that it gives me an excuse to be sloppy.) I just have to remind myself sometimes that I'm usually the only one who notices flaws or errors in my work and I don't need to panic if something doesn't turn out exactly as I imagined it.

Bean bottle

Waterworks isn't open on Sundays, so here's a photo of a recent piece:



I simple coil pot with a bean-shaped base. I'm bad at guessing measurements, but I'd say it's about a foot tall.

Zzzzzzzzzz...........

Today I started work on the tile of this image. I'd already prepped the tile itself yesterday. Today it was leather hard. Maybe a little too leather hard, but good enough.

I had a printout of the comic, layed it over the clay, and used my needle tool to transfer outlines to the clay:





Alright, so, I don't actually have everything totally figured out. I'd planned to carve the background in, as in, the buildings deeper than the sky, and then build the stuff in the foreground up. So the next thing I did was carve out the buildings. Which was unfortunately more of a challenge than I realized it would be, not helped by the fact that the clay was so hard (and unforgiving).





If this is going to work, I'm really going to need it to come out more boxy and less...crappy. I decided to just work on other stuff and try to figure it out later.. So I just started working on the trees. I scored 'em, brushed on slip, and then stuck more clay on and kinda squished it around until it seemed alright.



There are actually two layers of trees because two of them are behind one (on the right half), so the three more prominent ones are built up, and the two behind ones are just carved out of what was there. I did a little work on the hammock as well, but the studio was closing. This is as far as I got:



This may end up as a practice piece rather than final product because right now it's kind of, well, ugly as. I've still got plenty of problems to work out, besides just getting it to look neater. Such as, what am I doing with the foreground?? (I would like to know!)

Today's work

Today I went in to work on the Pip hobo jug a little more and prep for tomorrow's tile work.

Tile stuff: First I rolled a half-inch-thick slab (Waterworks has two slab rollers!), smoothed the surface with a metal rib to get rid of the canvas texture, and used a template I'd cut out at home that's about 4 3/4" by 7" to cut out the tile (the original comics are 4x6, but the clay will shrink probably about 10% so it will probably be fairly close to original size in the end). Once that was cleaned up, I let it sit out while I was working, and it's sitting in the damp box now and hopefully will be close to leather hard by tomorrow so I can work on it. It may be just a clay rectangle now, but tomorrow, it will look like this! ... Well, actually, I will be happy if I just get the background skyline done. That'll be dug in, and then the trees and the cats will be built up.

That done, I got Pip out to see what could be done about giving him arms. This is what I got:



Pretty cute, no? I'll have to clean it up a bit once it's more dry, but it's pretty much done.

I had some clay that was a little dried out from rolling the slab earlier that I wanted to use up (it'd be too dry for another time), so I cranked out one of these:



A wonky-eyed owl. I started making little coil owls years ago. I must have made about 60 by now. I've got wads at home, sold others. My mom's commissioned me to make her some because she gives them as gifts for graduations with quotes about wisdom.

I got the idea for owls out of a kids project book for clay. Theirs were made out of pinch bowls, but I made mine out of coils and I've got all sorts of feather-ish stamps made for them. Just take a blade to a pencil eraser! You can carve anything you can carve on a tiny, round surface.

Signature Stamp

I made this initial stamp several years ago.



It's bisqued clay. You can see that there's a chip on the edge, too, from when it rolled onto a concrete floor a couple years ago (shouldn't have made it all round). I've used this on every piece I've made since somewhere between five and six years ago, minus a few because I lose it every now and then. I know most potters won't sign their work until it's done (superstition, or something), but I usually sign mine first because they're too big and delicate to pick them up and stamp the bottom at the end. However, once or twice I've stamped them at the end on the outside toward the bottom. I guess I'm not really consistent at all.

I prefer the stamp over an actual signature in the clay because I think it looks dumb (at least mine does) and also initial stamps are a pottery tradition and I like traditions. All my cool pottery profs have cool initial stamps.

You may note that it says "STK". I know when you have a big initial in the center, that's supposed to be the letter for the last name, but that's just not the way I did it. It doesn't matter anyway because "T" isn't my middle initial. It's just the middle initial I use to sign my art. There is a reason, but it's pretty boring and insignificant. Here it is: my sister and I have a friend who calls her "SB" for Sarah Beth. So I took "ST" because it rhymes with SB, and the T is from Stephanie. Some things (like drawings) I've signed "St. Kellogg" to differentiate from just plain S. Kellogg, which could be either sister. But then it looks like it should be Saint Kellogg, which actually I am fine with. My real middle initial is M. I don't like to use "SMK" because S and M next to each other just makes me think "S&M".