Clay-Gray Friday

Ill at home, waiting out the fever and fret.

Clay Figures: Dancers, Echoes, Dreams

Clay figures:
exercises in 20 - 30-minute increments.

That's Chloe: The Dancer in front
(sculpture mix; copper cobalt oxide; copper wire);
I can't recall the name of the pit-fired dancer behind her.
Maybe I didn't feel I could give her a name, for she has one of her own that she may not have shared with anyone, frankly.

I do recall the exact session at the ASUC Berkeley Art Studio with the art teacher having us work on with a specific model, and then we had to turn and put the head of the person to our left on top of the figure.  Funky exercise.

Such exercises always reminded me of Charles de Lint's stories about Jilly Coppercorn, but specifically about that story in which she's painting from a "pochade box" outside to remind herself about perspective, to remind herself not to get too immersed in the details.  De Lint offers up -- through the character of Jilly Coppercorn -- a quotation from Monet that I've never tracked down (in terms of authenticity, for I trust de Lint) but that I hold dear, allegedly from Monet to Clemenceau at Giverny:

"Your mistake is to want to reduce the world to your measure, whereas by enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged."

And isn't that such a common mistake?

But -- if we want to shift to beauty -- what are those lines from Elvis Costello's "Ghost Train"?

"Look at the way she dances --
One foot speaks,
The other answers."

Lyricism of a different sort than wry puns and such.
______________

Myself: unsettled, or itching to get some work done.
Something like that.
______________

"Hampered by the clothes she wore,
By the dirty looks they kept in store"
--old song circling in my head.

Model Behavior

I miss sculpting.
Older pieces, gathering dust here.

The Dancer: Purgatorio

The Dancer: sculpture mix and copper wire, pit-fired.

25-30-minute exercise with model.

Foreground: The Pict

Background: The Merman's Head.

Alternative titles: Not Hadrian; Deep in Thought; or The Painted Man's Grasp.

Sirens: Models of Danger and Desire

Sophia Loren, diver: still shot from Boy On A Dolphin.

One of my earliest mermaids in clay: sculpture mix; pit-fired on Ocean Beach, SF.

The tail is reddish from the kelp I wrapped around that part. The charcoal and blue markings surprised me with their aptness here: pure luck in the pit for a crude piece of work.

I've posted shots of this one before, of course. I wanted to look at it again with fresher eyes, and so used the camera and posted it. (That tends to work for me. Handling it, actually taking the piece down from the wall and feeling the clay, works too, often better.)

Study prompts.

Mermaid: Pit-Fired

Pit-fired mermaid. A crude piece, but I knew nothing about sculpting at the time.  Still, the crudeness worked, don't you think?

First pit-fire experience on Ocean Beach. A long time ago.

Luck conspired with fire here.

The red on the tail came from the kelp I picked up on the beach 

and wrapped around the piece.  My instructor Jim suggested the effect.  Thank you, Jim, for that and other kindnesses, other nudges towards artistry.

The Thinker(s): Orkney-Style?

My Pict (pit-fired clay; hammered copper) --

with someone else's Thor in the background.

I must say that my own sense of the Orkneys comes, chiefly, from Dorothy Dunnett's treatment of those fabulous northern islands in her King Hereafter, that wonderful historical novel of Thorfinn of Orkney, of Macbeth, and of the Celtic/Pictish/Norse mixture that infused those islands.  Seamus Heaney's brief references in his North, the poetry of Orkney poet George Mackay Brown, Henry Treece's historical novel Splintered Sword, the classic Orkneyinga Saga, and R. E. Howard's Bran Mak Morn have also informed my imagination here.   

Unfortunately, I've yet to experience Orkney for myself, though I expect to visit in the next decade or so.

Thor as thinker?  More than you might think, surely.  Check the Eddas.

A Dancer From Atlantis

DETAIL:  Pit-fired goddess: sculpture mix; copper wire.
40-minute exercise with model.

Atlantis sank beneath the sea when a well-meaning man made yet another thunderous blunder . . . ?  No, that happens all the time, sad to say.  (The Kardios/Wellman conceit, for those who know.)  I wonder what Virgil would have said about Atlantis and the perils of burning desire, what Homer would have said about the pitfalls of pride and Atlantis' final days.   I can guess what Archilochos and Sappho would have said, yet I still wish we had such utterances--in the most embracing poetics--here to read.  I'd learn Greek to do so, I think.  Odd thoughts after a long and hot day.

(Anachronistic thinking?  Where did Plato get his ideas anyway, I mean, besides from Socrates?  Sail west, Athenians.  Sail west beyond Sicily, beyond the Pillars of Heracles, beyond the Isles of Tin, and then hang a sharp right--or was that an easy left?)

Fall Begins

 Tumbler (Pictish): sculpture mix; pit-fired
. . . years and years ago on Ocean Beach.

Live model: 20-minute gestural exercise.

"Et Tu, Brute"

Julius Caesar: sculpture mix, pit-fired. 1999? 2000?

This may be the ugliest piece of claywork I've produced, and it is the second (of seven or eight) full-sized heads I've made, the first without teacherly supervision, and you can see the rookie mistakes in the flatness of the face, the buggy eyes, and so forth.

The great thing about pit-firing, especially for a beginner like me at the time, is that you just don't know how the piece will turn out, which colors and where. I had hoped for a more thorough blackening effect, but what I got was post-assassination theatrics.

I like to bring this head into the classroom while teaching Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, just as a reminder in Acts 4 and 5 . . . .

Hail, Caesar!

Exercising with Clay

20-minute gestural exercise w/ living model.

Pit-fired.

A Handful of Clay

Clay Fetish: Gestural exercise: live model, limited time.

Sculpture mix; pit-fired on Ocean Beach: 2000 or 2001.

P.S. The model had arms, but I left them off on purpose. They didn't look right, at least in my hands. Instead, I wanted to focus on the curve of the back, on the way the model folded his body upon itself, and on the way the whole piece fit--sat, lay--in the palm of my hand.

Pit-Fired

Don Quixote?

Figure from model: two 20-minute gestural sessions.

The instructor often pointed out how I tend to make everybody taller, longer, thinner; some of the models appreciated that tendency . . . but she felt I needed to rein in my stretching of the truth. Though, less often, she'd also tell me to run with this style, if it served my goals, if it felt right. (The latter phrase would come forth in response to my gasp: "Goals?")

I see a bit of the Don Q here, bound, hampered from pursuing his passion, his ideals, and appropriately, perhaps lugubriously pensive. Yeah, that's reading a lot into the figure. Too much?

Sculpture mix; copper wire; misc. chemicals and kelp.

Pit-fired on Ocean Beach, CA, years and years ago.

Pit-Fired Abalone

Attempting--and failing--to mimic one of the ocean's many beauties.

It was fun trying.

Abalone shell: Sculpture mix; pit-fired.

(The darker red coloring came from kelp I'd picked up on Ocean Beach and had placed against the form in the pit. The lighter red coloring may have come from some of the chemicals tossed down into the pit during the firing, and some may have come from the fumes of that kelp we'd put into the pit.)

Mermaid from the Pit

Here is one of my earliest mermaids, formed and fired years ago. Fired in a pit.

I made her from one chunk of clay, working as swiftly as possible to capture an essence or a gesture. (I was new to working with clay, and I didn't realize how easy it can be to add clay, to add limbs or features, and so I made everything all-at-once with an obvious lack of subtlety. Still, each piece possessed strength though, which is good when the form is going into a pit-fire.) Rough, ugly, perhaps monstrous. The Creature from the Black Lagoon is in her lineage.

Ocean Beach, San Francisco. Either in 1998 or 1999.

I recall enjoying digging the pit itself, a fathom deep into the beach, anxiously helping to place the pottery and sculptures. Many people had wrapped wire or ribbons of metal around their pieces, hoping for fortuitous effects during the firing. Others used organic materials they'd brought from home, leaves or branches, or from the beach itself; my art teacher pointed to some kelp that I could use. The iron in the blade just might do something, and just-might-do-something is part of the spirit or the point of a pit fire. Likewise, salts and other chemicals would be cast into the pile of art and wood at the beginning and at intervals throughout the firing for just such potential effects. Air flow and placement, say, of pot against vase would determine much of the colorful effects. I found a blade of kelp for the mermaid's fin, and I wrapped copper wire around two figures, a punkish/puckish female and an elongated-Don Quixotian-yet-nude male. I had another mermaid, larger, a Greek hero, and a rough pot or two also in the pit. I hadn't prepared enough pieces, I felt, but I hadn't known what to expect--and so what to prepare--for this, my first, firing.

After the clay pieces had all been placed and piled in the bottom of the pit, we balled up newspaper and scattered wood shavings for kindling, carefully piled the cut chunks of wood into the pyre, covered the whole pit (or trench, according to the rectangular shape, but we called it a "pit") with old sheets of metal, and then stood back as the art teacher started it all afire. Then, we watched, and we waited. Fairly bitter weather that year (unlike 2001 when we all went swimming in the somewhat unnatural heat and calm). I don't recall enjoying being bundled up beneath the fog and overcast all day long, but the company was certainly good.

The pit burned all day long, and only at sunset were we able to discover what had been achieved. We worked by the few still glowing coals and lantern light to pick out the newly fired pieces. Each marked by fire and wind, by salt and ash. Each hot to the touch, fragile, popping and creaking, shifting into the final shape with the cooler air. I had no idea what to expect when this mermaid--and a half dozen of my other pieces--came out of the pit.

I've never named her.

Her tail is red from the kelp that I wrapped around her.