Sunday, June 27, 2010

Annotations: Dan Duane's Caught Inside

Note: As a sabbatical project back in Fall 2008, I produced an annotated bibliography of 129 non-fiction texts treating water and water-related topics, usually emphasizing marine biology or adventure. Dan Duane's Caught Inside is one of my favorites.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Postcard: Honu Rising



Turtle rising: notice the cleaner fish that the turtle is leaving behind as she heads for the surface for air. Notice also the cancerous growths on her head, neck and front flippers.

Disposable underwater camera; heavily overcast day.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Postcard: Where's Waldo the Reef-Fish?


If you click on the photo, you should get a larger version. If you click again, you should get an even closer look, and I think you can move the cursor around to pick which sections of the photo you'd like to enlarge.

Postcard: The Salt Embrace

Or, In The Locker.
When I was a boy, I wanted to find the Elephants' Graveyard, the ruins of Atlantis, and Davy Jones' (actual) Locker.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

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.