Capital: Old Clay

Frog-Man II

Frog-Man
Sculpted 2011 or earlier;
Photos August 2018.

Sculpture mix; glazed with transparent brown and (lightly, quickly) sea-foam.
(I was expecting more green from the sea-foam, but that was a misjudgment on my part.)

Sobriquet

"Hey, hey, Teach.  What's with the clay-head?"

--Not-my-student asking about the prop for Macbeth class today.

Second favorite event after the baby duck on campus.  

Since this was the last day of regular classes and I will be suffering from not-teaching soon, I liked hearing the sobriquet.

Julius, Post-Ides: sculpture mix, pit-fired on Ocean Beach, SF, CA.

"Lay On, Macduff"

                 I will not yield
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet
And to be baited with the rabble's curse.
Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane
And thou opposed being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last.  Before my body,
I throw my warlike shield.  Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'

          Shakespeare's Macbeth, 5.8.3334


Macbeth's final lines, though not his final appearance in the play . . . .

Swimming Around In My Head

Images from a June 2015 excursion out from Timber Cove.

Trolling the Blues -- Two Views

Gunthor the Troll
sings to the spirit of Fall.

Clay: soldate;
glaze: abalone.
Nov. 2015.

Full Flow

The view from Bodega Head.
2/7/15

Revisiting: The Merman's Head

The Merman's Head:
sculpture mix;
copper carbonite oxide;
matte white glaze.

This must have been the third of the four or five full-sized heads I have sculpted.

Whiskey With Ice; Leaping From Zeus

RANDOM THOUGHTS OF THE DAY
____________________________

"No, I still drink whiskey with ice."

My response when the dental hygienist asked if my teeth were sensitive to cold.

____________________________

Influence can be tricky to trace.  Was I headed in that direction already or did so-&-so turn my steps that way?

I tend to mythologize myself as having leapt full-bodied from the head of Zeus, but that's hardly likely.

A Lump of Clay

Vercingetorix.

Grief's Visage?

Weird brother to go with the weird sisters in Macbeth this week?

Or, Grief's Visage?
Hollow-eyed and empty-mouthed?
Can you hear the wailing?

Herald:
stoneware; sea-foam glazing.

Tree-Spirit

Lady of the Marsh

 Venus, A Study: sculpture mix; celadon or light jade, transparent brown, and floating blue glazing.

Art class exercise from a few years back: 40 minute session with model.  Practicing, both sculpting and glazing.  I look at her, and I think of what I have learned, what I can learn.

The Gate From The North

Shadows of the Past: Advice

"Think harder; write better."
--from one of my favorite professors to the English 47B class as a whole; he was a tad frustrated with the first essays we had handed in . . . .

"Don't indulge your natural diffidence."
--from a professor after a mock-interview back in the graduate school days; spot on, by the way.

"Be wary of that tendency to idealize, to see the best qualities and to be oblivious to all others."
--note to self, echoed by a therapist

I'm finding myself reflecting on the advice, the possible wisdom or useful statements, that I've encountered or confronted.  These three stand out, though I have no doubt forgotten even better advice that I have failed to benefit from; to those advisers who meant well for me, I wish I'd been paying closer attention.

(I think that last piece of advice was/is meant to be applied to myself by myself too.)


P.S.  A good friend who was there corrects me:
'And, I think it was: "Think harder, write better, be smarter."'

Yeats and Pound: "Lake Isle" Poems

THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, 
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; 
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, 
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, 
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; 
There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow, 
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day 
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; 
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, 
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

--William Butler Yeats      (1892)


THE LAKE ISLE


O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, 
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop, 
With the little bright boxes
               piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragment cavendish
               and the shag, 
And the bright Virginia
               loose under the bright glass cases, 
And a pair of scales not too greasy, 
And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing, 
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit. 

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, 
Lend me a little tobacco-shop, 
               or install me in any profession
Save this damn'd profession of writing, 
               where one needs one's brains all the time. 

--Ezra Pound     (1915)

Wet Clay: Keeping Track

Bowls for the soul.
And small figures--heads of duck and ogre--to help me to find my pieces once the plastic goes over the top and obscures which wooden bat is whose.

Close-up of The Ogre's Head.

Work In Progress

Gemini, Sleeping

Gemini, Sleeping--A Mask: sculpture mix; denim, transparent brown, and clear glazing, layered.

Work in Progress: Summer 2008