Year: 2010

Thursday’s Tile: Copy-cake Ape-a-tation


Here’s the original “Cake” by Wayne Thiebaud:
And here’s a shot of the tile rendition of it on the Taste Area of the Five Senses Bench:
I’d say it is a fair copy-cake ape-a-tation.  But only fair, if that is the only standard to judge it by. It is tentative, small, soft-edged and melty in comparison.  Maybe an ice cream cake version. But to be fair in another way,  it was never intended to be shown side-by-side with the original!
To the copy’s credit, the hues and relative values are actually quite impressive and almost give off the same luminosity, especially in the sunlight. That righthand yellow section could be a lot lighter and purer, but so?
Thank my artful goodness there are plenty of ways to judge copies beyond photographic resemblance.  As an homage to food art and a terrific artist, it works great. (Just like the version of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can up on the back of the seat does.)
Plus, the medium of underglaze and the changes wrought by the ‘heat work’ of the kiln are enough to render whatever control this unknown artist exacted purdy near null and void. It is what it is. Part of ceramics is certainly surrendering to the will of the Kiln Gods. C’mon Happy Accident!
Knowing all of this, if we then start asking about flavors and sensations in the largest sense possible, we can easily see how much this tile embodies the Spirit of  “Cake” and not just the Letter of it and take our satisfaction with that deep into our artistic bodies and minds, thereby affording a Greater than the Five Senses Experience, all from one little copy-cake.

 


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Working with Live Models

Question: Is there a “Do By” date on some visual art endeavors?
Answer: Yes there is, especially if you are working with subjects that will manifest change, such as moveables,  mold-ables or mature-ables.
In the case of these daffodil bulbs, that means if you want to model an assortment of carefully observed and individually rendered ceramic bulbs, you need to get to it before they inevitably sprout into daffodil plants and flowers, or go off trying. It’s Nature’s Way.
Bought last September during bulb planting season here in the Mediterranean climate of California’s Monterey Bay, they were going to be a quick study and then plunged into a pot of rich earth for the winter. Instead, they spent those months in a paper bag on a shelf in my warm studio. The still green and unfinished  “quick bulb studies” happened this past week and some of them ring the bowl of wimpily sprouting models in the photo.
Although I think this particular bulbous tale has a last minute happy ending for both art and nature, it has got me thinking about timing in new way.
Carpe diem! Sometimes the timing is obvious. Paint the cut flowers and sliced fruit still life arrangement before it sags and smells. Sketch your kids before they grow out of that breathtaking innocence. Photograph the mountain trail sunrise should you very likely never walk that way again.
And sometimes the timing is insidiously glacial or blastingly unforeseen, meaning you probably should hie yourself to the studio lest you change as well. You might lose your stoke, get a better idea, or just get called away by Life. No, not might, but assuredly will.
To paraphrase Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig, “The ‘Do By’ date you’re working on is a date called ‘yourself.'”  We are live models as much as the subjects we attempt to capture. We can’t step in the same river twice because the river keeps flowing and so do we, us moveable, mold-able and mature-able change manifesters. Carpe Narcissi!
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Thursday’s Tile: Irresistable Sense Barrier

For all the tiles on the Five Senses Bench that revel in glorious sensual experiences, there are a few in each area that speak to their lack, erasure, or pain, and, in the case of this haunting tile, of their conscious need to be modulated or even forbidden.

This tile was certainly more than its maker bargained for. JP was openly enthusiastic about the bench and its evocative possibilities. He fairly quickly chose this image, finding it creepily amusing.  His artistic sensibilities led him to cut it in a stand-alone rectangular portrait format and to add the circle pattern background behind the figure. While most tiles need the canvas imprint pattern — made when the wet clay slab is first rolled out — to be smoothed, the fact that JP left it in place (whether through intention or oversight) adds a certain appropriate screen of tactility that is both decorative and a tad forbidding.

It’s basically its own work of art which happens to be attached to another work of art. That winds up creating an isolationist stance in both narrative and actuality, most assuredly adding to the work’s emotional power.

I originally had gathered this image thinking it would be placed on the Smell area. But that was not JP’s take on it: he wanted it on Touch. So you can find it rounding the front edge of the seat in Touch but closely bordering Smell. This placement always causes a blip on my cognitive radar, further adding to its uncanniness.

In the end, this kind of medicinal mask is more about Touch anyhow: not being touched by breath, not letting airborne germs touch one’s lungs. Not letting any stray objects enter or leave the mouth. The mask-wearer’s eyes are disengaged and distractedly looking up. No smile or frown can be read, therefore No Emotional Touching allowed either! Sterility on steroids!

And JP kept the palette painfully simple. Bare clay, lots of white with a subtle linear texture and those incongruous blood-red polka dots with a veil of smaller canvas dots over most everything else.

This tile winds up being a psychological study of nearly Jungian proportions. It is a strong guardian of the Shadow, the Forbidden, the Anti-Sense and it’s very hard to divert one’s eyes once it gets you in its grip. Must go gaze at it again soon.

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Catching Up with the Local Talkers of 2009

This time last year I embarked on a project I knew for certain would take a minimum of a year to complete, which was part of its appeal: to make one small jug a week inspired by the expressions of the respondents to the Local Talk column in the weekly entertainment tabloid called the Good Times.

I shared my quarterly progress with you and last wrote in October, noting the fact that, while I had faithfully gathered the weekly columns and made lots of other ceramic art, I was OK with the fact that I had finished only one of the 13 jugs in the Third Quarter…and the hands-on studio time for the project in the Fourth Quarter was not looking promising.

You can find the other posts in order here, here, here, here, here and here. I truly recommend reading the first and the last ones, for the original set up and the “we left off here” aspects.

But up top and just below are photos of the still-green evidence of my earnest studio time in the past week, when I returned at long last to Weeks 28-39!

I was concerned that after such a long time away from these faces, my “hand” would be different and it would reflect in an observable and unwanted difference from July to January’s product. Not so! While I felt differently inside and held some completely different mental conversations — many of which were based on the powerful learning I did last summer at Skyline College with Tiffany Schmierer and last fall with Cynthia Siegel — what came out was pretty seamless. Whew!

I have an opportunity to work in my studio at least this much in the coming weeks and would love to get all these lovelies, current and future (Weeks 40-52), into the bisque kiln by month’s end. I am rarin’ to solve the puzzle of how to decorate this body of work and also how to display it to best effect. I have some tantalizing ideas on both fronts.

After a year’s practice, it has been odd to not set out each Thursday morning in search of the current week’s copy of the Good Times, but it has taken one tiny bit of pressure off my days, allowing me to absorb the fact that I really did collect the whole year and now just can enjoy the heck out of making good on my promise to myself.

More on this real soon!

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Thursday’s Tile: Illustrating Poetry

The Sight area of the Five Senses Bench contains many tiles seen only in the mind’s eye, including several renditions of Third, Evil, and Horus eyes, which have special abilities in that realm. There’s even an eyeball with two pupils and irises! Go see for yourself sometime.

As far as I can recall, though, the purple cow tile above is the only one illustrating a poem. I keeled over in peals of kid giggles when first hearing it, which was mid-century, last, making the ditty an old one…. but in researching things a little, I  was surprised to learn it is from 1895, which makes it ancient!

Purple Cow
by Gelett Burgess 

I never saw a purple cow;
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you anyhow;
I’d rather see than be one!
Maybe it’s a stretch to call it poetry, yet it is in the vein of limericks, Ogden Nash and my pal Ernie, so I think it does qualify. Apparently the original verse caught on and grew to become a source of torment to Mr. Burgess, who was moved to pen a rejoinder a few years later:
Confession: and a Portrait, Too, Upon a Background that I Rue
by Gelett Burgess
Ah, yes, I wrote the “Purple Cow”–
I’m sorry, now, I wrote it;
But I can tell you Anyhow
I’ll Kill you if you Quote it!
Illustrations succeed best when mirroring the spirit of their source text, and I think this cartoonish, dippy, unreal cow tile does this so well! If no one has seen a purple cow, the fantasy image is open to interpretation, which then becomes our primal imprint.
Case in point: the images of Winnie-the-Pooh and friends forever in my mind are from the book illustrations of E. H. Shepard and most decidedly not Walt Disney Studios. That’s probably not true for a lot of others who only saw the animation and never the books. A thousand words, people, a thousand words!
Before this edition of Thursday’s Tile concludes, I want to also share with you the fact that the novel idea of a purple cow has gone beyond a fun rhyme. Wine, tobacco, clothing, food, even sports mascots derive from this quatrain of iambic quadrameter, which you can read all about here, if such is your hunger for knowledge.
Until we meet again, enjoy all your chimerical referents, wherever you encounter them, but, take it from Mr. Burgess, keep it to yourself if a slap-happy Muse whispers verse about them into your head!
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Why Begin Again? A New Year’s Resolution!

This post is a living example of itself (aside: would that make it a Strange Loop?) and I couch it purposely in the belly of the New Year, a very hard time to ignore the call of renewal and beginning again. I also couch it in the time of a retrograde Mercury, an esoteric period of reviewing and re-doing, especially one’s words and communications. The ramifications of Starting Over is a complicated, book-worthy topic, which impels me to distill it into a rough “Whereas and Therefore” Resolution format instead of my typically wordy prose, which would take…..ahem…..a book!

Whereas I have read in more than one place that the Four Most Dangerous Words in the English language are, “I already know that.”

Whereas I have “taken” (by virtue of my continued volunteering and actually listening to every lecture and demo) Art 7A Ceramics: Handbuilding at Cabrillo College around 27 times.

Whereas I have learned it is pretty much impossible to reproduce an artwork exactly, whether it is a master’s or your own.

Whereas I have watched A Christmas Story at least 47 times, Harold and Maude, 15, Brave Little Toaster, umpteen-zillion and have read Norma Jean The Termite Queen at least five times, enjoying each repetition (mostly) anew.

Whereas I recently learned that the creators of Blue’s Clues, a Sesame Street-like program on Nickelodeon, were initially so short of cash they repeated each program every day for a week and the series was a hit precisely because of that.

Whereas I have experienced the phenomenon of learning a new word or concept and then hearing it or seeing it used all around me.

Whereas once I understood the nature of neuroplasticity, I felt much freer to go deeper into what I wanted to know, over and over, knowing the truth of Heraclitus’ words, “You can’t step in the same river twice.”

Whereas my original teacher of the Creative Process, Coeleen Kiebert was fond of saying, “Begin again, it will move,” (that’s a photo of my actual notes from that class up top) and she emphatically honored all steps of this process, including the stages that appear as blocked or fallow, such as Gathering.

Whereas the Universe is ever-expanding and our cells are entirely replaced every seven years, yet still retain our true essence.

Whereas I notice that if I cultivate my dreams and make efforts to write down dreams and dream snippets and the hunches and connections I get from them, eventually and upon review, I can make meaningful connections because of the recurring themes and images.

Whereas the minute I began considering the value of beginning again and repetition, I saw these wonderful blog posts at Mildly Creative by Ken Robert: Themes Familiar, and Why It’s Good to Go Back Where You Started, that exactly said what I wanted to here. (And now I don’t have to!)

Whereas I am loving words such as, “let me repeat that….” “you can say that again!” “lest I repeat myself….” and “it bears repeating,” especially when said with enthusiasm and wonder.

Therefore, be it Resolved (solved again?) that my enthusiastic learning and re-learning in all things with heart and soul truth in my life continue wild and unchecked this entire year because I stay open, present, cognizant, energetic, healthy and able to respond.

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Thursday’s Tile: The Not Quite Finished Story of "Piece of Meat"

This is the sort of tile on the Five Senses Bench that probably looks better in a photo than in real life. Shot on the perfect overcast day, the photo provides framing and focus, which also helps us see the lovely juxtaposition of off-primary colors that lie right next to “Piece of Meat.”  (Heck, they might even qualify as off-secondary colors! Oh, and the orange-yellow squiggly things are ceramic Cheetos!)

You can find this uncooked classic T-bone steak tile curving slightly on the left end of the Taste area seat. There is really no image on the whole bench that is as blatantly raw, which was JMC’s impetus for including it. He said that the sashimi was too pretty. He was looking for defiant visual *POW* and maybe even meaty offensiveness. Well, as a Bench Curator who maintained detailed Wanted lists for each sense area, so was I!

He wanted to replicate the bright red Threadless “Piece of Meat” tee he had on. Who says art inspiration can’t be found literally right under your own nose? And whether your message is on your chest or left forever for folks to discover and contemplate, it’s just as valid, no?

As with most of the tiles we all made, we used a source photocopy, laid it over a leatherhard clay slab and traced the image with a slightly dull pencil, physically transferring both the outline and the main lines needed later when decorating. Then the shape was carefully cut out with a sharp blade, keeping it perpendicular to the image surface. No undercuts!

Ever so carefully the still-malleable tile was laid in position on the bench and gently curved to match the topography of its intended location. While in position, it also got traced around with a permanent marker, right onto the bench surface, so others would know that spot was taken! It might be weeks or even months before it was ready to be applied. Sometimes we even wrote the artist or image name in the outlined space so we would know who or what to look for if either seemed to have gone missing. Ah, group art projects!

Well, Mr. “Piece of Meat” stuck around for the duration and was thrilled with his contribution.

He told me not too long ago that he still loves that tile, but that the tee shirt is now too large for him because he’s clearly lost a few steaks’ worth of baby fat. He’d love a meat-tee that fits, but it’s “Out of Print.”

On Threadless.com anyone can vote to have a favorite tee shirt re-printed. With enough votes, they actually do it. Whaddya say we all mysteriously flood the request line and see what happens? “Piece of Meat” the tile will last forever and, with our help, maybe “Piece of Meat” the tee shirt can too.

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