Last month I was finishing a body of work that I had been thinking
about for a couple of months. I’ve been
trying to think of a way to make work with the limitations of not being able to
glaze my work, our current kilns are not trustworthy enough to do anything but
glaze in. In my last body of work I used
markers to touch up and add to the scenes on the pots, I really like how this
looks and had wanted to use it again. So
with this new work (and not being able to glaze anything) I decided to go full
out and use marker to decorate all the vessels in this series. I expanded a little bit to include different
colored India inks, these I used mostly for the banding lines and for larger
areas that needed to be filled. I made
this new work out of a commercial clay body called B-Mix (cone 10), it is a
mixture of porcelain and a white stoneware.
This gave me a smooth white surface for the stories I wanted to convey,
it also allowed the markers and inks to “pop” off of the surface of the
vessels.
The
actual content of this body started with doodles I used to do when I was in
primary school. I would draw a cave or
dungeon type scene with traps and treasures hidden within them. I would then draw a little stick adventure
man to climb, swing, and jump his way through the drawing discovering all the
hidden things I had placed. I had shown
Keturah (my wife) how I would draw these when I was a kid and she loved them,
she thought they were the funniest thing she had ever seen, and said that it
would be a good transition from my last body of work to a new one if I could
put them on to some pots. So I sat down
and sketched out some ideas in my (hand-i-dandy) sketch book of what kind of
stories I wanted to convey, and then I moved into the studio and threw some forms that I thought would look good if seen from a distant. I then bisque fired them in our converted gas
kilns, and then after some hesitation (I always get nervous before committing pen
to paper or in this case pen to vessel) I started drawing onto the forms I had
made. Here are some of the finished
pieces:
The drawings evolved from the adventure man traversing caves
to Greek style stick figure pieces. I
have always been a huge fan of Greek pottery; I really enjoy the variety of shapes
and the wide range of subject matter they portray. So I made some Greek inspired vessels and
gave them some Greek styled stick figure scenes. Here are a few pictures:
I really enjoy using humor in my work, and the idea of bait
and switch. By that I mean I enjoy
giving the viewer something beautiful to look at from afar, while putting enough
detail in the scenes to draw the viewer closer to the work. At which point they realize that that
beautiful vessel is decorated with stick figures and scenes from a child’s over
active imagination.
