Animal Wilderness

The Call and Response of Clay

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Sensei and Cowboy

Posted by AE Reiff at Thursday, August 18, 2011

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AE Reiff: Since blog stats began in 2010 many views of these blogs have occurred from people of Russia, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Malaysia, Brazil, UK, Indonesia, Moldova, Lithuania, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, Canada, Slovenia, Poland, France, Portugal, Latvia, Turkey, Pakistan, Ukraine, Italy, Venezuela, Japan, China, India, Lebanon, Australia, France, Austria, Israel, Serbia, Spain, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Guadeloupe, Bulgaria, South Korea, Sudan, Malta, Belgium, Singapore, Finland, Hungary, Sweden, Hong Kong, Iran, Kuwait, Sri Lanka, Honduras, Romania, Philippines, Zimbabwe and the Isle of Man. You immensely dignify these proceedings with your presence. May the LORD lift up his face to you.

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Appreciation of Li

These are photographs of pots. Some don't have bottoms,
some don't have tops. Clay dialogues like a poet:

"I knew him once
char wood with a brush,
grain patterns of wood
with a torch,

raise in relief, drop stone
from a height,
make dragon fly,
spider web, tree."

So shape, reshape, work, non work, poured on plywood like paint, asks a clay crust of clay, who writes?

"Li patterns mark jade,
wood in water,
fire in matter,
cloud mist spit,
tree ink,
brush plunge, elbows heads (Duthuit).
Wind is greater than water, he said
to a potter as clay, scored glass
paint flood, stone build. "

Chuang-tzu said this nature was born on dry land and grew up in water. Chuang-tzu said, "though seventy years of age I am still making wheels." Do not repeat.

Creation

II.

Sculpture in the folk tradition is a tale from Aesop. Beth Cavener Stichter likes to slice the image in planes from blocks, hollow out the center, carve and put it back together. Here is a pic of her, on her back with her bare foot upholding the belly of a horse [Belly (4)] So sexy.

The mammals here are made from single planes combined, sheets rolled and thrown to catch the air. Shapes occur as the clay shows. Simplistic - no model, sketch, armature - parts attach with clay on a board with a knife. They come up from below, the four foot easier than the two. Laminates of porcelain impasto fired at a hot cone 10 show bisque in the crotch. Repeat not knowing. Make no notes. They crumple accordingly and make badger, stand up and make Pegasus.

Either the clay reveals what the eye sees or it has to be rolled out again. Pony came from a third roll. A pair of boots made Sumu, Balzac, Black Eyed Pea.

Some potters, like Malcolm Davis, feel the clay chooses: "I first touched clay at age 40," he says, "and knew immediately that I had been a potter all along."

The Call and Response of Clay

"Making my mark on the raw clay and not having it perceived as contrived is a major anxiety of mine...I make every attempt to rise above 'technique only'...it is much more important to reveal your passion and character, not just your dexterity." Peter Callas, "Conversations," Claytimes, May/June 2009.

"What I have noticed in the poetry and poetics of the most important poets is that they are arguing, weaving, and composing a cosmology and an epistemology. Over and over again...It is this structuring, large and deep in the nature of things, that still thrills us in Hesiod’s struggle for the sense of it... repeatedly in the history of poetry, we find ourselves returning to epic structures and the bases of epic in the shape, size and feel of the world cosmos, I suggest that great poetry is always after the world--it is a spiritual chase--and that it has never been, in the old, out worn sense, simply subjective or personal.

"The Violets," Robin Blaser

"It was clear to me that if my scientifically reasoned working assumptions were correct and if I did my part in successfully initiating, and following-through on realizing the previously recited potential chain-reactive events, I would be supported by God in realistic, natural, but almost always utterly surprising-to-me ways. I therefore committed myself to such initiations, realizations, and followings-through."

Guinea Pig B," R. Buckminster Fuller, Inventions, xv.

"The proper life of a flexible instrument cannot be well ordered. It has to be terribly free. And utterly responsive to a darkly, dimly understood command" (18)..."a few brush strokes...not a representation of anything, but rather it is the subject itself"(40), "collaborations with some force or shaper of outcomes other than himself." Thomas Merton in Angelic Mistakes. GoodReads.

They "aren't drawings to be shown to anyone. They are purely personal, and therefore illegible hieroglyphs...my figures have no proper spatial proportion. They have no horizon of their own. The perspective of the shapes I try to capture lies outside the paper, at the other unsharpened end of my pencil--in myself." Franz Kafka

Ousmane Sow has always sculpted without a model. He creates his own medium. In a form of subtle alchemy, he allows a number of ingredients to macerate over the years. For him this medium is a work in itself, giving him almost as much pleasure as creating the sculpture itself. He applies this material onto a framework of metal, straw and jute, allowing Nature and the medium their own freedom thus opening of the door to the unforeseen.

Ceramic Experiments

Bisque banned. Roll mix of clays over porcelain over paper, sprinkle cobalt carbonate, oxide w/ gerstley borate and frit, edged w/ feldspar, blind stamp, edge with cedar shim impressions, set up around large PVC pipe, remove pipe, make shell. Dry, but the oxides flake off in bisque shelf, even after fixer, get banned from the bisque. Alt wedge oxides into clay.

Feldspars occur in glaze recipes probably more than any other ingredient. The reason is, Spars satisfy all the categories found in the Seger Formula which describes the molecular ratio of a fired glaze. Putting this another way, Spars provide flux, amphoterics (alumina), and silica to glazes. This is basically all you need. You could glaze a pot with Custer Feldspar and it would be pretty durable, but it would craze from an abundance of potash(potassium). If you wanted a high fire tenmoku or celedon, you could make these with potashspar, whiting, kaolin or ball clay, and silica. Feldsparwould be the major percentage in the receipe.
Very useful stuff to potters and glazemakers. I still have two unopened bags of the old Kingman Potash Spar. Craig Martell

...feldspars are among the few relatively insoluble sources of potash, soda, and lithia.

Glass Formers
From about 1615, the Dutch potters began to coat their pots completely in white tin glaze instead of covering only the painting surface and coating the rest with clear glaze. They then began to cover the tin-glaze with clear glaze, which gave depth to the fired surface and smoothness to cobalt blues, ultimately creating a good resemblance to porcelain

From about 1615, the Dutch potters began to coat their pots completely in white tin glaze instead of covering only the painting surface and coating the rest with clear glaze. They then began to cover the tin-glaze with clear glaze, which gave depth to the fired surface and smoothness to cobalt blues, ultimately creating a good resemblance to porcelain

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Thursday, August 18, 2011

Sensei and Cowboy

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Appreciation of Li

II.