Lion, 17 July

10 July

The last in series of big, tall pieces with no bottom. That way they don't catch rainwater when they take their inevitable walk to the garden. 21" tall x42" around even if it doesn't look like it.

Figure 44" Waist, 3 July

Angel I & II - 22 May, 29 May

Angel I looks like a previous b/w monotype of that name.

Passing the Baton 19 Apr 13

Two figures pass the baton to the one with his hands in his pockets with the look of surprise. I sent him as a bio pic to Anti-Poetry. They want him for a future cover.

 Deconstructing the Vessel. Cracks bulges, botanical formations at the top instead of whole, round and perfect.

Rapture in Progress 3 April 13

 This was the blurb of Rapture: 

--Warning for any inquirers, the bottom of the inside is inscribed with words written in every rapture, The Lord Is My Shepherd. Sorry about that. This was done on Aeyrie's birthday. It is in the round, figures ascending in different stages and is like Opening the Fifth Seal which shows the figures as a canvas. It takes a while to understand these things, but I seem to have made countless images of  people flying up, at least since I wrote on a student's paper way long ago, what do they do at the tops of mountains, children lifting pretty heads from pillow beds? So not only here, but by interpretation of El Greco's Opening the Fifth seal and in the end in Danby's Sixth Seal, in the process of being hung.

"It was all wrapped in these children being born and flying around, "what do they do at the tops of mountains, children lifting pretty heads from pillowed beds?...Raleigh says You rose into the mountain air and nevermore were seen. I don't know if it answers what children lifting pretty heads from pillowed beds were doing at the tops of mountains, but right up until Once upon a time when it was dead and gone, when one was enough and too much to be alive and well in Ameryca, the new found land, a glory rose up into the head... Raleigh, the marigold in the sun's eye, seems to write about it in his address to Queen Elizabeth in his poems of 1596 where his "first-born love...Restless desire from my love that proceeded / leave to be and seek heaven by dying, since you, oh you, your own hope have exceeded by too high flying."...

So they are all children of St Branden who turn the cheek, spiritual children shall we say, who seek another country, full of mishap called justice. You see how fruitful the allegory is by result, even if there is so much effort in the history of America, the outer one, to find the inner. All the little pretty ones, utopias, Oneidas, so many more in two hundred years than all the world produced in its entirety... How can green know the red? I am what he was, within. It wouldn't change anything he did, not a certainty  to be within what he was without, visible from the interior but not from the exterior. That's the play. The moon has opened up her eyes, like summer stars so soon they rise. Thirty years of absolute sobriety, with love. Of course these things are, but saying so in the same parlance requires that my ears hast Thou pierced, as Messiah said. Listening, hearing the revelation, he wakens me morning by morning to listen as one being taught, as when a slave in Israel, offered freedom after seven years, to continue in that service put an ear against a board where the owner pierced the lobe to symbolize his listening to him alone. The sublime writer carries this along from Psalm 40. Lo I come...I delight to do Thy will, O my Elohim: yea, the  law is written in my heart, no certainty, and he knows nothing of the future, only the moment and past revised amid all failures and regret. Prophetic and at the same time impossible, nobody picking Calendar up forty years later would see anything symbolic in "A Conjunction of Planets," What lovers' open lips we are tonight in time the endless world, our minds unfurled. Symbol is defeated by propaganda, but propaganda cannot eradicate symbol, only neutralize it by saying it cannot be understood. These texts were to prepare the y to overcome the i, a reversal to which we all now have our attention drawn. I think Goya or El Greco said that. Souls in the egg, so all right world, Hatch and hatch. from Ameryca With a Y - Autobiography of a Poem

2013 II

2) 22 May Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil 

1) 8 May 21x13x10

16x10x8 22 May

Grotesque of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

This style has its hazards. It wanted to shape fluting with stretched porcelain, the figure around the vase from some notion that it would pick up the pot and walk off, the green contrast against orange shino the tree's leaves so to speak. But myriad cracks of the stretched clay produced dark where the glaze broke, not veins of leaves. The entwined figure likewise turned dark, glaze separating into scales which looked more like the figure was strangling the tree. It takes some time to be able to see what is actually there as opposed to what one thought should be there.

What this says about the value of education can be left to the spectator. What it says in the iconography of the forbidden seems evident in the corrosion of the dark clay of the figure, borders of red around the "leaves," orange, = maroon cracking, speckling, spalling, a perfect allegory of the knowledge that can cut the fins off every shark to enhance health. Evil is always so explained, analyzed, rationalized that pains have been taken at  Scribd sites, HistoPossum, Opiomes, Building Transhuman Immortals, and etc. The white shino interior of this vase belies the ill prognosis where it has collected on the inward curves of the slopes like snow.

All-AZ Clay Exhibition April 2013

AZ Clay exhibition at Peoria City Hall Gallery 2013

Praise Him

Flight

Christmas Turkey

Only three weeks to see   Praise Him, Christmas Turkey and Flight, lyrical pieces, but the show is mythological and epic. The Blue Ribbon to Kazuma Sambe for Whale Soda. He also has Goldfish and Tuna Soda, takes on commericalism and marketing. Working on Goldfish Smoothie, underglazes on Amador clay, pretty thin, ten pound fish pieces. Vertical Japanese writing as advertisements explaining the value of Whale Soda. Japanese orthography closer to the ideograms that originate the alphabet maybe. Mine have no intellect dimension, surprising maybe in a writer, opposite from clay,  never designed. From the moment. Kazuma called this an unconscious technique opposite his own. The unconscious is only ever known by looking back on its leavings, so the insight belongs to the viewer, not vested in an idea of the telling. Immediately current, a huge porcelain emperor's face is to have a hat, but not a Pope's Hat suggesting Antichrist, religion and state joined. So no hat at all. Myths lend significance. A recent story, What a Dog Coyote Sings AI-AI-OO-OO and Other Visions of Iisaw, (under review) constructed over a  twenty year period as a tail off of Overflights of Pedro Escadero, was thought out, built consciously line by line, sound by sound. The clay exhibits are some kind of meditation finished in a few hours of composition in two days, dry two days, bisque, glaze two days, then final fire. Here are some pics of the exhibition.

2013 I Escape the Pot

Rapture in Progress

9. Mt. Rushmore Crackpot 6 Mar

 

19 Apr

11. Power for Good Instead of Evil 17 Mar

6. Ode on a Grecian Urn 13 Feb

10. Three Muses At the Name of Jesus 13 Mar

5.  Goin' To Pot 7 Feb

After a few weeks a series of  figures wanted to leave the pot. They were looking for an exit. #5 could have made it, picked the pot up on his back and carried it off, but new to the game it just thought about it. #6 was lazy and decided to run around the thing like Keats' Ode. Trying to overcome the lassitude Foo-Foo jumped out, but he was blind in one eye, poor thing. # 8 had a mishap too. Standing tall the figures suddenly collapsed into this sitting position. Escaping is not easy. # 9 Mt. Rushmore got some fractures, but what rock face is without them?

Phoenix Center for Arts Sale Dec 1012

More Bags Full, Fall 2012

10. Flight

1. Bag Tied with String

9. Night Dress

2. Open Bag

6. Shopping Bag Eleusis

 This series started with the gift of a greenish white Australian my son gave me last October. I began to model the pumpkin, #1 above, which became a Bag Tied With String. I continued to haul this pumpkin to the studio a half dozen times, but the bag opened in 2., skewed in 3., started becoming a purse in 4., completely fell apart in 5., got mythed up in 6., (7. is omitted), became a species of night gown in 8. and 9., started flying around in 10. as a quail and 11. a turkey, which and took a dive in 12.

 3. More Bag For Sale. carpet bag, valise with pockets, some wear, part of a side missing, but you can see inside. Ash has sifted over the lip, a skin of paper clay and porcelain, homemade impasto impaled with desiccated prickly pear, agave and skeleton bone with cobalt, iron, chrome and tin oxide.
4. Tool Bag. With handles and at first nichrome wire, but took the wire out. The shell pap plus porcelain  plus mix worked cholla, pp pear, palm. Sifted chrome oxide, over it titanium ox, tin ox, more chrome, plus black iron, cobalt, rutile. A little thicker skin than 1.

5. Colossi. Was to have been a tall work bag with handles at the top but became Colossi, four legs, handles of the old bag implicit heads. Prickly pear skin prints fired out in bisque. Rutile, titanium, chrome, cobalt, no irons. Porcelain again rolled over paper, handles glazed clear, some white satin, the whole gently sprayed with Phx shino to maybe cause blistering like the original prickly pear skin.
  6. Shopping Bag.  Paper rolled with porcelain rolled with Dave's kneaded with blue and green mason stains plus composite light/dark clays mix impastoed with chrome oxide, titanium, cobalt and some burnt umber. Dessicated prickly pear spines applied for texture and with cholla skeleton. Death valley red added to strengthen lip at end before formation.  Glaze with blue green mat + lily pad + drift of clear inside, blue green mat + green poison patina + clear outside.

7. Well Bucket. Sprayed White shino heavy, light, also with bulb syringe, then syringe turquoise oribe over such, ash on shino.
8. Night Gown. Moldy Porcelain paper, top and bottom edges strengthened with paper, usual impastos. Wax over turquoise oribe, top lip, bottom, angel spit and TO over paper porcelain, spray clear, white satin, Shaner inside.
9. Bag with little bow on handle. Death Valley edges, handle, paper porcelain, Gault mix with hint of mason stain. Wax death valley, shaner inbetween, Angel spit over prickly pear fibers, lily pad, clear over rest, hoping to get red hints in borders.
10. Gault paper w/ porcelain waves, covered with paper porcelain w/ green mason stains, Rod's Bod top and bottom borders. Stains rolled into wings pressed w/prickly pear skeleton. Had handles, taken off, bottom of porcelain. Carbon Trap Rod's Bod, Angel spit, clear
11. The Gates of Heaven, after Rodin's of the opposite, angels in declension, figure arms waving, all in pastel mason stains, over coleman porcelain, over gault paper. Wrapped around form, eyelets for handles added, the whole full body hugged, too big for hands, collapsed, more handles added.

Apologia II

Eagle in Birdbath

A full grown golden eagle landed in the birdbath in the back yard.

Katonah Animal Shelter

When I was an arborist for Crockett Tree Service we sometimes dumped the day's wood chips at the dump, backed up the big truck to the edge, raised the back and it all slid out down the hill. Sometime it seems I had been warned not to look around the site, home of the Katonah Animal Shelter. The road to the dump wound around a little and then the truck had to backed up and in, so I didn't look on the way in. This day was a Friday. On the way out I glanced to the right and saw maybe the most disturbing image ever, but there are others, a pile of dog and cat bodies that had just been gassed, eight feet high. The thing grows over time. It is gargantuan. It was about three pm. They had just cleaned out their ovens for the week. I'd never spoken this before this morning when I was telling my spouse, in order to explain what I am doing with all the ceramic bodies in my mind, piling them up. These will actually be photographed some time, with blanket shreds in between to prevent them from chipping. There is fox, bear, seal, hawk, coyote, horse. What animal has not been annihilated? From the start, for  years, quadrupeds, glued back together, that either came apart in the making or in the glazing or firing, torn skins, beaded shino ridges, marred as it they were none, nameless. One called Boxcar Named Desire, to be exhibited this fall, hard to look at the faces; one called Apologia below. Some so large as to diminish their own perspective. All creation groans together toward its redemption. I don't think there is or ever has been one scientist who felt or grasped this pain.