Ceramic Canvases,

Eruptions in Phoenix

Pompeii

 Eons from now we're going to find these pots and think civilization was here, like in Greece and Rome. Can you imagine what they'll conclude when they dig up the Ceramics Research Center?

A series of pots excavated from ancient Roman digs, probably from Pompeii, either that or they were broken and put back together by shard hunters: an appealing view is that they had just been thrown before the holocaust, but saved by that atmospheric bisque in the moment of  eruption, 800 degrees in some places, low fire, which accounts for the stress. They have been delayed in arrival from customs boondoggles. Please understand all these statements as if they are still waiting to be fired @ cone 10, and are made to look as if they had undergone those stresses. I suppose the striations and cracks from stretching the clay also occur from the suddenness of heat without kindling, though they must have been sitting there to dry some time after being taken off the wheel. 
Afterward the heavy ash would have sifted from the cracks leaving them as you see. Further  post Pompeii studies are likely to record sources. In one we can just see traces of an outline of Italy in the remains.

Egypt. Another series of these fiery disasters occurred at Fall of the Egyptian Zodiac, part natural, part political which could be linked to politics, lining up modern Cairo with Naples, which presents constellations in the promise of a horn blown against the serpent [tyrant] Ouroboros, fulfilled in the upraised arms of the Warrior Deliverer, but the top blew off. Put to biscuit kindle an hour, the controls were left on high from the previous fire. The floor manager did not return for an hour. Turning on the fan to clear the smell (and smoke), which  made more thermal shock, in another hour there was a  crack. Zodiac exploded all over the kiln. That was the end of democracy. You may say of the elders of Egypt, even if their faces get singed, that if the top is exploded the bottom may go. That of course leaves us worse off than when we started. That the walls are still standing is something that the vessel will not hold. The complete story is here at Foresight and Fall of the Egyptian Zodiac.

These politics would need a greater series of earthquakes with great splits and cracks in faces and cliffs of pots,  but the daring needs to be great because the whole construct is at risk, especially from inch thick impasto slices of porcelain speed dried over other base laminated clays which accelerate the cracks. 

Syria These matters affect Syria among the Arab states. Did not CIA boast in recent bulletins that it overthrew the Iran democracy in 1953 to put in the Shah? Obama wants what exactly Bush, Johnson, et. al. did. Wait for the news.

Woman & Samurai

Samurai and Lady, 17 July

Loose Leaf Tea Jar

May 22, 2013. 16 x 10 x 9.Jar has two faces on this side, a diagonal from 2 o'clock to 7 ending in the chin, and 12 o'clock to 5.30 down the center of the face.

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