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Additions of Kiln Beast

 -Possible additions to Kiln Visions

-History of Forms

Much of this work is improvisational, begun with a fragment of idea recognized as the work progresses.  First solid, stable, but taken to where it begins to fall, just intervening in the collapse, the clay is shifted and pulled, but it is a hollow or solid cylinder when all is said and done, that from from the various strength and weakness in the stretching, pulled back from the brink, it is a rescue. It has to be remembered that these are three dimensional, have sides and backs to the front side viewed in the photographs which have to be as good as organic as the front in advancing the impression.

Sculptures and murals appear here. The sculptures are laminated layers of different clays, stressed and sculpted into figures which must stop short of falling to remain upright. Parables of redemption, just intervening in the collapse, for they are hollow cylinders when all is said and done, the tallest about 27" and can fall from the imprecise pressure of  stretching the various strength and weakness of the clays, which have no armature, and need to be pulled back from the brink. The murals haven't circulated to shows because they need to be hung but are put in glass cases.

 First there were small figures, bears floating in a cloud, children playing with lollipops, but after an early version of Bruegel’s Opening of the Fifth Seal, the Early Captives of Egypt, portals of the divine gates and  seraphim. Many processions become figures or immigrant families of up to four that cover compositions. Some become in-depth looks of one or two. There are a number of horses, and stand alone figures like medieval woodcuts, finished in glass, and whole heads mounted on a background of plexiglass.

The idea generally is to give form to the formless, the invisible, the unknowable, meaning the spiritual world. Many of the ceramic murals explore this by bringing but not quite bringing a picture of what really exists that cannot be seen by posing linked identities, one in one world one in the other, that have similar names but are unknowable to each other except from some third narrative view.This teasing the brain tries to make sense of unknown patterns by making them into the known even though the two worlds exist untranslatable to each other.

Captions—All high fire reduction atmosphere.

Looking for Work. 2012. 20x9x6 First place Standing Sculpture, AZ State Fair, 2012.

Tortoise 2013. 11x9x10

Holding the Lamb 2014. 21x11x1/4 published as cover at https://issuu.com/buffaloalmanack/docs/issue9

Orchidaceae. 2018. 16x14x11 Best of Show, AZ State Fair 2018

Weimar 2014. 21x10x8 Basis for article, “Oracle,” Red Fez Magazine 71. 13 Sept 2014

First there were small mural figures, bears floating in a cloud, children playing with lollipops, but after an early version of Bruegel’s Opening of the Fifth Seal, the Early Captives of Egypt, portals of the divine gates and  seraphim. Figures became processions of immigrant families and in-depth looks of one or two. There are a number of horses, and stand alone figures like medieval woodcuts, finished in glass, and whole heads mounted on backgrounds of plexiglass.

 

--Notes

 BALZAC to appear @ AZ Clay Annual Exhibition 29 March at Shemer Art Center. This Balzac is in his younger day. He later became Rodin’s crag of corpulence in age and La Comédie Humaine. Diurnal Balzac wore his “willful nature,” on his back, but had not that smirk when Rodin sculpted him. I met the marbles at the Rodin Museum outside Paris where I sketched days in succession before being expelled for sketching Orpheus.

 Gazundite - When the Body Touched Elisha's Bones

Don't know the name yet. Loaded a fan brush w cobalt wash and blew over edges of the gown. This will show in bisque and final fire. Then easy to clear glaze.

 An Aleutian Pegasusian. First in a series of flying horses I imagine circling the city of Troy.

 Faint image above the altar, side door basement of the Lady Chapel, Glastonbury Cathedral. Another time zone. The Tor, IRA, Glastonbury. Blessing and danger.

Pegasus, Fox:  David said it was an astronaut. He could see the helmet and the capsule! Mom said it was a horse. I had no idea. It won't photograph because the wings, winds (?) extend around the sides and back of the vessel; there is also a foot back there. When it fires the cobalt traces blue. Sometime maybe a better pic.

Egyptian zodiac:  You may say to the elders of Egypt,
that's what the life of a father's about,
act on foresight with face singed
if the top is exploded and the bottom goes out.
If the head at the top and the people at bottom
are both lost to exposing,
It leaves us worse off than we thought,
walls still standing but the vessel won't hold,
Do not turn up the fire too high we're told,
Foresight get out of the way!

Sometimes too hot, sometimes not believed,
self doubt is the last thing it needs.
With all the crowds going it's easy to doubt,
The prophets seem sure, but not sure enough.
Go back to protect family. Require foresight to act,
Constellations on all sides of this vessel come out
and the worm Ouroboros eats itself,
What new top and bottom to historic walls?
Forces are opposed, and like tyrannies.

Death, creation continue. Top and bottom create.
This is a reading of fate.

 Pile of Bowls. These bowls are transparent held to the light. He wants a permeable membrane between the clay and light.In his last years Cezanne was so blind his landscapes abstracted until they were only colors.

 'A divine tortoise', said Confucius, 'can appear to prince Yüan in a dream, yet it cannot escape the net of Yü Ch'ieh. Its wisdom can yield seventy-two faultless omens, yet it cannot escape the misery of being cut to pieces. Truly wisdom has its limits; spirituality, that which it cannot reach.'In spite of the highest wisdom, there are countless snares to be avoided. If a fish has not to fear nets, there are always pelicans. Get rid of small wisdom, and great wisdom will shine upon you. Put away goodness and you will be naturally good. A child does not learn to speak because taught by professors of the art, but because it lives among people who can themselves speak.'

 

 --Crumpled, Dented, Crshed

 Unless it is too philosophical to be of interest these stressed and broken attempts to fall and stand at the same time see pots as people and to which do we like most, the cheerful ones who go against all odds and heroically oppose, or those who bow the head, the knee, and excite sympathy? Indeed many did fall, imploded, collapsed in the stretching intended to enhance their lines. Why were they pushed to such extremes? Some can't raise their hands because they don't have arms. These are many. Or sometimes they just have stumps for arms in these days. Of those who raise hands not all get them all the way up either, from the weight or maybe they are prevented. There are all kinds of postures in hands raised, just like there are all kinds of reasons for raising them. Surrender is always implied, and praise. Also sacrifice. Those without hands are the most poignant if we imagine them. We can see the heads and the bodies, as if the arms and hands were wrapped inside a serape maybe. Hands raised, heads raised, bodies raised. If we are armed militarized security forces it gets ambiguous, as they are concealing something under their cloaks. Beating hearts. Some of these may be considered Protest Jars, others Quechua ladies silently witnessing.

 

--Kiln-Spit

I  went to pick up pieces at the kiln, one had cracked on refire. I threw it in the can after the master complained that he likes what I do, wants to teach me, but that if I don't learn then the P C for the Arts is no place for me.

He asked again and again who my teachers are (because he thinks I have to learn about "handbuilding") and that there are many at the P C of the Arts who could "help" me, but how could I say that my teachers are only the clay?

I may then have said that teachers only teach their own virus and the ones they have been taught. I said I learn from my work and I admire Gareth Mason and wood fire effects and could have said Callas or Voulkos, especially their attitude which is not punitive.

The master says, he's  your teacher then (Mason). I reply no, I'm just glad he's in the world and I admire and identify his work, but I am seeking to split form into pieces. I don't bother saying what work is banal and commonplace because tyrants who throw their voice around have favorites and the rest can skate. Their teaching, so called, is mainly opinions and jokes. They cannot teach what they don't know, that being that the essence of form is the nothingness of design and the liquid of color that flows around it.

All the righteous are offended. I have offended print teachers, ceramic teachers, Mennonite teachers, English teachers, poets and tennis bigshots. I might be onto something. The outcome is that I want to tear the top off with the bottom so the form can represent the detasseled torsos of our time. So people are like corn stalks. This is meant to stir compassion for the pain of extinction and malformation introduced everywhere in the world. These oppositions are much in the air. I sent  a beautiful piece of writing, Reset Blue Superstitution Farewell Blue Superposition in dialect and dialectic to a place and the editor wanted to know, in the rejection, if it was a Markov chain-- a random process that undergoes transitions from one state to another. I replied, thinking to make some headway, that it was a Mono-ha, another thing to be ignorant of, and the editor on the other end said I could have said all that in three sentences. There are rule givers in power everywhere. I have planned to get ten of this Flower Guys, the one shown above here is #2, two more are made, but it may be prevented (but wasn't). I'm coming to believe that if a piece can be photographed it is inferior, for color is everywhere and always changing.

There was some kiln-spit off the embedded feldspar onto other pieces, master said, not that he knew it was buried feldspar, and that the bottoms are "unfinished," hence unstable. I said I can glaze the surface to prevent the spit, they are hardly glazed at all, and sand the bottom. He thinks they should have feet, is utterly afraid of the spirit. I have since reinforced the bottoms. But now they are falling from other directions, the plasticity of the clay at 2300 degrees causes the "arms" to fall. That's OK. It leads to further curvature in the work (Dec. 17). But there are three or four absolute show pieces in the yard than need plaster of paris bases to stand. Will get to it.

This is a good time to repeat the quote from Kierkegaard at the head of Forms of the Formless:  As soon as a man appears who brings something of the primitive along with him, who says “let the world be what it likes, I take my stand on a primitiveness which I have no intention of changing to meet with the approval of the world,” at that moment a metamorphosis takes place in the whole of nature, the castle that has been lying under a spell for a hundred years opens and the angels have something to do, and watch curiously to see what will come of it, because that is their business.

--magister vacancy

  Vacancy is a fallen state, not the destiny of the redeemed man. What is his destiny? He has to find it out. If firings are apocalypses what are "reconciliations of the good?" No results found. The pine that fires the apocalypse of the kiln will die in the fire, but it is the same pine that made the purest water in the world. That water that comes from the aquifer of the pine barren is like water that comes from the rock in the desert, and like the orchid that comes from the rock in the broken, erupted, eroded world, its flower is a symbol of the destiny of the man.

 Fire is romanticized. Think the sculptors and the piscine shapes of women know that we go in this fire? Been touched? Once burned? Twice? Why were they in the Euphrates (not the Gihon, Tigris, or Nile)? Why had they been bound, now loosed?! You know why. The 200 million horses breathe fire, smoke and brimstone. They are kilns some critic would say, wrenching scripture as does Kafka's analogy of the Wall of China for the Tower of Babel. China to Babel, horses to kilns, all prophets, Enoch, Noah, David, Isaiah, Jonah, Jesus, John are traditional and iconoclastic. Consider making a whip to cleanse the Temple. Kafka enforces scripture with the best Biblicals. Believe that and read the Great Wall of China and the kiln opening like my nephew asking what the opening of the seventh seal means. I told him that I hate to spoil the ending. I subscribe parageography to geology with the voyages of Odysseus, Virgil, St. Brenden. As Beowulf stands beside the burning mere Of plumb immensity before he’ll go Into the vast abysm without fear, And wonders if that watery bed’s his bier Before he draws a breath of earth’s sweet air, And dives into the darkness of the mere:

Poetry? You say there's a difference between water and earth, air and fire, male and female? More pollution of  intellect?

The wood kiln  is about  blushes girls make when they come out and open their faces. The Unloading makes the color ranges known. In the catacombs Don Reitz is rumored to mix his clays from a WSO base, with a pinch of the secret (oxide). Others are trucking raw clay from the East as Reitz draws From The Heart. Implicit reduction of oxygen or oxidation forced with ash and smoke from chemicals saturated in the clay makes them blush. Iron and copper clay compositions set up blushes with the wood, depending whether pecan, walnut, pine. Some place they fire with cinnamon, persimmon, madrone. Lee Ufan (Japan), Claudi Casanovas (Spain) and Donald Judd (W Tex (Marfa!)), range to and fro over takes of this natural, cuts of stone hills and scrub growth, sun and sky.

 Mining Minimals
Truth Business:

How can the intellect pollute the natural and its art when it thinks it is mining the heart? All mining produces contamination of surface and subsurface, slag heaps, gob piles, subsidence, runoff increase. Chemicals concentrate in water that the Reitz Ranch is well situated to recall, chemicals concentrated in the Verde River run right by. Consider the Verde river polluted with mine tailings and arsenic runoff just down from here where Cottonwoods fish the river. Maybe they don't drink the water, but abandoned smelter stacks and slag piles wash down leftover mines also in Globe, Bisbee, Jerome and a hundred others. Compare these with the intellectual pollution of the natural in the human. Like it or not, seeking depth, mines are the depth of art mirroring life that cannot take the pristine uprights of Reitz' sculptural  recall, with its crosses and grave artifacts, other than as if they were the River Shannon graveyards of Clonmacnoise. The last thing I remember is Jonathan Cross saying something like, "the fire of the volcano," who insisted that deliberation of ceramic takes of the world were intellectual, after a taking of the natural. The argument was that had they the colors we have they'd certainly used them. So the sea would not remain the wine-dark of Homer. But what is art if not pollution, considering our surroundings, the hills barren, the river poisoned, the sky filled with chemtrails all the sun filled day? Intellect to intellect? I didn't say this. I am listening as if knowing is finding the spirit of knowing and not knowing simultaneously, as in a human mind.The red, black and white clay colors of ancient statuary are like the three classical colors, the only colors, inferred from Arabic.

Kiln opening.

Don't you love art talk? Don Reitz is famous for it. Claudi Casanovas, in Twenty Blocks, says "each piece is a silence. If I were a poet, I would inscribe words there." Here Casanovas too, but such impossibility! The silence is complete. Only his stressing of materials is exciting, The problem all these boys have is why should I buy their pieces when I can go to Winslow and buy petrified wood as big or bigger than I can lift, already stressed? The stressing of materials echoes Mono-ha. The impression these give on the GalerieBesson site is of a depersonalization attractive because the viewer doesn't have to figure out the message, recognize the face, interpret the image. It's a rock its own self collecting, but there were no human figures in the kiln. Donald Judd collaborated with his father, but had extreme distaste for galleries and art biz. Artist as "designer," not "maker" might not obscure that design. Whether preceding the made, made in the making, or found after, in breaking, this is a mere time constraint, for should there be time no longer, to further the Biblical, if then, then now, time is a convenience for those who talk. If no time, then no human maker either, not to deny the work, merely to say nothing, certainly not thank you for saying it is good. What's your problem anyway? He died rich. He was so rich he started a foundation in Marfa. That's where Robert Creeley got sick in order to die in Odessa.

Afterward I got out a pit fired Papago pot from the old trader Kermit Lee acquired when he liquidated. You can see the burn marks and its softness: “Eight miles from the Pisinemo Road is the Quijotoa Trading Post. Quijotoa is a Spanish corruption of KiaHoaToak, Papago for “carrying basket mountain.” The Quijotoa Mountains were mined in 1774 and again with more importance in the 1880s. At the trading post, Mr. and Mrs. Kermit Lee have a wonderful selection of Papago baskets and pottery. Baskets range from thumb-nail miniatures made of horsehair to waste basket size of yucca, beargrass, and martynia…Almost directly across from the Trading Post is a road north to Santa Rosa Village. Just west of it is Ventana Cave; and here lies some of the most ancient history in North America.” Desert Magazine,
 May1969.

2014 and after --"Firing in wood burning kilns gave him new surfaces to explore along with new clay bodies that he discovered while in Japan, clay from Shigaraki. Sandy clay from the bed of Lake Biwa has a warm orange color which characterizes Shigaraki ware [?] of irregular contours and archaic flavor. Firing technique shifted from reduction to oxidation firing, which allows free admission of air during the firing rather than limited air admission into the kiln. This allows iron oxides to be used as part of the coloring process. The allowance of free air is due to the type of ancient kiln, called an anagama kiln, which is used to fire Shigaraki ware...achieves the mineral glaze surface. Depending on the placement of the piece, the resulting coat of ash and minerals will vary with a greyish to a reddish-brown colorizing, small impurities protrude, caused by embedded quartz [feldspar?] partially fired. Covered with a thin layer of overrun yellowish-brown to a peach blossom red color glaze that crackles when fired is also characteristic."

Voulkos "Invented each time as if for the first time then reinvented as part of the history of invention."...geology of art, archeology, layer by layer...primeval geology, gap, crack, smash, sludge, break...beauty of the crack, the burned crack, the torn edge, plasticity, viscosity, drying, slashed, embedded, incised, scratched, scored, incised wax resist stacks, plates, STACKS! contours, recesses, fit for caves, spelunkers, "destroy itself at the same time it creates," ...original wary attitude toward applied glaze solidified to total avoidance...cylinder, dome, sphere, disk, plate, slab. Leather hard wheel forms joined in various combinations in stacks or ice buckets (?) muscular, irreverent, anti-academic [primitef] (From the introduction of Clay's Tectonic Shift: John Mason ceramic walls].  Mason began to make massive rough-hewn walls... huge cross forms and solid, geometric shape...imprinting the finished form with the gestural force of its making-ceramic walls]. Walls, vertical totems, crosses, reaching for the primitive.

We are going to have to forgive Voulkos for being an influence on so many ceramic artists. That's their fault. Also forgive the force of his personality, here's a good pic. The solitude, rejection, anger, energy, dislocation: “The minute you begin to understand what you’re doing it loses that searching quality.  Your emotions take over and what happens just happens. Usually you don’t know it’s happened until after it’s done.http://franklloydgallery.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/peter-voulkos-on-improvisation/Of the influence of Franz Kline: 

Of the influence of Franz Kline: "Bridges, tunnels, buildings, engines, railroads, and other architectural and industrial icons are imagery informing Kline's work; lines, planes, facets, coal, "Kline’s memories of his native Pennsylvania’s coal-mining region, with its stark scenery, locomotives and similar massive mechanical shapes to which the titles of his later abstract images sometimes referred." Reading that Franz Kline's black and white paintings with tunnels and roads stems from his childhood in Wilkes Barre and the coal mines makes me wonder at the influence of that house along the railroad where we lived from 5-16. Especially the early years, starting 1947 the trains smoke was not scrubbed. What was later white was black as soot, especially where the freights had to go up a gentle rise we live in the middle of. There were two tracks, only freight trains, that went to and way from the Pennsylvania Railroad train yard a few miles down. This was a big operation hillsides undermined by coal extraction prevented development.When I look at these rectilineal constructs, crosses etc I see grave stone ceremonials. Much of Voulkos, Callas, Reitz is suited to memorials. De Kooning also enters these associations, who I have long loved, block and slices. I love everything he says about art non art.



These ideas of the primitive need to be distinguished from false Legends of the Unconscious that abide in all psychiatry. On the one hand, in ruined artifacts of vacancy and presence, vacancy of design and designer, the presence of the natural flows. Repeating patterns to identify work betrays the natural, vacancy. Artists in need of PR exhibition make and imitate their own style, which is neither primitive nor unconscious. Making design by erosion, breakage, eruption, gravity, is vacancy.
 Lee Ufan, in Mono-ha, the School of Things, says unknowingly materials reveal knowledge. Against thought and forethought when stone hits glass the breakage conforms to gravity and glass, not the intention of the artist. Glass is resistant to breaking, explosive, but clay adapts, molds to the maker in its making, gradually perfected into its form that when fired becomes the form to be accepted or cast off. Comparing glass and clay, the freedom of each to act and crack or mold unknowingly reveals qualities inherent in, but not visible as object. Destruction an aesthetic smacks of social disorder. Earth is being destroyed all around us by earthquake and volcano, fire, and flood and hurricane, water. If you crack the stone, you conceal the stone the way railroad ties reveal connotations of forced labor in Japanese colonies in World War II or Ireland's famine stone walls around the Burren are famine walls denoting starvation and slavery. After the same notion of changed form, burning wood makes charcoal.

Laminating Opposites. Mercury

Take passage tombs, where the sun shines into the passage at a significant point in the year, as wood kilns and both as the spirit of knowing and not knowing of a human mind. Pollution is a symbol if it fuels the laminating opposites of volcano and and kiln, infiltrating impurities into clay, cone 5 into cone ten, bark and organics that incinerate and leave a trace, rocks, volcanic ash, erosion deposition, reburied feldspar as shigaraki layering,  cracking, stressing with cedar berries, pine needles, sycamore bark, buckeye pods, chicken bones under streams of shino, impurities that swim in the underclay where spines are buried, pebbles, manure, vermiculite! beetles! road kill!, chollas, spines, pads, all buried. Who dares be born on this earth? Hope to hatch out a split scarab, stretch geologics, Mercury-like thrust faults and global contraction of the planet, with lobate scarps from interior cooling? As Mercury has a larger core than other inner planets creating cumulative compressional strain recorded in the se lobate scarps that decrease Mercury's radius which the kiln can easily top, shrinking up to 15%. So a reduction kiln imitates an anagama and both a planet. A planet is a pot. Core contractions produce lobate scarps [scalps],

 cliffs of implosion,

 displacement thrust faults, 

compressional stresses,

 thermal contraction,

 lineated terrain. 

All these are part of the man in the wilderness. Preexisting crater rims disrupt crude polygonal hills. Impact ejecta blanket fractured mantles. Miners, dwarves, nibelungs mine coal out of the earth clay coat, rutile wash, cobalt hole. This art is katalole. It reminds of the electrical scouring of Mars.

All the global aspects of Mercury lead to a loss of surface planting contradiction into the clay body. Slumping, cutting earthquakes seek the volcano in the kiln. The pollution in saying so calls fire out of the medieval Cloud of Unknowing with the spirit. Fathom that after the volcano, like the shell of a man shrunk, heart sack creased like a pot expelled from itself, when you don't have naught to say. Thought burns up. Intellect ceases tasks. You stand struck, parietal lobes rewired.This destruct is art? Apocalypse.is art. All these firings are apocalypses. I read that when the sixth angel sounds it will loose the angels bound in the Euphrates.


 ***

Malcolm Davis

Their glazes were basically feldspar with a little ash.

The secret of carbon-trapping is in one ingredient: soda ash. My particular glaze has

about 18% soda ash. Many shinos have no soda ash at all and are glazes used by potters

who do not want carbon-trapping and are searching for a more traditional Japanese sur-

face. I love those pots, but I am obsessed with carbon and soot.

 left to dry for 2 weeks to grow sulfates on the surface.

reduction pulls the oxy out of the glaze that was grown in, sulfide to sufate

Note on celadon: a little tin oxide and/or barium carbonate will help with the blue color.

John Mason

The common reduction fired Shino glazes in North America are mostly gloss or semigloss, fat, white crackle glazes with some orange to red and dark red from iron in the clay body or iron slips under the glaze. Shinos were born in Japan as almost pure high fired feldspar glazes. Shino on porcelain requires underglaze iron bearing slips, or in-glaze iron (i.e. from an iron-containing kaolin). Shinos are fluxed with soda spars and nepheline syenite and do not contain calcium because it dissolves the iron and inhibits the red color. Shinos usually do not have added silica, the silica being contributed by the feldspars and the clays in the glaze. Some Shinos contain Spodumene, which may be added to balance the high expansion soda spars. A simple Shino recipe is 70% Nepheline Syenite and 30% Kaolin. Shino

Iron Glazes

After: I have done less of this in clay than I did in glass and words. The world is before us, but the pot remains after. Ask what he will do tomorrow if he had success today-what are you working on, as they do all novelists. The answer is there is no time and what is done is done before, during and after.

A Planet is a Pot. Crumpled, Dented and Crushed, the ceramic here and the writing there is a primitive, naive, unfinished stress and distress of  feldspar crystals from pumice clasts within a tuff. 
Not I don't know why I talk that way, I can't help it. Maybe it's because "the creation of a perfect illusion depends not (only upon a vertiginous degree of) technical ability, but ultimately upon the intuitive channeling of a breathless state in which the painter himself no longer knows whether his eye still sees or his hand still moves." W. G. Sebald, A Place in the Country. On the Paintings of Jan Peter Tripp, 175.

 Stressing materials away from the smooth and the fine to the lobate scarps is the illusion of planetary implosion. It makes cliffs of displacement thrust faults that grow orchids, compressional stresses, thermal contraction, lineated terrains of earth stars as a means of dramatizing the primitive to display the universal human, not the beauty fantasy of it, but the pain in the global aspects of a planet like Mercury that leads to a loss of surface,  except it is a man, secreting and planting contradiction into the clay body. Slumping, cutting earthquakes adjoin the volcano in the kiln. It is also part of the solar minimum. The pollution in saying so calls fire out of the medieval Cloud. Fathom that after the volcano, the shell of a man shrunk, heart sack creased when you don't have naught to say, like a pot expelled from itself. That thought burns up. Intellect ceases tasks. You stand struck, parietal lobes rewired. That is primitive.

As in Kierkegaard's idea of the primitive in Johan Tael's Immediacy and Reflection in Kierkegaard's Thought, 57F:

Primitive existence always contains a reexamination of the universally human. The primitive thinker reflects on what everyone knows, or should know. What these things are must be shown not told to that self consciousness that is so self assured. If it recognizes it recognizes itself. The concept of human being is normative; The ethical task of each singular human being consists in transforming the psychic qualification of his existence in a pneumatic one; The bedrock normative practice that determines the human being as "pneumatic" is the existential speech-act.

Writing is pneumatic if it breathes these primitive universal dramas. Primitive ceramic feeds on forethought not the intention of the artist when stone hits glass and the breakage conforms to gravity. If not, the result is mere thought.

 

--flower Guys

 I would like to think the Flower Guys, as my grand daughter calls them, are reintegrative, joining, rejoining the natural and the human into one fabric, human bodies with flower tops. This theme seeks me out from the initial "way into the flowering heart" of Sir Walter's loss of his son to thirty years later in all the Pennsylvania Dutch mythology of the flowering heart and now to these vessels. For as Ken says the Wabenaki believed that inviting the lost, fragmented, rejected and rejecting spirit into the family, honoring him, her or it with family titles, father, father-in-law, implicitly comforting them, clothing and reclothing them, and feeding them real food, which means the food of the soul so they do not have to eat the hearts of the enemies in ritual cannibalism or famine, giving them children to play with, brings them back from their cold into the warmth of the hearth and home and kin. from Pursing Gluskap. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1338801995


 

But more, and better, let the flower guys see  that whenever two people look into each other's faces the eyes of others are present, for there is a trace of a third person present in every face we encounter. We exist for each other as the start of breath starts speech in our throats and must know that we are either in the process of damaging or protecting the world.  He who has conferred upon us the power to open or close thousands of myriads of forces and worlds, has made us responsible for the maintenance of this universe. He gave to man dominion of his hands. This is the intimate trace of consciousness we awake in the public nature of our words and language itself, turning every meeting between one person and another into a meeting that must include the whole of humanity, living and dead.  It goes without saying that not one detail from any moment at all is lost of our deeds, words and thoughts. Each one goes back to its root to carry on in the height of heights, in the worlds and among the pure superior lights.

 --Faces

Travel to that far country from which when you return you cannot speak and if you did no one would believe. We cannot deny the three dimensions even if it lives in four. Inself Border

Last in a summer series called EMOTICONS to confront tongue tied idiots who Disnify everything about their relationships, if these images don't recognizable you that's because they are the real misshapen twisted faces initiate elites have produced for consumption in the commoner terrorist media. Khizar Khan. These Emoticons are two faced, three faced to show their users. Its back story, illustrative of the make or break demo and rebuild philosophy controlling our time is ceramic puppet.

 

Rid'em Dinosaur

But the face is signification withoutcontext...meaning all by itself.

You are you. In this sense one can say that the face is not "seen." It is what CANNOT BECOME A CONTENT, WHICH YOUR THOUGHT WOULD EMBRACE; it is uncontainable, it leads you beyond.

Their unvarying intensity of facial expression, impossible for living actors, keeps the imagination of the spectators continuously stimulated. When one of them is speaking or tumbling and the rest left aside, these, though in full view, are invisible, as they should be. Living actors have to learn that they too must be invisible while the protagonists are conversing, and therefore must not move a muscle nor change their expression, instead of, as beginners mostly do, playing to them and robbing them of the audience's undivided attention.

Puppets have also a fascination of their own, because there is nothing wonderful in a living actor moving and speaking, but that wooden headed dolls should do so is a marvel that never palls.
And they can survive treatment that would kill live actors. When I first saw them in my boyhood nothing delighted me more than when all the puppets went up in a balloon and presently dropped from the skies with an appalling crash on the floor. GB Shaw. Complete Plays: With Prefaces - Vol. 5

It is in this that the signification of the face makes it escape from being, as a correlate of a knowing. Vision, to the contrary, is a search for adequation; it is what par excellence absorbs being. (Levinias in Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Phillippe Nemo)
But the relation to the face is STRAIGHTAWAY ETHICAL. The face is what one cannot kill, or at least it is that whose meaning consists in saying: "though shalt not kill."
Murder, it is true, is a banal fact: one can kill the Other; the ethical exigency is not an ontological necessity. The prohibition against killing does not render murder impossible, even if the authority of the prohibition is maintained in the bad conscience about the accomplished evil - the malignancy of evil. It also appears in the Scriptures, to which the humanity of man is exposed inasmuch as it is engaged in the world. But to speak truly, the appearance of being of these ethical peculiarities - the humanity of man - is a rupture of being. It is significant, even if being resumes and recovers itself.
 

A nephew says some of these are monstrous. They however are not meant to express the artist's intent or person. They reflect the world. The world does not like to look at itself as is hence we can color this image with verbal association. Does anybody like calling it Hillary? Or how about Hillary at the Philadelphia Dolphin Convention coming up in July. Or it you like something sooner, how about Brexit EU? I hate it when art reflects the world and we have to thing about it.

 

After all this I must accept them after i have forgiven them for what they are, because there were previous stages in the making, as the past in an individual life, the amorphous forethought, the making of the clay, its lamination, the molding into form on the wheel, the separate parts waiting assembly, the stretching of the clay, the assembly and its bracing, the bending, molding breaking, the covering and hoping it won't fall, the finishing of the head, adjustments, the signing, the flattening the base so it will stand: all this precedes the bisquing and glazing when whites blend and intensities fade. Then the final firing and it cannot look like what it did before. That I may accept them after I have forgiven them for what they are.

"The last piece of summer fell, but not off the table. It landed on its side improving the whole nicely after it was retrieved. The inner stakes helped. The plastic around it helped. That BMix paper is brittle. Had to remove the top story. Then it toppled to the floor. Which has not happened exactly before. So the whole 30 lbs was reconstituted, wedged, rolled, thrown into the present state of this clay."

 --2017 Murals: Immigrants, Captives, Horses

Stylized indian horses, Beatien Yazz, Iberian and Andalusian bloodlines. The Iberian is the source of the Spanish Barb. Spain's long occupation of northern Africa resulted in the agile desert-bred African Barb horse being crossed with these existing stocks--conformation is often short-backed and deep bodied. They appear narrower in the chest so that the fore legs join the chest in an A-shape.

Immigrants

I saw the Immigrants and  Philistine Captives At Medinet as Bruegel, Goya behind ongoing compositions. It is a kind of exhaustion but work anyway when last nite I lay out a field of red and brown with porcelain lights and cut strips of thick porcelain, throwing them down so they came out a kind of fleur de lis that I slashed with a yardstick and assaulted with a rolling pin, which made it worse till
I cut sections of it away with a knife and got this below. Most often I work on these a couple days. This one I have to leave as is after the fight. It is not my brain but my eyes that tell me what is right, so this one which could be viewed in any direction demands to be upside down. 

Captives

The Philistine Captives At Medinet and Bruegel, Goya behind these ongoing compositions, 4D wrestle against seemingly impaired or part deformed people, men, disposing of them, moving quickly, which attracted two of the superior ones who watched from above; I was down in a kind of gully. They sent one of theirs to oppose and while dispatching him he showed absolutely no emotion, like a robot or clone. I dumped him further down the gully, wondering whether there were more when I woke. It is always the eyes that speak, not the brain. They say instantly what to do and present titles.

Broken texts relied upon as a method almost. Clay falls off the table, pushed too far. Any number of disasters befall so it can become an active means of composition, which at least brings unexpected spontaneity to the work. Is intuition in the nature of clay like the hyper grammatical, each jot and tittle mathematical? No, to me language is sound and sounds skewed, consonant assonant meanings misspelled with punlike context, corporate collective meanings with image yes, but of the sound itself, therefore flowing and changing as the clay that falls forms the pot. There are other of these tapestries to be fired, cut and formed as such.



I accept them after i have forgiven them for what they are because there were previous stages in the making, as the past in an individual life, the amorphous forethought, the making of the clay, its lamination, the molding into form on the wheel, the separate parts waiting assembly, the stretching of the clay, the assembly and its bracing, the bending, molding, breaking, the covering and hoping it won't fall, the finishing of the head, adjustments, the signing, the flattening the base so it will stand: all this precedes the bisquing and glazing when whites blend and intensities fade. Then the final firing and it cannot look like what it did before. Then I may accept them after I have forgiven them for what they are.

Two Birds

-Cover Art & Praise Jars

Of the cover art and four sculptures shown on p. 53-55 (83-86) it says  "AE Reiff is a scribe of the social-medicinal history of native southwest plants who operates a bakery near Marfa, TX. These plants are not confined to the Utah canyons and deserts, but range south to Marfa and Big Bend, which impacts the sightings of those mythogmas, the cartoon shadows of the world indexed at encouragementsforsuch.blogspot.com, light and shadow of society and world by day, intercessor by night.

Click to view additional sculptures!

Clay laminated and impressed with oxides, feldspar, quartz and glass, fired at 2350 degrees Fahrenheit

Comment accompanying Praise Jars, that appeared at Buffalo Almanack 9:: “the eye tries to understand what it sees when lamination arches from form, bowed in the firing, so daylight appears between the cracks. It is as if the eye recasts folds and curves to create familiarity to look like something it recognizes. Many of these did fall, implode, collapse in the stretching intended to enhance their lines. Why were they pushed to such extremes? Some can’t raise their hands because they don’t have arms or just stumps for arms in these days. Those who raise hands may not all get them all the way up from the weight or maybe they are prevented. There are all kinds of postures in hands raised, just like there are all kinds of reasons for raising them. Surrender is implied, and praise. Also sacrifice. Those without hands are the most poignant if we imagine we can see the heads and the bodies, as if the arms and hands were wrapped so that armed and militarized security forces thought them ambiguous, concealing something under their cloaks. Beating hearts. Some of these may be considered Protest Jars. These ideas arise in conversation like legends of the unconscious, not yet written exactly, with many sources of vacancy and presence, vacancy of the design and designer. Making by erosion, breakage, eruption, gravity, is vacancy. The world is before us, but the pot remains after. Ask what he will do tomorrow if he had success today. The answer is there is no time and what is done before is during and after.”

---

Flower Guy

 

           Asking who my teachers are is a good time to repeat the quote from Kierkegaard at the head of Forms of the Formless:  "As soon as a man appears who brings something of the primitive along with him, who says “let the world be what it likes, I take my stand on a primitiveness which I have no intention of changing to meet with the approval of the world,” at that moment a metamorphosis takes place in the whole of nature, the castle that has been lying under a spell for a hundred years opens and the angels have something to do, and watch curiously to see what will come of it, because that is their business.

The quote of the Day on 6 July 2015 occurred when   I went to pick up pieces at the kiln. One had cracked on refire which I threw it in the can after being told that the master likes what I do, wants to teach me, but that if I don't learn then the P C for the Arts is no place for me. As it repeated I much to learn about handbuilding, that voice urged again and again, who are your teachers?  adding helpfully that there are many at the P C of the Arts who could "help" me. 

 Teachers teach only their own viruses and prejudices and the ones they have been taught. I said, I learn from my work but I admire Gareth Mason and wood fire effects and could have the many notables of that, especially any non punitive attitude. "He's  your teacher then (Mason)." --"No,  I identify his effort, but I am seeking to bring the formless into form and there's nobody who can teach that. I should get a card that reads, Gravity is my muse.

The essence of form is the nothingness of design and the liquid that flows it. A piece that can be photographed is inferior. The form and the color are everywhere and always changing.

Not that I really believe this, but I want to tear the top from the bottom and make the form represent the detasseled torso spirits of our time. This is meant to stir compassion for the pain of extinction and malformation  in the corn field of the world.

Oppositions are much in the air. I sent  a beautiful piece of writing, Reset Blue Superstition Farewell Blue Superposition in dialect and dialectic to a place and the editor wanted to know in the rejection if it was a Markov chain-- a random process that undergoes transitions from one state to another. I replied, thinking to make some headway, that it was a Mono-ha, another thing to be ignorant of, and the editor on the other end said I could have said all that in three sentences, a version of which appeared here. Turning that into three sentences is like finding disemodied feet inside boots all along the Washington coast.  These resemble accounts of the disembodied heads on the Beltway found here.

Rule givers are in power everywhere. I plan to get ten of this  Flower Guys, the one shown above here is #2, two more are made. It could have been prevented but it was not.   

There was also some kiln-spit on the embedded feldspar on other pieces. The voice did not know it was buried feldspar, and that the bottoms are "unfinished," hence unstable.They are hardly glazed at all. The thought that they should have feet, is a fear of the spirit, but I have since reinforced the bottoms. Now they fall from other directions. The plasticity of clay at 2300 degrees causes "arms" to fall. It leads to further curvature.

 -- Precarious, I, II, III

The precarious balances the edge. First it was solid, stable, but taken to where it began to fall, just intervening in its collapse, it was shifted and pulled, for remember it is a hollow cylinder when all is said and done, and while the photograph may not show it, because it is not a photograph, the cylinder, some 27" tall in origin, can collapse from the various strength of its sides, the imprecise pressure of its stretching, and most from the need for it to totter there and be pulled back. Reduced from its origin by even a third, which will be further reduced by the fire another tenth at least, it is a rescue. She is precarious and he is too, but what other reason do they have to be? We have long since fallen away from the norm and the paranorm. They  become the same.

Relied upon as a method of composition, clay sculptures fall off the table, sink in, implode being pushed too far or have disasters befall them which ensures a freshness and unexpected spontaneity of broken texts to the work. There are two of these, the other still to be fired, which came as a result of a failed tapestry, cut in half and formed into these. Like a pot which got pushed too far and totally fell,  the deal is that the clay still has to be used, so it got made into a large protuberance called Molly or Maggie. Intuition is in the nature of clay.

The best writing comes out of desperation, puerility, except Stevens maybe, but there is some repose in Borges and Kafka and innocence in Kerouac vs. Poe’s true adventures, misadventures of an anarchist in Beasts, Imp, Man, Bottle. Crane writes with demonic energy of rejection which supercharges his lines with a mass fire of rejection, hence desire for acceptance, picking up seamen. Poe’s vindictive glee and ironic justice.  Promethean fire they spark within themselves, but not against the gods, rather in favor to them, from them, celebrated all their forbidden fruits, Lingering behind these are shadows of pedophilia, corrupted lusts. All this is the highest complement to empire, domination, the American Babylon. the myth of America. It does not follow that he sought solace with sailors because he couldn’t get a job, or lived at home. More Faustian stuff, disconnected intellect from life, the very thing Weimar, empire, feeds on. Crane was a intellectual neurotic as much as Harold Bloom. Truly neurotic verbal fire, the very thing his mentors and peers seek themselves. 

They are like the Cuckoo Finches who supplant the nest, therefore
Cuckoos cluck to finches: they lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and abandon the care of their young to the hosts. Like wheat and tares. The first act of most brood parasite species’ chicks after hatching is to do away with the host’s own brood. Different species do this by ejecting their nest mates from the nest, by using their sharp beaks to fatally injure them, or by physically dominating them. One of the most common strategies for brood parasites to manipulate their hosts into raising their offspring is known as “aggressive mimicry”. This is a way for the birds to dupe a host by looking harmless, for example by resembling a species that is not parasitic. The strategy is already well-documented in a variety of brood parasite species: some lay eggs that resemble those of their hosts, while the chicks and fledglings of others look (and sound) like the host’s own chicks and fledglings. This is necessary, as hosts will reject parasitic eggs, chicks and fledglings, if they can detect them.

Time going forward from the ever present now, us receiving the future,  is malleable as its appearing the future is fluid like the present. Taken from any present time accuracy if may change taken from another present time accurately from events that have happened since the first reading. In the case where some diviner predicts the future  a collapse of the probability into a reality, and it occurs that may be because they made it occur by ruling out the other versions, ie they made you the subject believe it so it came to pass, like remote viewing targets find what they seek because they pick them out of the experimenter brain and then find what he thought was there. Observer created reality observed itself. An exception in meaning can occur when synchronous events of different kinds confirm themselves in the present, or rather viewed after they have occurred in the present, some day or weeks.

--Waves that crash are escalators up and elevators down. The excess of over trend is the wave long building sudden collapsing.

 

-- Raissonne

To contemplate the vision and its symbols, compositions and colors, many animal forms keep recurring, fox, bear, tortoise, dog, eagle, horse, only valuable if you love and respect those beings and forms as miracles themselves, which makes their interpretation worthwhile.

There are  human figures of all sorts. 

 

Sometimes the symbol catches pre-emergent in the clay,or roaming round the pot, or like the souls in the cave, and sometimes they are released.

These range from Balzac to every from of political Everyman and people we have never seen, who show us who we are by contrast. 

 Lamination bowed in the firing so daylight appears between the cracks, caverns and splits in the firing, arch from form. The eye tries to understand what it sees when folds and curves make shadow. It constantly plays over it to create familiarity. It is as if the eye recasts the image, which seems to be moving, in order to understand it. This establishes the statement that it depends on your point of view (see Buffalo Almanuac #9, 88-91).  

 

These ideas, called minimalist and abstract expressionist, arise in conversation like Legends of the Unconscious, not yet written exactly, with many sources of vacancy and presence, vacancy of the design and designer, presence of the flows of the natural. Making and repeating patterns to identify work as recognizable of a certain style is a betrayal of vacancy. Making by erosion, breakage, eruption, gravity, is vacancy.

 The world is before us, but the pot remains after. Ask what he will do tomorrow if he had success today and it cannot be answered. The answer is there is no time and what is done is done before, during and after. Such composition has a range of meaning and association from more simple but improbable Flowers from Rock to curvilinear figures not quite named, like a woman or a flower or orchids growing out of rock or appearing out of deep textured natural permanence or condominium cement blocks and subway cars that haul off prisoners of American myth.

 

There are many stressed vessels deconstructing which the eye tries to make look like something it recognizes, broken attempts to fall and stand at the same time, pots like people who go against the odds and heroically oppose, or bow the head and the knee and excite sympathy. Many of these did fall, implode, collapse in the stretching intended to enhance their lines. 

 

Why were they pushed to such extremes? Some can't raise their hands because they don't have arms or just stumps for arms in these days. Those who raise hands may not get them all the way up from the weight or maybe they are prevented. There are all kinds of postures in hands raised, just like there are all kinds of reasons for raising them. Surrender is implied, and praise. Also sacrifice. Those without hands are the most poignant if we imagine we can see the heads and the bodies, as if the arms and hands were wrapped, as if there were armed and militarized security forces, ambiguously concealing something under their cloaks. Some of these may be considered Protest Jars silently witnessing.

Peasant Work

This is a Raisonné of folk work. Clay befits peasant work unlike marble sculpture or stone. Clay wants to lift the human spirit from forms that hold it in. All the examples here have that intent.

They are Raptures in Progress that ask how can I reconcile myself to what has made me.To get the kings of marble and high art you have to get the attitude. Faisal here is undergoing his beauty treatment in pride and power. The British have so warmed their royals. The word king hardly appears. It's babies and beauties, stability they are selling, all masked. Other potentates suffer their pride of manhood. There's nothing behind a Saudi prince. Abdulla, Farouk, Faisal, especially Farouk lands the fat cats in trouble. Outlaws in bandanas with the top down will pull up next to him and his cousins at stoplights and taunt: King Farouk! King Farouk!

Trojan Horse Pleistocene horse: was let in the city because of its art. This replica was found in old papyrus. It had Greece in the belly.  After a light spray of shino over found clays with B mix laminated, red shino sprayed and waxed, some trigger pulls of clear  penetrated the wax and diffused the orange. 

ChuangTzu resolves this with this with a joke about horse (Legge,183). The disputant wants to stand "in the center where he can respond without end to the changing views" of the affirming and denying . "Separation led to completion, then ensued dissolution" (184). Let us give up devotion to our views and adopt the "ordinary.""By means of a finger (of my own) to illustrate that the finger (of another) is not a finger is not so good a plan as to illustrate that it is not so by means of what is (acknowledged to be) not a finger; and by means of (what I call) a horse to illustrate that (what another calls) a horse is not so, is not so good a plan as to illustrate that it is not a horse, by means of what is (acknowledged to be) not a horse. ( All things in) heaven and earth may be (dealt with as) a finger; (each of) their myriads may be  (dealt with as) a horse. Does a thing seem so to me? (I say that) it is so. Does it seem not so to me? (I say that) it is not so. We used to argue these things on long tennis trips, like the say that said, "Dust Storms May Exist," and austere elements of the periodic table. But it was a joke!  The ordinary can't be found among the immortals.What is a horse? His son will tell him what is a horse. It is different from what he said was a horse. The sons point that out, affirm and deny, horse around. My kingdom horse! All unhorsed. Another horse quote from the age of sound bites.

Pit Pony spent his life at the bottom of a coal mine. He is the last of his kind. The split on his leg is where it was broken. It healed and it got him back up in the air again for a time. There's no point to a broken pit pony. What can he pull? He has a cousin, Pity, an experimental rabbit who lived in a cage in the basement of the Experimental Science Building. His scientists turned the cage against the wall. Pit Pony is also Pit Poetry.

 

 

 

Pegasus-The Pegasus islands off the Aleutian coast are home to

Pegasus. For that reason they are called baby Aleutians and in childhood range the Pacific. Many babies are sighted  at birth before they fly away. Then you can see them. Later their colors reflect the ice and arctic environment, blues, whites, beige, frost colors make them hard to see against the clouds, which is why they are mythological in the first place. Whether there are real such flying horses who can doubt? These are modeled from my years among them. 

Chihuahua went in the oven to heat, to take a reglaze then sat on the  shelf without firing. I got bored and took him home and took the reglaze off. Talk about skin! A brush wouldn't do. It needed a scraping tool and the skin came off a piece at a time. Oh skin, what changes more blue would have been? This chihuahua is life size.

Lien Among Pots is either a mortgage against pottery or a bed from Psalm 68. Two Button is thin. He survived biscuit and got clear-glazed.

Tortoise Carrying Pot

The tortoise carrying a pot is raw clay. There are three blues, cobalt carbonate and oxide, rutile, a green, nickel carbonate and yellow iron oxide. None of them will be then as now. The pink and blacks will be blue. 

I brought it home but couldn't touch it when unveiled this morning. What use is the potter? I rolled out paper B mix, impastoed on top with Jamaica and the last found clays of that bag, took it down to 1/4 inch, laid it on a board, sifted the oxides, pounded in Aunt Libby's acanthus woodcut, pressed a cedar shim in ledges, rolled it up round a plastic tube, picked it up, set it on end and let it dry a little. Too soon I took off the tube to pack newspaper inside. The whole thing collapsed in a sheet. Using my chest, hands and some English (I had rolled the papers up in a big ball) I stuffed the newspapers inside and, picked it up and bounced it on the board, because otherwise it won't sit (La Primavera, the first of this series, fell in the firing). When I saw the tortoise I got a chill.

 

Notes 

 

Tortoise Mythical tortoise-Comments: "I heard that in Ch'u there is a sacred tortoise which has been dead now some three thousand years and that the prince keeps this tortoise carefully enclosed in a chest on the altar of his ancestral temple." Chuang Tzu. We keep tortoises. Rick's wife Alyson once indicated she wasn't sure about reptiles, but Tracy, she got her name from Hank, the neighbor.

What is a horse? The universes of man will dispute. His sons will tell him what is a horse. It is different from what he said was a horse. They point that out, affirm and deny horsing around. That's it. "Separation led to completion, then ensued dissolution" (184). He says let us give up this devotion to our own views and adopt the "ordinary," meaning the simple use of things. Then stop (184). The ordinary is so arcane it can't be found among the immortals. Immortality, sageness, the superior man are all synomyms for idiot. We give everything to restore the commonplace world.

Note from Pleistocene horse: He wants to stand "in the center where he can respond without end to the changing views" of the affirming and denying (Legge, Chuang Tzu, 183). He resolves it with the joke, his horse. What is a horse? His son will tell him what is a horse. It is different from what he said was a horse. They point that out, affirm and deny horse around.  "By means of a finger (of my own) to illustrate that the finger (of another) is not a finger is not so good a plan as to illustrate that it is not so by means of what is (acknowledged to be) not a finger; and by means of (what I call) a horse to illustrate that (what another calls) a horse is not so, is not so good a plan as to illustrate that it is not a horse, by means of what is (acknowledged to be) not a horse. ( All things in) heaven and earth may be (dealt with as) a finger; (each of) their myriads may be  (dealt with as) a horse. Does a thing seem so to me? (I say that) it is so. Does it seem not so to me? (I say that) it is not so. We used to argue these things on long tennis trips, like the say that said, "Dust Storms May Exist," and austere elements of the periodic table. But it was a joke!

 

 "Separation led to completion, then ensued dissolution" (184). Let us give up devotion to our views and adopt the "ordinary." The ordinary can't be found among the immortals.

All these tensions are illusions, including between the gifted and the folk. That comment goes with this other, that "the more gifted, the more intelligent, the more experienced classes were the first to accept an absurdity and the last to give it up." What causes acceptance of absurdity? Value. But beyond the personal, illusions of perfection are also a means of social control. Three truths are that life is sacred, relationships are to be sustained and freedom must be found. The gifted are less free than the folk. Yet each of the truths has qualification. There are no qualifications to illusions applied in every situation.

The romantic adventure of death is a ha. Preceded by suffering and death, like matriculation at a university of epic size where you don’t know anyone and the registrar tells you have 39 hours, people are shouting in Egyptian about the politics of the past. Denial even in death. It was their custom when driving the sins out of  New York to bury them in decommissioned subway cars. That was good for fish. Habitats for sin were only one discovery.  Western sins driven to Grand Canyon made coruscations at sunset. Many jumped within to be alone. Fish with Sin were buried under golf courses. Forests planted to hide it had to be rooted up lest fish return. It was getting crowded. New sins appeared. They sent them to space. We sent Japan into the sun. We sent our sin into the Son!

I have not progressed beyond my farm ancestors. Each morning I am at the fields before daylight, and earlier in the barn, tools ready, tending, My fields are historical fences and boundaries, my stock that night’s teaching when I awake. I am a farmer planting, weeding, hoeing, repairing on the farm where the solitary gather in families 300 years.

Trumpets

Mountain is the piano, Bear the pianist, Wilderness the composer.

Genghis Khan’s horse is 60 miles long.
A rhinoceros runs across the piano.

More Notes 

 In holding to open source in formations of these matters I report happily that the last instance of this run before the kiln closed until fall was its greatest success, first because of the issue of how to glaze these dark clays without greying them was given a possible solution. All transparent celadon glazes diminish and grey dark clay—of course in porcelain they are beautiful—so that in awaking one morning the intention was to dust the dark trumpets of this piece with glass frit held on by wax. It was a blue frit on hand but the clay utterly absorbed the color so that it seems any sort, ever clear glass would do. Of course there is a danger it would fall on the kiln shelf but this did not happen, instead a magnificent sheen  appeared. So that was discovery one. The second on this last and best was the  plate-like lamination of different amadors, black mt, death valley, Jamaica clays affixed before the stretching with serious feldspar crystals rolled in along with some feldspar gravel, pre bisque. So this makes the body so interesting in its textures and thicknesses and suggests much use. The coup de grace was when the piece was finished at about 20in upright and because previous ones had fallen was reinforced with paper clay on the inmost slope. So it was finished, covered and left, but again came the message that it had fallen, but not completely, it had bent because one part of the bottom had been compressed, but had not fallen off the table, just bent until the cones were an inch above the surface of the board on the wheel, and there is has stayed more or less, just above the surface, a kiss of five cones bending one over the other. I say all this to urge open source upon us all, for once years ago in a class with the best texture surface maker in the valley, and watching him spray shinos in different strokes and ash between he would in no way explain what he did but tried to hide his method. Zero sum all the way. Cavet empetor.2.

This must be another in the era of horse and rider (cast into the sea), the second time in this kiln opening when the best piece fell before or after it got to bisque. I was bored with events before this but not now, and seek to recapture them, for once you see the wild boar you load your gun. At least in the first one, a vase with extensive tears in the middle and bottom, narrow and 20in tall which then had the trumpet figures added to the open top and compressed and there it stood, the most beautiful thing I have seen, so all was well when I covered it, but then the report came 20 min later of its fall, which I reconstituted but it could not be like. This one here is in the raw after undergoing the same kind of devolution, but this much remained, a kind of cannon off the Triangle at the Fort Pitt blockhouse, its trumpet extending as you see far into the ether. It did bisque, and held, but in the glazing to solidify its meager consttuction the trumpet fell off. Here in this pic it looks like another horse and rider, which images keep appearing periodically as a kind of Egyptian retrospective.

3. had a block of black mt a little dry so cut into slices rolled out, joined into 4 figures and put on a ground of jamaca, but  without paper this time, left the cylinder in all night, in morn pushed the top together, put in the 4 cylinders little ones, and it was beautiful. Some miniutes later heard a noise, it spooked the dog, it all fell down!

4. Let us say that this zodiac reveals its prehistoric constellations as it progresses, that the promise of the horn  blown against the serpent Ouroboros is fulfilled in the upraised arms of the Warrior Deliverer. What this promise is we know when the top is removed from the vessel that bears these truths.

If a piece is not precarious why should it exist? She is precarious and he is too, but what other reason do they have to be? We have long since fallen away from the norm and even the paranorm. They have become the same. The precarious balances the edge. First it was solid, stable, but taken to where it began to fall, just intervening in its collapse, it was shifted and pulled, for remember it is a hollow cylinder when all is said and done, and while the photograph may not show it, because it is not a photograph, the cylinder, some 27" tall in origin, can collapse from the various strength of its sides, the imprecise pressure of its stretching, and most from the need for it to totter there and be pulled back. Reduced from its origin by even a third, which will be further reduced by the fire another tenth at least, it is a rescue.

 5.   Clay artist--These towers I make out of layers of lamination of old and new clay with porcelain interiors but exteriors of lava, gravel and cobalt specks pressed into the new that stretch above two feet, which stretch into cylinders with shoulders and mouths, which taken the other way are cut, compressed, the shoulders lowered into the body, the base informed, all for the climatic event, the vulnerability, the weak spot, prevented as much as possible but inevitable in most, hence the tear, the slump, the complete collapse of the shell so the hands are full, but braces at hand, two by fours and sponges and props combine them all to a landing. The tower lands as play but needs to be put back up on its base, which was made double and triple to support the whole of which by now in diameter is as wide as the tower was high, but it has to touch the ground too, so an edge tilts, otherwise it will fall in the heat of the firing. So there the volcano. Comment on scale: big or small. If big they are a measure of ourselves. If we were big they would be small, so big or small is a slight measure. If we photograph the small close up we make it big in scale. These are the scale they are from the point of view of what will fit in my car when I take it wrapped from the studio to where the real work is done, a garage, not of machines, but of stretching, for when it falls, it can’t be moved for a while. They are speed dried though, so in 24 hours after composition are ready to go outside. The scale is the car and the weight carried to the car. Exiting the building they are above the head. I don’t have any associates or helpers, hoists or lifts or pulleys or rollers. This work is not a part of any social situation.

--AURAS

Since they are portable, but could be set into an exterior wall, these were hung indoors, which needed to support that weight. An early one entered in a show wasn't hung but put it in a glass case, so they haven't circulated to shows since. They need to be hung. They had to be fired in sections which means the larger were cut into threes or fours or two parts depending, so the design bears these lines through it. The themes were discerned as the process developed. First there were small figures, bears floating in a cloud, children playing with lollipops, but after an early version of Breugels Opening of the Fifth Seal, but without any effort to continue that theme, the fluid composition produced figures in procession, like the Early Captives of Egypt. These further became portals of the divine gates and then seraphim. There are many processions which become figures or families of up to four that cover compositions. Some become in-depth looks of one or two. There are a number of horses, and stand alone figures like medieval woodcuts, finished in glass, and whole heads mounted on a background of plexiglass. The horses were unintentional, produced by the fluid motion and after recognized. There are more of these that I realized, 30 or 40 perhaps.

 -- An Aesthetic of Rescue

Telling the truth has saved me but I know there are several varieties of truth about the same act. This particular site was intended to tell the truth while other sites I manage  argue different kinds. All play to their own music within me, turning fiction into poetry and poetry into fiction. Riddles native to the telling of renaissance poetry drew me early and distilled with personal experience. The distance is great between thought and words, trying not to think, but thinking.  I took a green pumpkin to the shop to remake it ceramically, but after preparing the skin and  molding it to the pumpkin the clay  tore in several places. The final effect of the tears was appealing, and after several layers of impasto and lamination fabricated with oxides and patterns implanted by tools, palm fronds, it turned into not a pumpkin at all, but a bag tied at the top with a piece of clay string. On a second try it was an open bag of torn, weathered carpet, which in extension became a series of "bags".  The broad strokes have some kind of general image but no plan, like the best fiction writing on this site constructed in hearing the music, which came little by little in aural accidents and continual seeking of the ear,  or with a visual. image.Another flowing context is the submergent heart you are born to, if you are, and then find in the linens retrieved from the attic, as clear an image as needed, but what it means has to felt in the life, in the body, in physiological changes in the psyche that when triggered go all on on their own to completion. Like the clay.  Internalized these become what they will, but the image in all the linens and frakturs make the fact plain. 

 

That these are concomitant with mystical Boehme letters is irrelevant  to the fact of the experience of the air clogged with spiritual beings, so take it for granted that the study of texts can produce such effects, it rather defeats them, like the dark brow head shots of the patrons of the Weiser bookstore. Why do the rich and the royal seek alchemy? Because they have no other means of life while the seraphim swirl everywhere in invisible air.

Many of the effects of the skeins of clay take long to appreciate and do not translate well in a photograph of their subtlety, like the grey effect of the strip of Dave's porcelin on Mr Rushmore next to the white figure that so sets off the white shino.

 

 Transcendence. The pathos of form in a world of color and figure in action, smooth surface and  rough unglazed stasis of the natural. Both action and stasis express the transcendent the way notes and rest, inhale, exhale, start and stop. These may coalesce where they emerge into identities of their surroundings, tree, air, water earth.

Some explanation for the method can be given. The idea generally is to give form to the formless, the invisible, the unknowable, meaning the spiritual world. Many of the ceramic murals explore this by bringing but not quite bringing a picture of what really exists that cannot be seen. The writing does it by posing linked identities, one in one world one in the other, that have similar names but are unknowable to each other except from some third narrative view.This teasing the brain tries to make sense of unknown patterns by making them into the known even though the two worlds exist untranslatable to each other.

The digital substitute of a screen for the face is like the perfect pot on the wheel made symmetrical without tears, idealized, for the wheel destroys imperfection before the fact of its existence, or means to, the way the digital substitutes the individual with the crowd. The wheel, the perfect balance is untrue to ourselves. We are disproportion and torn and this  is our glory-- it is our redemption in more than symmetry.

All of the ceramic on this site presupposes the precariousness of life, the parable of being human, the highest created being, once realized. Writing seeks the same, as empathetically as clay. That's because thought is the highest art and poetry its best expression. Reflections that occurred in the course of this year lag behind the works, but in the Duties of the Heart of Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda of Spain, c. 1080, the last and tenth gate on The Love of God has many instances of precognition, serendipity and synchronism with the Preparation of the Heart that the "gates” constitute human spiritual life.

“Constant consciousness that He contemplates your secret and your open life, that which is hidden within you and that which is seen. [Always bear in mind] that he guides you, has compassion on you, knows your deeds and thoughts—those concealed and those revealed, in the past and in the future, that he reassures you and shows friendliness to you.” Duties of the Heart, tenth Treatise, 33.

“When you arrive at such a stage that you remove Him from your thoughts and senses (ie, give up the possibility of conceiving or imagining His essence) because he is not thus to be apprehended, and you realize Him in the evidences of His activities, as though He were inseparable from you, you will have reached that limit of the knowledge of Him which the prophet exhorts us to attain in the text (Deut 4.39) “Know this day, and lay it to thy heart, that the Lord, he is God in heaven above and upon the earth beneath; there is none else.”

-- If a piece is not precarious why should it exist? She is precarious and he is too, but what other reason do they have to be? We have long since fallen away from the norm and even the paranorm. They have become the same. The precarious balances the edge. First it was solid, stable, but taken to where it began to fall, just intervening in its collapse, it was shifted and pulled, for remember it is a hollow cylinder when all is said and done, and while the photograph may not show it, because the work is not a photograph, the cylinder, some 27" tall in origin, can collapse from the various strength and weakness of its sides in the imprecise pressure of its stretching, and most from the need for it to totter there and be pulled back from the brink. Reduced from its origin by even a third, which will be further reduced by the fire another tenth at least, it is a rescue.

Look at the stars to bring them to the earth, this is that knowledge of the worlds, a kind of medieval  quantum, all stories told with Breugel, Giotto, spiritual beings everywhere which  would not identify until looked with the thought, the figures are seraphim.

 

2.

--

Archie Johnson and The Las Vegas Seraphim Collection
Archie Johnson stopped by and produced pics from the Las Vegas Seraphim Collection. He came to the apartments below where the paintings were but then said he should tour the upper three stories, unfinished, rickety, dangerous with catwalks but traversable. The house had never been properly finished off, just enough so it wouldn’t get too wet in the rain. Visited many times in these venues, it had been acquired but never improved much, so to view The Seraphim Collection in situ is a challenge. I Had been up there myself so it was more or less possible. There are so many more parts and pieces he didn't photograph. It's a little like the old Barnes, the only other place I saw pieces crammed and crocked together, crowds milling shoulder to shoulder to pass them. Obviously they they can’t do that in Vegas. Without apology the name tags are also missing. As for the photography, if was a variable cloudy day when Archie passed through.


This approach to life and art is experimental. One book I took out three times before I understood its importance and found the part that mattered to me, Vanuccie Biringuaccio, Pyrotechnia, where the roots of mines were compared with the roots of trees and the golden age a material form of them. This document is unbelievably  now online in a PDF, although the translation I used was Richard Eden's of 1540. With the serendipity applied to hundreds of instances that inform these searches, always remembering the search term is most important.My search terms are supplied by continual reference to the first moment of my being when I was formed by Messiah.
This site is unadvertised. It is sometimes like a journal. Perhaps the writings form a loose assembled inquiry. Since I have just been reading Either/Or, liking the Preface and the very first part, this could be an assemblage of some ideas about faith and the self. Kierkegaard's takes on Don Juan and Tragedy strike me as pedantic and dull, but he has a lot to say about the poet in that first section before he abandons him. Of the ceramic creations that have occurred in the last decade, some at Forms of the Formless, one piece at a time for critique, these show a part of myself not otherwise seen.

 

 

 The Oxford poets in Weimar c. 1929 and following, Spender, Auden, etc. prefigure  our visit to Weimar-America materialism and its later censorships of oppression about a hundred years later. Hence, other that saying so, we traverse  with ALL THE FIGURES WALKING HERE AS MEDITATIONS OF THE STATES OF HUMAN SUFFERING AND INTERCESSION FOR THE SUFFERING OF THE SINS OF THE WORLD.

Some Examples of this aesthetic occur in guided accident, prophetic dialogue, privileging of surface, native/alien interface, double coding, narrative subversion, hijack, cross-column reading translation. It’s there and 1) I write it down as best I can.  2) The image  of the finished piece of the vision of Pisceus Piano Rhinoceros is like the translation of a text, it’s arbitrary, edited. The finished Rhino is too big to fit on the piano but time and space are not particularly important in vision landscapes. What if somebody writes or makes something that’s not a vision? what do we call that. Invention? Imitation.  But a baby is not a vision, a baby is real and it embodies all its future like a seed that grows into a tree. A vision is indeterminate before its expression, but when it emerges it chooses a style, or one is chosen for it by the man. One attractive style is the playful-weary tone and almost-spoken element. This occurs by divining it from the words through which are sought the spirit of the writer--and hence the spirit of the original author we translate. To reproduce the original, particularly with a first-person narrative, it becomes very important to find the right voice, so it is said, refrain from making a translation dead by missing out on all the texture and drama of the text.

 

--Raisonne 2018 The Aesthetic of Rescue. Parables of Human Life. Artistic statement and  catalog raisonne

Some texts don't translate. They are only symbolic, as with--Anselem Kiefer, Remembering the Future, borrowing stalks of wheat and grasses, tall sunflowers on single stems above with patches of paint as rock or mud patched brown and greens and blue swirls, all grained rhythms of the natural in motion, collage pieces of foil, silver, gold, glued, painted, stuck on, peeled off recurrent color notes are black, white, gray, and rust; and their surfaces are rough and slathered with paint, plaster, mud and clay.

 Old and new clay with porcelain interiors, but exteriors of lava, gravel and cobalt specks pressed into the new, that stretch above two feet, stretch into cylinders with shoulders and mouths, cut, then compressed, the shoulders lowered into the body, the base informed for the climacteric event (Robert Lowell) of its vulnerability, the weak spot we see, shows  its mortality, prevented as much as possible, but inevitable in all, hence the tear, the slump, the complete collapse of the shell. In composition the shaping hands are full, and need braces, later extracted, remnants of two by fours, sponges and props to support the landing. If the tower lands hard it needs to be put back up on its base, made double and triple to support the weight which now in diameter can be as wide as the tower was high, but it has to touch the ground too, so an edge tilts down, otherwise it will fall in the heat of the fire.

There is a measure of scale. If big they are a measure of ourselves. If we were big they would be small, so big or small are a slight measure. If we photograph the small close up we make it big. These works are the scale they are from the point of view of what will carry wrapped from the studio to a car to drive to where the real work is done in a garage, not by machines, but by stretching, for if, or when it falls, it can’t be moved until it drys. The scale is the car and the weight carried to the car. Exiting the building they extend above the head. There are no associates or helpers, hoists or lifts or pulleys or rollers. The work is not a part of any social situation.They are speed dried though after 48 hours and are ready to go. The skin skein, the onion simultaneous all happening at the same time comes many into one, one into many, expands and contracts separately and together.

The compositions being performed at a studio some miles from their finishing point at another studio, where they are finished and bisqued, are limited to what will fit in the back of a car after composition,, Another limit on size is the weight. One, Boxcar,  molded around a 35 lb. cement block 8-inch by 8-inch by 16, was double that in weight. At end however it sagged and broke and and had to be put back Humpty Dumpty style and made a good Boxcar.