Raisonné

 

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.