It’s always exciting and really kind of miraculous when work comes out of the kiln. It goes in, utterly fragile
and emerges stone-like, ready to serve for the next few thousand years.
I’m quite happy with this new group of bowls (note- it seems my photo is distorted- I’m working on fixing that)
I’m using a slightly different technique for these “production” pieces in that I am roughly painting the branch and then just refining it with sgraffito.
What I’ve done in the past- and actually it gives me more freedom- is to cover the entire surface with black slip and then draw the branch out free hand. Then I carve away anything that isn’t the image.
This is somewhat quicker and also gives a more painterly quality to the black. You can see the brush stroke and direction.
I’m also including color for the first time! This truly echoes what I see in the winter. A bare black branch with a few bright red berries made all the more vivid by being set against the white backdrop of snow. It is the same for cardinals- in the wintry absence of color, red catches the eye.
I also got some vases out- these are a good size. About 8-9″ tall.
A note on where inspiration comes from. I was riding a school bus full of noisy children- a field trip chaperone – and we were going down Lake Shore Drive when I thought, for the briefest moment, that I saw a rabbit on the very lowest branch of a tree silhouetted against the lake. Of course there was no tree-climbing rabbit, but it was such a lovely image in my mind that I decided to put in on a pot.
It is the left -most pot.