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The Old Town Art Fair

I always try to go to the Old Town Art Fair.

Actually, this year I tried to get into it. Apparently, it’s one of the hardest to get into. I’m not surprised, as the work I see in there is excellent. 

Of course I have a few favorites and I collected their cards and will post their links here:

First I came upon Chris Dahlquist who does these exquisite, spare landscapes with luxurious clouds. Her website photos really cannot convey the depth of her pictures because she paints gold tones on paper and digitally prints her photos over them. This gives the photos great depth and light that changes depending on the angle. 

Even though another artist at the fair said “I hate when they come in and say ‘If I only had enough money…’” that’s exactly how I felt about Chris’s work.  I absolutely would have bought a piece I saw with a reflected stream. It was lovely.

Another artist whose work I have actually purchased in the past is Gary Stretar, an Ohio painter who stands out from the crowd of landscape painters. He says he is a colorist if I remember rightly. His work has a wonderful stillness about it like those long hot days in the summer when you are too tired to do much of anything and all you can hear is a cicada droning on. Or in the spring right after it rains and living things haven’t yet resumed scurrying about. He doesn’t seem to have a web site but you can google him.

Winner of “Seriously, just give me 700$ so I can buy this” award goes to Jenny Pope whose work, besides having wild colors and incredible compositions, is also trying to say and do something about the environment. I really love her work and subject matter.

I’ve never quite seen space used the way she uses it and yet it is really balanced. 

I saw her pieces and met her last year and have been following her work since. It seems incredible that these are woodcuts! She has a great website   Even more incredible was the fact that she remembered me  from last year and is a delightful young woman!

On to 3-D.  I was totally blown away by Jennifer McCurdy’s porcelain.

Now I have often called porcelain harsh cruel mistress but of course it wouldn’t have any power over me if it weren’t so seductive. And forgiving in odd ways.

Ms. McCurdy was very gracious and explained some of her techniques.  Most amazing is that these pieces move quite a bit in the high fire- porcelain gets a bit “soft” when it goes vitreous. Take a look at her site.

Then a really nice display caught my eye and immediately after that, the pots!  OMG they are gorgeous. The artist wasn’t around to ask so it was only after I visited his site that i realized these gems are terra cotta! Each one has wonderful  flashing and is unique. I am guessing he saggar fires them first and uses the results to inspire his surface decoration but that is a wild stab in the dark and really just a projection of what I would do.

I do know that sometimes you can add Terra Sig. to a bisqued piece. 

Anyhow check out his gallery. Also, I love his “bowl from earth” statement. 

There were many other great artists there but the 3 additional ones I’m thinking of, don’t have web sites.

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Slip ‘n’Surfaces, Week 1

 

Hi everyone! Welcome to Slip’n’surfaces; a four week class on surface decoration.

Since I believe that surface decoration must enhance form and form should enhance the surface decoration – in short they must work together and compliment eachother, I decided I wanted to address a couple of key areas of functional pots. I  decided to do: 

Foot-of -the -week

Lip-of-the-week 

and also a Glaze-of-the-week    

as I have fielded a lot of questions about what glazes look good over and show off various surface decorations.

For my first demonstration I did again, the Eric Jensen Method of throwing out a slab. This is show in my blog entry Handbuilding week 1.

I brought in “sketches”  which are examples of work I did in 1997. I have an ancient web page with photos of the large work on it- to see them, click here.

The Lip-of-the-week was a simply rolled over lip – I don’t have a picture but in handbuilding or throwing you can take a thin lip and roll it over to give an extra thickness and a nice curve to the rim without adding weight to the pot.

The Foot-of -the -week was 3 “pods” – added feet to give some stability and height to an otherwise round bottomed drop dish.mayan-pot-ad-500-pinchpot-tripod-legs-animal-headThis tiny  Mayan pot shows the basic idea.

Glaze-of-the-week was actually  my favorite two glazes for over delicately carved slip and that was Shaner Clear and  Shino water.

 

Shaner Clear:

For porcelain* I give the pot a good wiping with a  very wet clean sponge so that it soaks up less glaze. I use a sponge so I have more control as to where the water goes (as opposed to just holding it under a faucet) I don’t want to soak a thin rim or it won’t have the ability to absorb any glaze.

Shaner Clear is a very forgiving glaze. Drips, dabs, patches all disappear and smooth out in the firing.

(all the rest of the photos on this blog entry are pots made by me)

Shaner clear thin over black slip
Shaner clear thin over black slip

The reason I thin it is that if it is on too thick it looks milky and makes the slips lighter in color- for example the black looks more like a blue-gray.

*Porcelain tends to absorb glaze more quickly and therefore more glaze than stoneware.

I prefer the shino water instead of Shaner clear over stoneware as clear leaves the stoneware a kind of dead-looking gray. Below you see that gray only in the lines cut through the white slip down to the stoneware underneath. It’s the only photo I could find with clear over stoneware as I dislike it so much.

small-birch-tray-clear-glaze

Shino Water:

 

Shino water often turns bare stoneware orange. The water leaves no thicker coating and so the texture of slip carving is highly visible. 

okay, right now I can’t find a photo of shino water over slip on stoneware but I have plenty of:

Shino over porcelain 

dsc00019Above is shino water over porcelain with black slip.

or porcelain slip  over stoneware can also go orange :stoneware drop plate with white layer of porcelain slip under black slip oak leaf -shino glazeThat is all for this week!