Oregon Art Beat; #206; Sitka Center

I think you have to really put it on the thing. You do. The more you put it on the second, the more it will crack. That's what I saw in this video. It's really pretty impressive looking. I'm going to try one of those. I tried one the other day. I'm going to try one of those. I'm going to try one of those.

What you got there? Oh, it's a tile. Fox glove and a little tree frog right here. I'm going to colorize it and fire it. This is the other half. You get it like this. It's going to be like a wall. The Fox gloves will be light purple to pink. Then I'll variegate the leaves dark green to white green. Then we'll put them in the raccoon. What will you do with it?

I'll hang it on the wall in our entry and our house. It originally to be closed over form become a sculpture. This one is going to leave it open. I just want to talk a little bit about the ending of it. You can feel it. You feel the thickness. It's fairly even thickness up through route. It has a stiffness to it. It's not flexible to move any longer. This rim has gotten a little bit hard. It looks to me like the piece was just stopped. When you just stop, that last little bit is not attended to. I want to have the piece have attention throughout from the start, from the formation, from where it comes up the surface of the floor on up to the very end of it. The piece can be stopped in another number of ways. Nobody says that you have to put a refined edge on things. But some knowledge you look at the piece and get the

feeling of completion with it that it works for me. At least that's what my attention is with it. I'm going to take a few minutes to come along and work this edge by adding another coil of clay and softening it to take away this hardness. These two hard edge feel like I just stopped. So at this point what I have to do is score it up. The film crew. You get real used to it. We just don't see them here. Oh really? We're going to have somebody grab me a

little bit of water. Continue with a little bit of water to soften. Thanks. And maybe one of the brushes, Connie. For people who did not observe me, I did a reinforcement on the inside of this. I ran a strip of coil up in this direction and on both corners of it. Horizontally it's unified vertically that strip unifies it also. I'm doing this, I'll talk a little

bit about how the day will probably unfold. We can spend them and we'll be firing all day long until the work is finished. Clay is cool, the warm is air, the air is warm. Now once again with the hands of the roller, it doesn't take much.

I know. Can you do a soul -cracking selfie? Yes. Enjoy it.

No, this is heavy. I like water. No, I don't think so. You can go put on your slippers pretty soon. What

are you going to finish with? Katie, what are you going to finish with the slippers? We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying

to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as

possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. There's a lot of glaze on there.

There's a lot of glaze on there. There's a lot of glaze on there. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible.

We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're

trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible.

We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get

as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get

as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're

trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as

possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get as much cotton

flush as possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible.

We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as

possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. We're trying to get as much cotton flush as possible. I think I learned that I saw a couple of people do some

good work and I tried to emulate or pick up on what they had done. For instance, Joe's black band, this thing came out and I didn't use the same finish but I used the black band to kind of set it out. I also learned that if you scribed Sitka's name in the piece, it's big bucks. The first thing is the unpredictability of the raccoon patina and how long it really takes to get good at that. The second thing is the fact that I had not done much with slabs and I had almost gone totally to the wheel and I really realized now how much you can do with slabs without the wheel which was kind of a surprise. And also the

unpredictability of the material itself relative to shrinkage and how much that is impacts what you're doing. I think I've done clay for a while and the thing I really like is the fact that you get a totally different effect through this process than you do through the normal high fire process. The look is totally different and also I agree that no matter how long you've done clay, you can get together with people and some of them who have never done it before and you can still learn a lot from them because everybody here is an artist of one sort or another and so you can pick up things that you can apply to your own work. Well, I've just I have never used clay before. I'm a painter and just too dimensional and I this was just a totally different experience for me and at the beginning of the week I was doing surface decorating with the fish and just working with the glazes and by

the end of the week I was doing forms, three dimensional forms. That was great fun. That was really and I ended up with a hippopotamus and a polar bear and a long ways from doing a two dimensional painting but I just have had a wonderful time here. And I'm a painter also and but I think that the best thing about this rock who class is and it's my second year to do it is the bonding and making the friends because it's so it's such a bonding time working with clay and the glazes and the heat and everything and you really make good friends in this class and that's been a kind of a brilliant bonus. I just I've been doing rock who firing and I never knew that you could use slips before until this class. You never ever went over that and CCC so I never give because I just made it

up. Who knows if it's going to work with experiment with the class? I can't do 3D forms very well but I can do flat stuff. Well I've taken CCC class a number of times and we did some rock who and I took this class last year and really liked it and the bonding with the group is great and I really liked the process of rock who. And I've been working on the form and stuff and that's been a lot of fun. It's just been a nice experience. I really liked the class. Well I think like in all the classes I've taken from you it's always a surprise. Glazing is just really a surprising thing. Now when I rock who this I put dragonfly on it and here it turned out gold. I know because I put the white over the top of it.

I'm real pleased with the things that I've done and I've had a great time. It's been a nice week. I think that working with clay and most especially with the rock who firing process really points to the interdependency of ourselves and the world around us. We're working with larger forces, we're working with earth, we're working with fire, we're working with water. There are a lot of variables and it points to the unknown, it points to the spontaneous and it points to things that went on before us and probably I'm sure will go on after us. It's the second oldest profession in the world. And it's really such a wonderful feeling to feel that you're part of the history

of human consciousness and human expression and you're playing a role in it. This is work that's being done now and it fits in because it's being done now and it's connected to what went before and it will be connected to what comes in the future.