pictures

I'm home sick today. It's been a busy month and I think I wore myself out. Congestion, sore throat, fever. Ya know, the usual stuff. Figured I'd get caught up on shooting some pieces. Here they are.

Top: 10.25" wide x 5.25" tall

Middle: 7" wide x 4.5" tall

Bottom: 13 inches wide x 4.25 inches tall

Just a little of this...

Just a bit of time in the studio last night.

Glazed a handful of pieces (below). The bowl & mug set are a commissioned set, so they get glazing priority. The other little bowl is a test piece. I've never done naked green slip on the outside of a piece before, so this one will be testing it. It's also a new glaze on the inside - one I've never used before, but may have potential. We'll see how it goes.

Have I posted pictures of unfired glaze here before? It's amazing how ridiculous the glazes look when they go on - absolutely nothing like the colors they will turn out to be. The little fiery red inside the little bowl should fire a blue-brown (strange combination), and the other reddish glaze inside the other pieces is also a blue color. The chalky mint color on the outside of those will fire a transparent/translucent pale green, reminiscent of a celadon.

Some of the more interesting surprises come when, even in the process of glazing a batch of work, you forget what went inside one bowl vs. the other, which can then throw off entirely your choice of glaze for the outside of the piece. I've gotten some interesting combinations simply because I mistook which glazes I had actually used.

I also finished up (I think) my big jar. It came together a lot faster than the last one, so that's a plus. Anyhow, here it is.



It's now down to 20 inches, and will continue to shrink here and there as it dries and fires. It's my hope that it is still a solid 18" in the end. I think I'm quite pleased with it.

Once we get into March I should be glazing and getting some of this new work finished up. It'll be a massive batch of finished work, that's for sure.

9 hours.

That's how much time was spent in the studio today. 9 hours. It was pretty sweet. Here's what happened:

1. Small and mid-sized pots. A number of the them. Trimmed and decorated those from last night, as well as threw some more today. Used up more of my red clay. The usual.
   
   
   That little green one is really quite small - 3 inches tall, 4 inches across, maybe. The other two are using one of my new slips. It's supposed to be a "purple-brown." Not sure if that's how it will turn out, but we'll see. Trying something kinda new there in the decoration of the red one. Gotta try new things every once in a while or you get stale.
   
   Here's another red pot. It's a little bigger than those - maybe 8 inches tall, 10 inches across. Actually, it looks like it may be taller than it is wide. But then, I'm not sure. I only made it, ya know? It's not like I should know how big it is...
   
   
   Keep in mind, everything will shrink in the firings, so all sizing here is pretty much irrelevant. The only thing you can really count on is that they won't be any bigger when they're done than my guestimations here.
   
2. Big bowl. The on in the picture there. It came from 10 pounds of clay. I think I like it. It's a good 13 inches across, pushing 12 inches tall.
   
   
   It's only got about an inch of clearance on this shelf, and there's not that much space between the shelves. Hopefully I don't break the foot off of this one.
   
3. Glazed a big bowl. I'm trying to avoid glazing things this month, as the firing gets a little expensive. But I wouldn't mind having this bowl finished sooner than later.
   
4. Recycled. I had some slop from throwing last night out drying, so I had to wedge and knead the slops, which became nice clay. The nice clay became some nice pots. Like the ones up in section "1."
   
5. Continued working onthe shape of the "decent sized" vase from last night, seen here. I lost a little bit of the height in trimming some of the weight out of the bottom, but I'm much pleased with the overall shape, specifically in the collared neck and shoulders there. Yes, clay jars have necks and shoulders.
   
   
   I think this picture is before it got shorter and stouter. But still a nice representation. There's another picture below.
   
6. Finally, a big vase. Two pieces, 20 pounds of clay, 21 inches tall, and (originally) quite a bit thicker in the base than it ought to have been. Here it is assembled, into one piece.
   
   
   Still lacking significantly in definition of shape, I think it looks like some kind of cocoon, or an alien larva. That could just be me. This took up the majority of the day. Especially the part where I needed to be patient, and not rush things. You know, the usual things that if ignored will ruin a nice pot like this.
   
   
   Anyhow, here's the final shape, and the other big guy. It could be noted that it is 21 inches in this picture, which means it was undoubtedly taller before it became wider.
   
   I'm still trying to get a handle on how much a good-sized pot should weigh. I'm pretty sure these are both weighing in a couple of pounds more than a pot their sizes should be, but not to the degree of morbid obesity. If pottery had a BMI, these would probably clock in at 26 or 27.

Finally, my friend Jon stopped by in the evening to see the studio, check out some pottery in action, and get his hands dirty. It was nice to have a visitor, and good to take a break from the more intense work of the day. He also brought me some peanut-butter chocolate chip bars that were delicious. I joined him for dinner before heading back into the studio to finish up the vases and do some serious cleaning. You don't spend 9 hours in the studio without making a decent mess.

That's all for now. I'll be taking some sort of hiatus this week, I'm sure. I have some non-throwing pottery projects to deal with. After a weekend like this I think it will be healthy to take a couple days off from the studio. Fun though it is.

On an unrelated note, U2 is streaming their new album, No Line on the Horizon, in its entirety from their MySpace page. It's set to release March 2nd and I'm pretty stoked. It seems to me to be a tonal collision of 1988's Rattle and Hum and 1997's Pop. Raw, classic U2 for the 21st Century. It seems that everybody has their own take on it. Rolling Stone gave it 5 stars and proclaimed it their best album since Achtung Baby. It may be true. Check it out.

Leave a comment, shoot me an e-mail. Have a great week!

Late night, more pots...

I did forget to mention: in my before dinner shift I also spent some time prepping and mixing some new slip. Not horribly interesting, but necessary. Running the last of the slurry in my slop bucket through a screen and then adding colorant. I needed a new batch of brown slip, and decided to try a new one that's supposed to be a "dark purple brown." We'll see how that goes.

I finished up those two vases, and threw another little one also seen below as a test piece for my new batch of brown slip. I'm not sure which one I prefer between the two of them - I went very different directions, keeping one more simple, and really filling all the available space in the other. Here they are:

I certainly do enjoy both approaches to the pottery. While my work carries elements that I will happily attribute to being influenced by various historical and regional pottery traditions, I tend to liken my approach to the sgraffito designs to the work of Jackson Pollack. Pollack's work was about capturing in static work the motion of the work - that the experience of the process is as important as, if not moreso, than the "finished" result. Pollack's paintings weren't about squiggly lines and paint drips, but they were about making squiggly lines and dripping and splattering paint.

Similarly, each of my designs starts with one line. I don't plan the piece out before, but jump in with one stroke into the slip, or a carved line in the piece. I then work around the piece, one stroke at a time. Each stroke is as equally influenced by the line before it as by the shape of the piece itself. Sometimes it works out that the negative space completes the piece - less is more, and fewer lines are needed before I feel it's complete. Other times it's simply not complete until the space is entirely used.

I'm not afraid to let the lines become more suggestive than abstract, either - it has definitely become more suggestive of flora over the years, or reminiscent of rosemaling. I also find it sometimes taking wavelike forms, or suggesting mountains. But as mentioned in previous posts, a majority of this embellishment is done in reverse, so even an intentional representation will have a completely different impression when viewed as a finished work.

Speaking of unintentional results, below is a picture of a bowl that came out of the bisque kiln last week. See that hint of blue slip on the inside? I didn't do that. It's a shadow image of the outside of the bowl that was nesting inside of it. I don't know how it happened, but the sgraffito from the nesting bowl burnt this impression into the bowl. The inside will be glazed, most likely with an opaque, so the result will probably not be visible in the finished product. Even so, it's one small example of the unpredictability of this work, and all of the fun surprises you can happen upon.


Back to tonight's work. I threw a couple of smaller pieces. Here's a little pot which I'll use as a test for the "purple brown" slip. It's about 5 inches tall, 4 inches across, and I'll trim a nice foot onto it. It'll make a lovely little flower pot.

Here's another small "flower pot" sort of pot. 7 inches tall, 5 inches across. It's almost the last of my red clay. Not much more to say about that.


And finally, the evening's piece de triomphe: I threw a decent sized vase. This one started as 14 pounds of clay, and now stands just over 14 inches tall. There's a lot more clay in the bottom to trim out yet, but I'm really pleased with the shape so far.


I'm working on being able to get this size of piece without all the clay in the base (meaning that I could throw the same jar with 8-10 pounds instead of 14). Vertical pieces have never been my strong suit - the bowls are much more natural for me. But I need to keep pushing my limits - and I do really like the big vases. They're just a little tricky.

Tomorrow will be another long day in the studio - I'm thinking a couple large bowls, a couple small bowls, and a section vase. We'll see.

Dinner Break Update

It was time to eat some dinner. I'll head back into the studio for another couple hours when I'm full, and this time it'll be for some throwing. But throwing on an empty stomach is as poor choice; throwing takes a lot of physical exertion, and if I want to tackle a couple large pieces, I need to be filled up and focused.

The first leg of the evening's work was to deal with the clay I recycled. All 38 pounds of it. Here's a picture of 38 pounds of clay.

After it's been "recycled," it needs to be kneaded. Kneading the clay has two primary purposes: to homogenize the clay, and to remove all air bubbles/pockets. Here's a bisection of the clay displaying some lovely unwanted air pockets:

Those little streaks in there are the air pockets. They look small, but small bubbles cause big problems in the throwing process. Because an air bubble is not the same density as the clay, it becomes essentially a lump (lumps of hard clay are also removed in the wedging/kneading homogenization process) in the clay. With every pull in the throwing, the air bubble will push the piece ever off-center. Even if an air bubble does not cause any problems in the throwing, it will increase the chances of something exploding in firing.

I knead my clay using a double-ram's horn method, so-called because of the shape made by the kneading motion. Here's my ram's horn:

That's a decent picture, I guess. The horn is created when the mass of clay is rolled over the table surface while applying pressure both inward and downward. Applying the pressure in two directions simultaneously is what removes the air bubbles, squishing them with the pressure, rather than just moving the bubble around with in the clay.

I generally will knead about 10 pounds of clay at a time. It seems to be a nice amount to work with to be efficient without being too much clay to handle. Here's the finally kneaded clay, sans air bubbles. Nice and smooth, huh?

Finally, I got to actually work on some pots - trimming and doing some final shaping on the two vases thrown last weekend. All told, I was able to trim about 2 pounds of clay off, between the two of them. Both by necessity of achieving the desired shape, and also to remove some unnecessary weight from the base. In the end, trimming a pound of clay out of a vase is not too bad, and I'm pretty pleased with the shape I'm getting. Here's the two vases.

The one on the left has not been trimmed at all, and the one on the right is mid-way through the process. They stand about 10 inches high and perhaps 7-8 inches at the widest. I've since applied some slip, and they'll be ready to decorate when I get back into the studio.

I'm off - I'll give a final update when I return. As always, if any of the process was confusing, or you have a question about my working methods, leave a comment. I'd love to have an idea what my readers are looking for, content-wise. In the meantime, I'll just keep writing whatever I want.

Brevity.

I had a 30 minute window Thursday night.
Emptied my slop bucket onto our plaster drying table.
Slop bucket is now empty.
By Friday evening I should have 40+ pounds of clay ready to throw.
This weekend should be another long haul of throwing.
Haul of throwing?
Oxymoron, I think.
I'm ready to do another big piece.
Hopefully the clay agrees.
Happy Friday, everybody!

More Practice, Tough Lessons

I haven't been thrilled to make this post, because I'm not horribly pleased with my time in the studio this weekend. If you'll recall, I had a very productive Thursday evening, and I was excited to move forward with my section-thrown piece. Well, it didn't go that well.

I did decide to throw a new bottom section, which was a good choice - the new one was 2-3 inches taller, and was not much more than 1/2-inch thick most of the way, which is a good thickness for something which will need to support weight. Unfortunately, the original top portion was not so cooperative, on a number of levels.

First, it had firmed up too much since I last worked on it - I failed to wrap it thoroughly in plastic on Thursday. It was still soft/moist/plastic enough to bond the two pieces, but it was too far gone to do any further shaping.

Second, the top portion was not so swell, throwing wise, as I thought it was to begin with. It too was significantly thicker on the bottom than it should have been, making it heavier, and also causing it to not line up very well with the bottom portion. (I'm thinking a pictorial narration of my next section piece may be in order - this verbal walk-through is already confusing me).

In any event, the piece was in the neighborhood of 21 inches tall - with the amount of clay that was in it, another 2 or 3 inches would have been preferable. I scrapped the clay, which is now waiting for a second shot at it. The upside is that the entire process gave me plenty of time to practice centering and throwing cylinder forms. In retaliation for my piece's unwillingness to cooperate, I threw two lovely little vases, which i forgot to photograph, but which are quite lovely, and uniformly thrown, with just the right amount of weight left in the base.

It was a gentle reminder to me that it's continually a learning process, a practice, and every failure is very educational, if I take the lessons from it. So, pros: practice throwing cylinders, technique-honing experience, reminder of fallibility and humility. Cons: nothing concrete to show for my efforts.

The rest of the afternoon was spent doing some trimming and decorating of my little teacups/tumblers, seen below. The one in the middle is not part of the set - it's a separate mug, a giant among teacups.

I also had to do some general housecleaning stuff with my studio space, including moving dry greenware off of my shelves and into the firing area, and sorting/shelving my bisqueware that came out of this week's firing. I've decided, in an effort to reduce costs, not to glaze fire anything unnecessarily through the month of February. Bisqueware stores just fine, and I'll be happy to wait and have just one large load of glazing to do at the beginning of march.

Here's some greenware ready for firing. It has to be bone dry before it's ready for firing, that is, minimal water left in the clay. Any water left in the clay can become a problem in firing. Like all things clay, the variable circumstances make the difference. The most common problem comes from firing clay that is too wet too quickly. If fired slowly enough, the water in the clay should steam out slowly and pose no threat. However, if the firing moves too quickly, the water in the clay will boil, expanding rapidly in an attempt to escape the clay and that's when pots expode. It's not fun. Not fun at all. Well, you can get some good stories from it, but opening your kiln and discovering that an entire shelf of work is kaput is no good. Therefore, it's better to be safe than sorry. These bowls are from the last couple weeks, and are nesting nicely.

Pots can be nested (stacked) for the bisque firing, which is nice. You can fire more "stuff" in the same amount of space, which cannot be said for glaze firing. The reason is this: glaze is sticky stuff. Glazed surfaces will stick to anything they touch in the firing, so pieces cannot be stacked, and also must have more clearance room in all directions to avoid any contact during the expanding and contracting of the firing process. Like exploding pottery, this is also rarely fun. But the bisque kiln can be nested. Cram that sucker full. And make sure the pots are dry, or everything crammed in that tight space will be clay crumbs.

Check out last week's big bowl above. It's good and dry. I did have an interesting experience with a bisque piece this weekend, but I'll need a picture before I go into it. After trying to describe the failure of my section throwing, I'm pretty hesitant to describe anything without pictures now. So there.

And now, just for fun, here's a little bowl I threw with the last of my Calico clay. I'm not sure I'll be buying any more, as I'm not such a fan of the shrinkage rate, but it also is pretty fun to work with in larger bowls, so we'll see. I think it's a cute little bowl. And that yardstick is in inches.

Happy Saint Valentine's Day!

Finished Work

Pots and Pictures

Productive studio evening. It's always nice to be able to say that, especially when I really feel it. I had a solid 3+ hours, which came to around 2h45min of work time before clean-up. Let's see what was accomplished:

1. Decorated and applied handle to special order mug. Handles are finicky, but this one went well. I may have to make more of these mugs; it's officially my first "handled" mug to also feature signature sgraffito work. I'll get a picture up of this one later.
   
   
2. Decorated small bowl - this one was trimmed on Tuesday, so it was ripe and ready to be decorated. I've attached a picture of the process below.
   
   


3. Decorated plate - this one is 14.5 inches across, and I'm pretty pleased with the way it has turned out thus far - it's very similar to a series of plates I did for my Senior Project, which can be seen here. Here's a posed photo of my hand decorating the plate, and finished. Yet to do with the plate: trim, dry, fire, glaze, and fire again, all without inducing cracks or warps. I can do it. Yes, I can.
   
   


4. Trimmed and decorated medium bowl - this is the smaller of the two originally seen here. That's 12 inch bat it's sitting on, so it's a decent sized bowl at the moment - probably 9 inches across, 9 or 10 inches tall. It will shrink before it's finished (10-15% shrinkage - don't know the exact stats on this clay body), which is one of the side-effects of working in clay. Everything large is just a little less impressive when finished. Oh well. Here's also a picture before it's decorated, with a little flower pot I made this week as well.
   
   
   


5. Trimmed and decorated large bowl - the larger of the two here. There was a lot of clay left in the bottom of this one, I discovered while timming. I need a decent amount left in the bottom to put a nice foot on it, but this was significantly more than I needed. However, the last large bowl I did, the one that didn't survive, had less clay in the bottom then I wanted, which I'm willing to blame for its demise.
   
   I'm slightly disappointed that I left that much clay there, because it means that I probably could have pulled another inch of height and probably of an increase in diameter, but it's better to be safe than sorry. Here's the bowl, upside down, of course.
   
   


6. Threw the pieces for a larger vessel. The one on the left (below) will sit on top of the other, and we'll have a decent sized pot without having to wrestle 19 pounds at a time. The advantages are just that - you don't have to center the same amount of clay, so the throwing process is theoretically easier, at least at this point in my life. The disadvantages are that it does take more time, more steps in the process. But then, it's not like throwing 2o pounds of clay is necessarily any faster.
   
   
   I may have to throw a new bottom section, as I'm not so sure I like this one - there's a lot of clay in the bottom half that shouldn't be there, which translates into it being wider and shorter than it needs to be. Even so, it may work out for me. It may just be a squatty little pot.

So that's it - a pretty decent list of accomplishments for a mid-week turn in the studio. I also was able to get shots of my newest work, which will be added shortly. I'll leave you with a few of the bowls I threw for Empty Bowls, all glazed and finished.

Tuesday Night

Had an abbreviated session in the studio Tuesday night, which will become the norm. Krystal is taking Tae Kwan Do and so I have just over 2 hours to get up to the studio, do some work, and come back. Which is great. It won't be marathon production evening, but it will be enough to go up and do some trimming, decorating, glazing, recycling - general upkeep sort of work - or throw a couple pieces.

No pictures yet, sorry, but I have gotten a few new finished pieces out of the kiln this week, so I'll get those pictures up sometime soon.

Last night I was able to get in some trimming and slipping (applying the slip - the first step in the sgraffito process), and also threw a set of cups. I'm pretty sure they'll be cups instead of mugs, because I don't really want to put handles on them. Also, because I used one of these (see picture below) to enjoy some hot tea last night, and thought maybe it could use a few friends. So I have a half dozen of these little guys waiting to be decorated.

My tea cup.

So, that's all for now. I'll be back in the studio Thursday night to finish up those cups and trim some more plates, as well as apply some handles to mugs that need them. Not happy about that, but oh well.

And last but not least, Happy Birthday to my beautiful wife!

Sunday Studio Update

Made it back to the studio this afternoon before picking Krystal up at the airport. Discovered that my repair job on the behemoth bowl to be to no avail. Bummer, but that's the way it goes. I had some clay from Saturday to finish recycling, and found it to be quite the right consistency for throwing, so I made a new big bowl. I also threw a smaller bowl to be its friend. Here's a picture.

For reference, that's a 5 gallon bucket behind the big bowl.

I also realized I forgot to update on the positives that were accomplished in the studio last night. In addition to breaking a very large bowl, I also threw a nice sized plate, a lovely flower pot, a decent vase, and a mug & bowl order. No pictures though, sorry. Forgot the camera yesterday, and didn't even get so far as to unwrap those pieces today.

However, here are a couple more pictures of some large bowls that finely decorated inside. Ta-dum!

Danger Will Robinson!

I need to know better than to be in the studio past my bedtime...

Tonight I crushed the foot of my large bowl. Grabbed it, without knowing my own strength, and crushed it into oblivion. Not quite that bad, but almost as catastrophic. It broke into 6 or 7 nice clean pieces. I put in the 10 minutes of effort to try and re-attach the foot pieces, and we'll see if it works. If not, I'll just have to throw another one. That's the way it goes. Sometimes bad things happen to good pots.

We'll see if the salvage operation works out. I'll keep you posted.

UPDATE: 2/8/09
Bowl lost - cracks didn't mend. Probably better this way. Even if it had mended visibly, there's a good chance that it would have cracked in firing. Which would have meant still losing the bowl, but also losing the clay involved. As it is, the whole thing is recycled and I get the clay back, with nothing lost but my time. So, I threw another big bowl. not quite as big, but still decently impressive. In other news, Krystal made it home safe and there is now balance in the universe.

Throwing Marathon

I put in a 5 hour evening in the studio. It was beautiful.

I decided to focus on producing "larger" work, rather than a number of smaller pieces. It was fun to take some time to to just concentrate on throwing larger pieces.

There were some fumbles along the way. The wide bowl is thrown from clay that might've been a smaller bowl and a vase. But the clay was disagreeable - a little too firm, some air bubbles. Fortunately, once you've thrown clay once, it's generally softer if you scrap the pieces and start over, so the "too firm" issue is resolved, and the ensuing wedging and kneading of clay before re-throwing cleares out the air bubbles. In the end, I'm significantly happier with the large bowl than I would have been with either of the two smaller pieces.

See that green thing? It's about 24 inches across. This bowl was so large it didn't fit on any of our other bats to trim it. Pretty sweet. This is sgraffito-ed inside, but you'll have to wait until it's finished to see!

(left) This bowl was a 10 pounder - it's about 14, 15 inches tall, a good 12 inches across. A different direction for me, a vertical bowl. It would make a good punch bowl. Or mantle adornment.

(center) These are two plates, waiting to be trimmed. The space under the plate is packed full of plastic padding - a major difficulty in trimming plates is the center sagging. Thus the padding.

(right) A planter for my wife. We have a decent sized Norfolk Pine in a less than decent sized pot. Apparently it's my job to remedy the situation.

The plates, post-trimming and decorated. The larger is about 14 inches, the smaller is about 12.

Planter, trimmed and carved. What do you think, dear?

Each of these had to sit for some time before they could be trimmed up. Fortunately, the studio's industrial fans in the glazing area are a great place to let pieces firm up a bit. Well, between the fans, the kilns, and the fact that it was 65 degrees here today, these pots didn't stay wet for too long.

In the meantime, I had a batch of bowls to finish decorating (from last weekend). They proved a little more work than I meant them to be. I left them on a nice flat board to set for the week, wrapped in plastic. A flat board. When I took them off my shelf today, the board had a lovely arch to it. Like, serious arch. Like, you could build a rocking horse from it. Consequently, the bowls had warped some with it. I had to spend a little time reshaping the bowls - fortunately they weren't too dry. A little spritzing with water from a spray bottle, and then leaving them on a flat surface for a spell, cleaned them right up. All except one. The one I tried to bend back into shape without water. That one did not fare so well. But the carving of the rest went fine. So that killed some time between throwing and trimming.

It's an interesting thing, being in the studio for so long. I get to enjoy the company of so many people over such a span. Really a grand evening. And listen to so much music!

When I started throwing, I relied heavily on my own music+headphones to stay focused, drown out distractions, and stay entertained. After a year of that my ears were really not happy with me, and the cords were cramping my style. Not to mention falling into ruts of listening to the same album for days on end.

So I switched to radio. KDEC, 100.5 FM out of Decorah, Iowa, to be precise. This station plays "music for people who love music." Heavy doses of Bob Dylan, Ray LaMontagne, the Rolling Stones, Jack Johnson, Tom Petty, and dashes of U2, Death Cab for Cutie, Maroon 5, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers thrown in for measure. This was the soundtrack to my senior show, my thesis exhibit. Pete Yorn, Josh Ritter, Donavon Frankenreiter - folk, blues, rock, soul. Beautiful, so beautiful. I miss you, KDEC.

Out here in Colorado I've found a fair substitute in KBCO 97.3 FM out of Boulder. It's not perfect - I miss the splash of Dylan in the mix, but it's probably a wider variety of music overall, mixing in a little bit more music on the rock end of the spectrum, but still with plenty of the roots and folk vibe. In short, radio like this gives such a variety of music to listen to in the studio, promoting the "creative process," whatever that means. It's also such a great way to a) discover artists that you otherwise would not have, and b) hear music that you may not choose to listen to everyday, but still enjoy. [options a and b are potentially mere derivatives of each other and are not meant to be mutually exclusive]

Radio also means listening to other peoples' music. Fellow potter Dave Ellis has an affinity for jazz, regularly tuning the radio to Denver's public radio. When I returned to the studio after my dinner break, he had helmed the tuner and I got an hour of jazz/blues classics, before the late night "Latin Soul Party" came on. It was a groovin' fun time. Included was a samba-flared rendition of U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," which was particularly interesting for the Spanish lyrics during the verses but the entirely English chorus. Not a radio station I would normally tune in to, but it made for an enjoyable end to the evening nonetheless.

So, to all you iPod fiends out there with your trendy little white ear-buds: Give communal music a chance.

It's late, and I should go to bed. Big day tomorrow. Still trying to decide if there's just cause for heading back into the studio. I think I probably will. It's just too much fun not to.

Thanks for stopping by. You stay classy, San Diego.

Cohesive

I have added a new Album to my Facebook - "Cohesive," featuring work from the new year, hopefully as a full body of work. The album can be seen here.

I'm torn at this point, between still thinking of each piece as an individual piece of art, worth its own slide, etc vs. the need to simply produce. If/when I pursue gallery space, I will need to transition into a production mentality: a series of small bowls, a series of large bowls, a series of plates, and will have to sever a level of attachment to each piece. However, it could also afford me the time and reason to focus on a smaller number of larger pieces and improving as an artist in that way. We'll just have to wait and see.

This weekend should be a marathon of throwing. I think I may have to focus on the idea of producing a few larger pieces. I'll keep you updated.

Picture Update

No studio news, just picture update. I have a new album of older pieces up on my Facebook, here. It's an assortment of mugs, small bowls, and a couple plates that never made it into an album. Here's a small sampling:

I haven't been in the studio since last Saturday. Krystal is heading back to Iowa to spend a few days with her family, so we've been enjoying evenings together this week. Consequentially, I will be living in the studio this weekend. Hopefully lots of pictures, lots of progress made. Granted, I still need to work on the whole "where are these pots going, why am I making them" thing, but no big.

That's all for now folks.