Morning coffee and big, funky teabowls

Some of you readers know I spend most early mornings at one of the local coffee shops in downtown Falmouth. Some of you have even been there with me. Coffee Obsession in Falmouth is a hub of the town, attracting a range of people - those who want a little quiet, uninterrupted coffee-and-newspaper-reading time (that would be me), people who dash in for a cup of coffee to go, people who want to talk international politics at an hour when most people are barely awake, people who have just gotten off the ferry from Martha's Vineyard and need coffee for the ride to Boston, people who have laptops and notebooks and PhD theses to write.
I'm there most mornings about 6:30 and usually get through my Boston Globe sports section (the Patriots have started the NFL season, finally, so some of the bad Red Sox news has been swept from the section) and the Metro section before anyone else sits down to ... ummmm ... talk. Anyway, that's what I do most early mornings. My wife, Dee, usually comes in around 8:15 and more readily engages the other nice folks at the table in conversation.

Anyway, early in the morning, the photo at the top of this post is more or less what my tabletop looks like at the coffee shop - coffee and the sports section. After coffee, I'm off to do errands around downtown, then back to the studio. The second photo is of big, faceted teabowls with crushed granite inclusions, drying on a wareboard. I'll trim them tomorrow morning, before going clamming.

New pots for Charlestown show Saturday

Every firing is an adventure. At least, every firing in MY kiln is an adventure. It's about the way I fire, the way I glaze pots, the glazes and glaze techniques I use, the kind of pots I sometimes make. I think, in fact, it's basically about my personality, which tends to plunge ahead with things on my own, whether I know exactly what's going to happen or not.
So there are mornings after a firing that feel wonderful, when the pots look more or less as I thought they would and sometimes even better. And there are mornings like today, when the first look inside is a disappointment, when it's clear a glaze combination hasn't worked, when one pot that felt good as it went in looks like a train wreck when it comes out. It's not until later, after ALL the pots are out of the kiln and inspected, that it becomes clear that it was not such a bad firing after all.
Yes, there's junk among the hundred or so pots, but it's a minority of junk. Most are just fine, even pretty good.
I think, and I'm not being falsely modest about this, that I just don't know enough about what I'm doing.
I am apparently still learning. And I'm one of those people who has a hard time asking people for advice; I'd rather stumble forward and hope that the path I'm on brings me to a good place.
Which it has with many of the pots in this firing. I wanted more teabowls for the Durango, Colo., show next month and there were several in this kiln. And several that could be part of the group I send next week. The teabowls I've been making and the way they've been glazed have resulted in some pots that look like they've been hammered carelessly from stone.
Jeff Adelberg and Tess Mattern, two young student potters from Boston, were here earlier in the week to look at pots and asked specifically about a patched and broken looking teabowl that was at the front of the bottom kiln shelf. These faceted teabowls are made in a hazardous manner, faceted and then expanded to within an inch of their lives, and sometimes beyond. One facet in that particular bowl gave way as I opened it and a flap of clay spread out from the side. Rather than cut it off the wheel and re-wedge it, I pushed the flap back onto the pot and patched it inside and out with a few of the flat pieces that came off as the bowl was faceted.
"I don't know," I told Jeff and Tess, speaking of that teabowl. "We'll see what happens in the firing."
Glazed in a couple of Shinos and an Oribe, the pot came out today. And I'm pretty happy with it.

I'll have many of these new pots with me at Art in the Park, in City Square Park in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, on Saturday. Come on by if you're in the area.

The photos: Top, Shino teabowl with Temmoku pour, and the aforementioned patched-together teabowl; second, a group of teabowls; ice cream bowls, with iron slip brushwork under McKenzie Shino.

Cups and facets and biggish bowls

Yesterday's firing went more or less by the book, gaining heat steadily from 8:30 a.m. until about 4 p.m. No problems, no sudden shutdowns, no muffled explosions. Scarily routine. I have too long a memory for troubled firings, perhaps. I haven't had one for quite a while.
Lots of small bowls in this one. Faceted teabowls, cups or condiment bowls, depending on your nomenclature. Last firing was largely Nuka, but this firing had more of a variety of glazes. Carbon-trap Shino with Shino and ash glaze pours, glossy iron Kaki, straight ash celadon, Temmoku, a few scary copper reds.
I had tried a new way of faceting small bowls a couple of weeks ago, so there are lots of them in this firing. A more defined wire pattern to the faceting, due to my purchase at NCECA of a coiled wire from a Canadian pottery supply shop.
And I've had some luck with larger shallow bowls the past few weeks. Here's one.
Back to the wheel tomorrow.

Onward ...

Planning and staging the annual holiday open studio can wear me out, so I often spend the next few days before Christmas relaxing and finishing up Christmas shopping. This year, with entries due in early January for the State of Clay show in Lexington, Mass., I wanted to fire one more time. So Tuesday I started throwing. Low pasta bowls, big serving bowls, teabowls ... I've got enough as of today to fill the kiln next week some time. Maybe just before New Year's Eve.

The teabowls can go pretty much anywhere in the kiln, and people always buy them. Funny thing, people now rummage through cups in the gallery or on the Coffee Obsession shelf, looking for "that thumb hole thing you do." Years ago, when I was a year or two into making pots, I pulled a temmoku teabowl from the kitchen cabinet at the home of Dennis Davis, my first clay teacher. (We did lots of raku workshops at Dennis's place.) It turned out to be a Warren McKenzie bowl, with a dimple pushed into the side. From then on, any time I needed a coffee or wine cup at Dennis's, I'd search out Warren's cup. And I stole the dimple idea from him, using it occasionally, always giving him credit when someone commented on it. Now, people think it's my own trademark. Funny how those things happen.

Tomorrow I need to finish Christmas shopping ...

Loving teabowls ...

I began making teabowls years ago, only a short time after I first got my hands on clay at the Art League studio in Alexandria, Va. It must have been a book of Japanese work, or a Hamada book, or some such thing. Maybe it was Steve Lally, making them next to me in Saturday morning's open studio. But early on I loved making and drinking from teabowls, and buying other people's teabowls.

I spent perhaps an hour one Saturday morning in about 1992 in Mark Shapiro's booth at the Baltimore ACC show, picking up and putting down faceted orange cups before finally buying one. We still have that pot in our cabinet here on Cape Cod. (And I have a better understanding of those few people at craft shows who come in silently and have to touch everything before buying.)

Dan Finnegan, then my teacher, paid me a great compliment one day in the Alexandria classroom when he offered to trade me one of his cups for one of mine. I felt like I'd made some progress that day.

A couple of years later, by this time teaching beginning pottery in an Alexandria city program, I asked a student who was headed to London to go to the Craftsman Potter's shop there and buy me a Phil Rogers teabowl. I loved Phil's teabowls ... still do, in fact. I'd bought one for $25 at a workshop, but had cracked it. She came back with a lovely ash-glazed cup which cost the equivalent of $75.

Yikes.

"Don't tell my wife," I said, as I cleaned out my wallet. Today Phil's teabowls cost considerably more than that up at the Pucker Gallery in Boston. This one, in the top photo, has survived uncracked.

I continue to make teabowls, lately faceting and torquing them to within an inch of their structural lives. I spend a fair amount of time explaining to browsing buyers what those drinking things without handles are. I should just say "cup" and forget "teabowl." But it's an old habit.

Other photos here: one-pound balls of B-Mix clay soon to be the shallow teabowls and simple mugs you see drying in the bottom two images.

Pots from the Castle Hill salt kiln

I braved the ridiculous mid-day traffic on the Outer Cape Thursday to get to Castle Hill Center for the Arts in Truro and pick up newly-fired salt pots. Brian Taylor and his crew had the kiln nearly unloaded by the time I cleared the Eastham-Wellfleet jam-up and got to the idyllic countryside where Castle Hill lies.

This was only the second or third firing of this Donovan Palmquist-designed gas-fueled salt kiln. It's a lovely little construction of brick, maybe 15 cubic feet of stacking space. Brian said they used only 6.5 pounds of salt in the firing, which seemed like a fairly small amount. I used to fire with Bill VanGilder and Dan Finnegan at Bill's place in Maryland and we used considerably more than that in a bigger kiln, though I think at times we probably over-salted. (There was always a debate about that ... ) In any case, these pots were fairly subtle in their surfaces. I'll re-fire a number of them in my own reduction kiln this coming week, along with some re-fires from the Harvard soda firing, and we'll see if that makes a difference. I was pleased with the new liner glazes, a blue celadon and a so-called carbon trap Shino, both from the Harvard glaze book, and I'll try them out this week in my own kiln.

I hope Brian continues to fire the salt kiln and that other Cape potters take advantage of the chance to put pots in. I think the firings can only get better. There's always a learning curve with salt - packing the kiln, how much salt, reduction, all of that makes a difference. As a rule, things only get better and better.

I've put the pig sculpture at the top of the images here, mostly because in the last post all you could see were the ham hocks, and particularly the pork-centric folks in North Carolina were interested to see how cone 10 barbecue comes out here in the saltwater North. I apologize that I don't have the pig-maker's name. She didn't want her own photo taken and I neglected my reporter's duty to at least get her name. Perhaps if Brian reads this post he will e-mail me and I can give the sculptor her due credit.