New Clay, New Pots

I've been making faceted bowls for years, throwing thickly and then cutting facets after a bowl or cylinder was roughly finished, but this week I started making them differently. I caught a bit of a YouTube video of someone(sorry, can't remember who it was) throwing a very thick cylinder with a bowl-like bottom, cutting the facets, and then opening a bowl from the inside with dry fingers. The dry fingers pushing out the wall of the pot torques the clay and distorts the facets as the bowl walls open. The result is dynamic motion in the pot. I like the look of it. We'll see how it looks in the glaze firing.
I'm planning on firing in about ten days, so that I'll have new pots for the Wellfleet OysterFest, a big two-day oyster and craft fair at the far eastern side of Cape Cod Oct. 17-18.

Skiing in the Land of Fire

The title of this post refers to Tierra del Fuego, on the Strait of Magellan, in far southern Argentina. Our son Marcus, his wife Anastasia Pantelias and their friend Andy Toyota traveled from their homes in Seattle this past summer to the southernmost city in the world, Ushuaia, to find snow. What will these people not do to ski?
The photo with this post is snow and the three young skiers and some of their friends last June on Mt. Rainier. I put it up here because I hate to run a post without a photo. But there's better photography in the video on Marcus and Anastasia's blog, Pantengliopolis Blog of Phat, which you can see by clicking their link on my blog list to the right.
I'm posting this because maybe there are skiers out there waiting for the snow to fall in a couple of months, people who might like to see what summer skiing looks like. Or maybe there's someone, like Dan Finnegan, who have never actually met Marcus and wonder if he really exists. Marcus and Andy are about to start a video documentary course in Seattle, but this shows they've got a pretty good start already.
Back to pottery tomorrow.

A Weekend in the Hills of Western Mass. and Vt.

We took a few days off this past weekend to visit friends out in the western part of Massachusetts and Dee's cousin Susan Potter in Brattleboro, Vt.
Susan Elena Esquivel, clayworker and soon-to-be yoga instructor, and Andrew Sovjani, photographer, opened their house in the woods of Conway to us. I worked with Susan several years ago when I was editor of Martha's Vineyard Magazine and she was the magazine's art director. She's since found Andrew and the beautiful, forested and hilly area around Northampton, Mass., as well as Northampton's lively art and culture scene.
We ate well with Andrew and Susan, and had fine chocolate and banana pancakes on Sunday morning, made by Andrew's nine-year-old daughter Mika. Dee ran one morning down Main Poland Road and found Chapel Creek. She brought me back there later that day, after the sun had gone down. That's where the stream photos come from. Mika is, not surprisingly, the young woman with the pancakes.
Then we headed up to Brattleboro, Vt., less than an hour away. That town is yet another lively place, with lots of art, music, food, coffee shops and bookstores ... the five ways we measure the quality of a town. Dee's cousin Susan showed us around the area, and guided us to Vermont Shepherd, home of the sheep seen here. We bought cheese and admired the wool and the view.
Back home Monday evening. I drive to Braintree tomorrow to get more clay and begin to make more pots.

New Shino teabowls from the Aug. 23 firing

I seem to be fixated on teabowls lately. That will not come as a surprise to anyone who has looked at this blog in the past few weeks. This firing was no different, with a dozen or more teabowls on the bottom shelf, most of them glazed in layered Shino glazes and sifted wood ash. There were bowls and vases in the firing, too, but right now the teabowls are my focus.
Something seems to happen to both of the Shino glazes I'm using when they are combined on the Miller brown stoneware clay body that I use. The Malcolm Davis carbon-trap Shino takes on a sheen it usually doesn't have on its own, and the so-called Bright Shino usually goes white against the sheen. My runny ash celadon on some of them adds another layer, as does the wood ash shaken randomly across the surface.
There is a random landscape that is created with these combinations that is never intentional. I don't know which side will trap carbon. nor where the second Shino will go white. Glazing for this firing, the Bright Shino bucket was down to a few ounces and I was too lazy to mix up a new batch, so I resorted to dripping from a measuring cup. Spots and runs resulted, rather than great sheets of the whiter overglaze. Some got ash glaze, most did not. Almost all got ash.
There are, also, cups here in Shaner Red with sifted ash that turns the glaze yellow and runs down the side. And a couple of simple temmoku cups that are pretty quiet.
The detail of the glaze alone is from a low pasta bowl that's been marked on the inside by a chattering iron.

Chris Gustin Anagama Opening Friday

Chris Gustin's big anagama in South Dartmouth, Mass., about 45 minutes from here, was fired last week and will be opened Friday, Sept. 25, starting at 9 a.m. I've fired several times in this kiln, though not for the past two years. Since its rebuilding a couple of years ago, the three-chamber kiln has been producing magnificent pots.
Chris is well-known nationally for his big pots and he gets some lovely things out of this kiln. Those alone are worth seeing emerge from the firebox. But there are 15 other potters involved in the six-day firings and the anagama chamber and two noborigama chambers hold many, many of their pots in addition to Chris's. The top photo is from two years ago, one of the two atmospheric noborigama chambers behind the anagama.
This will be an unloading and sale worth seeing. Go to gustinceramics.com for more detailed information and for directions to the Gustin pottery.

Nothing to do with pottery ... or poteries

I've just added this site to my list there on the right. It's totally charming and apparently all about Brittany, though I say that only on the strength of two years of college French in the late '60s. But I think it's a fun site, and it has the added advantage of getting my own mug off the top of the blog. Take a look at it. Those of you who can hop a train to France might have some fun over there. The map is from the site, highlighting the area around St. Malo and also around Cancale, a charming little oyster-farming town with great quayside restaurants and stunning soupe de poisson.

A pleasant end to a hard weekend

This was a difficult weekend for us as we joined family from around the U.S. and hundreds of local friends in saying goodbye to our good friend and sister Kate Billings. We had dinner Friday evening at a local fish-and-chips kind of place with the family, then joined a big crowd under a tin roof in heavy rain for Kate's memorial service at nearby Coonamessett Farm.
The service was full of tears, but also full of laughter and love and good stories. There was a line of people waiting in mid-ceremony to come up to the microphone and tell stories about Kate. When the service was over, we stayed under the roof and ate a huge meal of Jamaican food, cooked by the fine Jamaican guys who work at the farm throughout the growing season. Kate loved that Jamaican food, and she would have loved the whole evening.
(Sunday before the service, we also saw Dan Finnegan, who dropped by on his way from the Truro woodfire workshop to the airport in Rhode Island. Dan left us a big bag of tomatoes and at least one beer. You can see his story about the woodfiring at Castle Hill's kiln on his blog, danfinneganpottery.blogspot.com. Finnegan also gave me some advice about displaying many fewer pots during shows. I took the advice ... more related to that in the following paragraphs.)
After the service, at about 8:30 p.m., I began packing pots for a show in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, a show I almost didn't do because of Kate's service. At 5:30 the next morning I headed north on a wet and empty highway, pulling into the Charlestown site, a lovely city park, at 7. Grumping, growling, whining to myself, very tired ... I unpacked, set up the tent and set about the task of being pleasant to buyers as the sun began shining on the sodden grass and people with coffee cups and leashed dogs began arriving.
Making a long story short, it was a good day. My neighbor was my friend Judy Miller, a decorator of colorful wooden bowls and a conversationalist, and the people who came to the park bought good pots, which always lightens my mood. Halfway through the show, a small crowd of show organizers appeared in front of my booth and in an informal little ceremony presented me with First Prize. They had inspected and taken notes on the displays of all the wonderful craftspeople and artists there and somehow made me the winner.
Thank you, Artists Group of Charlestown, for a very nice show, for the ribbon (pictured above) and for being some of the most caring show organizers I've ever met. Really. I'll be back, if you'll have me.