Kiln-opening in Putney, Vermont

Dee and I are headed off-Cape (aka "Over the Bridge" in local parlance) to visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston tomorrow and then to Putney, Vermont, for a kiln-opening.
My college classmate John Hull, a fine potter in Connecticut, has been helping out in the firing of Josh Gold's wood kiln in Putney over the past few days. They open Tuesday morning and we thought it would be a good time to get away, celebrate Dee's birthday (Oct. 2) and see some brand new pots.
We'll stop in the fine little Vermont city of Brattleboro, visit Dee's cousin Susan, maybe browse a good used bookstore, then come home.
Meanwhile, I'll attach a couple of photos of pots by John Hull and Josh Gold. John's is the top photo, Josh's the bottom one. Both fired in the Putney kiln.

New pots from Thursday's firing

It's always startling for me to see Kim Medeiros's pots in my kiln, next to the rough, cut teabowls I've been making the past several months. Kim, who owns The Barn Pottery in Pocasset, spends a lot of time on slip-trailing, sgraffito and very particular glazing of her pots. It shows in her work's color and precision, whereas I dip and pour and spatter on my pots. And she loves those jewel colors, which are so not carbon-trap Shino and ash. So when I open the kiln after firing, as I did this morning, there's always a contrast between her work and mine, as you can see in the top photos. I love that.

She was happy with her pots this morning, and I was happy with most of mine. I've still got problems to work out. More about that in another post, I guess.

Meanwhile, another dozen or so big teabowls came out of this firing, layered in Shinos, ash celadon, copper red and Oribe. The faceting of the pots early in the throwing process, then the pushing out of the bowl shape torques the walls, thins them, sometimes breaks them mid-wall or at the rim. I patch these pots and get on with it. They're going to remain rough and imprecise right through the glaze firing, so I'm not concerned with symmetry or exactitude. Good thing.

There were also, as you can see, some simple squared vases with added lugs, glazed more or less as I glaze the teabowls.

Glaze over glaze over glaze ...

For the past year or so, I've been doing more layering of glazes, particularly on teabowls and vases, mostly over a base glaze of Shino. Sometimes it's another Shino or two, sometimes Oribe or copper red or ash celadon. When they work, they give a surface that is made up of several surfaces. And faceting the clay on the wheel, most often using a twisted wire, shows a base reality that's sometimes there and sometimes not. If any of that makes sense ...
The resulting pots do not exactly fly off the shelves, but I've sold enough to think that there's a market for these pots. Somewhere ...
All of which is to say I finished loading the kiln this afternoon, loading the last two shelves in front. The top cone shelf has a half-dozen very rough and large teabowls, most in a base Shino with multiple layers. We'll see how it goes.
I shot a few photos of a couple of the pots as bisqueware and then with dipped and poured glazes. The lumpy bowls have granite inclusions. I fire tomorrow. I'll get some finished pots on the blog perhaps Friday, after the kiln is opened. At the bottom, a teabowl glazed this way from a few firings ago.

Moving into autumn

Just a short post today, while I take a break from cleaning up the studio and getting ready to mix glazes for next week's firing.
We're going to have a couple of cedars taken down next to the house, but when they come down they'll fall onto the vegetable garden. Or what's left of it. So I picked the last of the peppers this afternoon. Jalapenos, Anchos and a lifetime supply of Habaneros. (A "lifetime supply" of Habaneros is roughly 10 peppers.)
The garden is a tangle of dead tomato, cucumber, pepper and tomatillo vines. The last tomatoes came in a few days ago; there haven't been cucumbers for weeks and the tomatillos would fully ripen some time around Thanksgiving, if I let them. Today's skies have been gray and threatening and the wind is cool. It's wool shirt or fleece weather here now. I mowed the yard yesterday, after letting the broken lawn mower influence my yard maintenance. We should have brought in a herd of goats.
I whined in my last post about the craft show circuit, and I think rightly so. However, I got back from Harwich last week to find a handful of dry trimmings on the wheelhead, holding down a nice little pile of U.S. currency. Sometimes I just love the people who buy my pots.

Later ...

Killing time ... waiting for buyers

The Cranberry Festival arts fair in Harwich last weekend was full of strollers and lookers ... tons of them. Very few buyers of pottery, though. Or, I should say, of my pottery. Enough about that, except that this craft fair business is wearing on me ... there's gotta be a better way to sell a pot.
So while the crowds flowed by in the early Sunday morning sunshine, I took a look at my pots and decided to photograph the brilliantly lighted glaze patterns.

The glazes I use - overlapping Shinos, Kaki, Temmoku, Nuka, ash celadon, copper red, Oribe, a few glass flows - often react with each other like the surface geology of an alien planet or Earth's occasionally rain-soaked desert or a Yellowstone hot spring. But you have to look closely to see that effect. Most people probably won't see it in a stroll past my tent, and even people who like my pots probably won't get close enough to see the glaze landscape.
With my two Nikons, their close-focusing lenses and the straight-on September sunshine, you should be able to see in these photos what I'm talking about.
The photos: Oribe over Shino on a teabowl, ash celadon over Shino on faceted teabowl, copper red and blue ash over Shino on plate, ash celadon on small shallow bowl, finger wipes through Shino on shallow bowl, Nuka overlapping Temmoku on large vase, blue glass run through Temmoku on large vase.

A sweet moment in Harwich

I just finished two looooonnggg days of watching herds of humans walk past my tent at the Harwich Cranberry Festival. More whining about that tomorrow, but I wanted to do one post with just this photo. Mid-day Sunday, the Festival parade went rolling past Brooks Park, with veterans and Scouts and costumes and fire trucks and - I'm pretty sure - a cannon of some sort. Which kept going off.
Afterward, the local Cub Scout wagon parked on the lot behind me and parents and kids took advantage of the hot dog concession there.

I wanted to get a photo of one of the Cubs, since my friend Hannah McAndrew is a dedicated Cub den mother in Scotland and I wanted her to see the US version. So when the heart-covered little girl and the Cub sat together on the fence rail, I shot them from the back. Which was fairly cute. It wasn't until I downloaded the photo last night that I saw the little girl's fingers splayed out gently across the Cub's little hand. Very sweet.

Visiting Kim Medeiros in Pocasset

The Cape Cod Potters have a show coming up next month at the Cape Cod Museum of Art and I got the assignment to shoot some photos of working potters for the walls of the room we'll be in. So today I drove over to Pocasset - about 20 minutes from our place - to shoot photos of my friend Kim Medeiros.
Kim's business is The Barn Pottery. She's just off a "major" intersection in downtown Pocasset. (I put quotes around "major" because in that part of Cape Cod some pretty small business districts qualify for that adjective. Pocasset is one of them.) UK potters Hannah McAndrew and Doug Fitch will remember her place; that's where we went to borrow the torch for Doug's flaming pot-making last year.
Kim put on a good pot-throwing and decorating show for the camera, and served fresh coffee and banana bread in addition. Not a bad way to spend an hour away from the studio.
I thought I'd post a few photos of Kim at work in her highly decorative studio.