June 28th, 2009

"...but mainly he wanders in circles aggravated with the need to
start from nothing again." - Carol Lollis

Things at St. Earth were kind of in the suck this week. After enjoying ideal California weather, we returned home to an early blast of suffocating Midwestern heat and humidity. As the afternoon temperatures in the studio climbed near 100 degrees, I realized that I'd procrastinated too long on yet another maintenance project: repairing the gaping hole in the styrofoam ceiling. (That's right: styrofoam. It's ridiculously fragile, totally uninsulated, and needs to be completely replaced at some point. But suffice it to say that this was the least of the problems with my studio building when I inherited it, and thus it's still pending.) The hole was another weird casualty of the storm (tornado?) that took down the barn 18 months ago. It left a long break in the panels all along the front of the building, like a giant hand gave it a karate chop from above -- which suggests the force of the wind as it shot through the small vents into the attic. Fortuantely, the fix required use of hammer and nails, a box knife, and some duct tape, which are mostly within the limits of my technical abilities. It was a nice change of pace to do a building project, albeit a minor one, that didn't require elaborate research, planning, or professional assistance.

Since the lawn never takes a vacation, I also spent extra hours on mower duty trying to catch up with it, acclimating my blood to the new season and attempting to break the tedium by listening to podcasts (via noise-cancelling headphones -- a wonderful invention).

All that hot grunt work made me want to just hide out in the house (preferably lying down near an A/C outlet), but I managed to slowly get back to making pots. I've got plenty of teabowls in the queue already, so I started with mugs and moved up to some two-part vases. I wasn't too rusty, given a few weeks away from the wheel, but there was the usual discomfort and awkward groping to rediscover a good touch on the clay.

The shelves were packed full of greenware, so I ran a load in the bisque kiln. Then on Friday I made a clay run to Amaco for 400# of white stoneware. I just took on a new dinnerware commission -- a setting for eight, three pots each -- which I'm planning to start soon. As usual, I'll probably have to throw about double that to end up with good, consistent groupings, and to cover for any firing mishaps, which means about 50 pots total. That should get me back in the groove!

With the solstice gone by, I'm due to time-shift my studio days into the earlier morning hours. I've done this the last couple years, and it really helps get the bulk of each day's work done before it gets crazy-hot in the studio. There's also something nice about getting up at first light, but without having to trek across an icy driveway to start a fire in the wood stove -- a reminder that summer, for all its flaws, also has its priviledges.

June 14th & 21st, 2009

"I never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long" - Tom Waits

We spent the past week on vacation in San Diego, my hometown from 1971-89. Most of my family still lives there, so Maggie got to see her grandparents and meet her aunts and uncles. We dipped her feet in the Pacific for the first time and got sand between her toes, which reminded me of summer days as a kid spent on the beach: breathing sea water, getting sunburned to a crisp, making castles and digging for sand crabs, never realizing that's about as good as it gets.

The week before that I caught up on some missed days at the job, so it's been two full weeks since I was in the studio -- hope to have some progress to report on that front next week. We also celebrated birthdays: my 38th year and Maggie's 8th month coincided on the same day. (It all just keeps coming back to parenting these days. I'll insert a couple family vacation photos and then get back to writing about pots.)

Before we left, I applied to the Strictly Functional Pottery National (here's the 2008 show). It's usually a great collection of pots, and I really appreciate the show's concept. I've been in it once before -- so long ago that it's no longer on their website (*sigh*) -- and have applied a few other times without success. My reservations about the pay-to-play aspect of juried shows, where the losers finance the winners, has gradually increased over the years, to the point where I'm very selective about rolling the dice on a $30 application fee. Perhaps I'm now overly-cautious about this, or just getting old and cranky, and I'd probably change my tune if my work selected more often. And, of course, it's possible that my pots just aren't good enough to compete!

In any case, I'm trying to maintain a thread of activity in that area, and if I'm going to apply to one show a year it may as well be the one that explicitly asks for utilitarian pots. I was also prompted by their choice of juror this year: Pete Pinell. I've admired his pots and generosity as a teacher for a long time. He did a workshop when I was in grad school and gave me a thoughtful, helpful critique. Subsequently, I've learned a lot about glazing and firing from his articles and handouts, and have used several of his glaze recipes with good results.

Also this week, I started reading a new book, Stumbling On Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. I first heard him give a talk on the TED conference podcast (an amazingly good archive of lectures on a range of topics). I was so taken by his content and delivery that I've listened to a half dozen times, and wanted to know more.

The book's main premise is that we humans use our imaginations to predict what will or won't make us happy in the future, but that this function is spectacularly flawed. It's written more from a scientific perspective than a typical self-help book, with lots of evidence based on psychology experiments. Gilbert attempts to explain why we're often unhappy even when we get what we wanted -- and vice versa! The details of this are unsettling, because they question an assumption most people take for granted: that you can trust your own perception, memory and ability to predict what you want.

I think this issue pertains directly to artists. We spend so much time envisioning things that don't yet exist, and building mental models during the making process. This is particularly true in ceramics, where you have to be able to imagine how things will change from one stage to the next: shrinking, drying, decoration, raw glazes, and the pots hidden in the kiln during the firing. I think making pots actually improves and refines this imaginative ability, through what Michael Kline recently called "triangulating experience, speculation, and blind luck". But even so, it's hard to accept that this skill starts out far more flawed than I'd thought -- and that there may be unalterable limits that prevent it from ever really working well.

Another reason Gilbert's thesis is so interesting is that it challenges not only what we do believe about our own thinking (meta-cognition), but also what we want to believe. Most people want to trust their instincts, believe their senses, rely on their memories and think that they have a good idea of what they want and how great it will be when they get it. But if it ends up that your internal narrator is unreliable -- perhaps to the extent that you can't even guess at what will make you feel happy -- that changes everything. One plan starts to become about as valuable as any other. The sense of being able to control your own fate looks more like an illusion. And the struggle for that control no longer seems worth all the effort. Freaky.

Despite this new awareness, I'll be stumbling towards the (theoretical) happiness of finishing the book over the next few weeks, so might have more on this topic coming up.

June 7th, 2009

"It's no good for men to work in cages" - The Clash

I had three fairly productive days in the studio this week. Four series of pots: vases, planters, oval baskets and batter bowls. Fewer pots in each series, but more complex forms; the baskets and planters have a lot of steps in the assembly and finishing stages. These forms were on the Make list with an eye towards filling in gaps in the showroom; I haven't done the last two in a long time, so there are none currently on the shelves. It's interesting to observe the demand for different forms over time (all other things -- like quality of execution, glazing and decoration -- being equal). Some things I can never have enough of, while others take a while to clear out.

For example, I probably sell large bowls three to four times more often than baskets with cane handles. I imagine that often comes down to the simple fact that everyone knows what to do with a bowl, or could find a use for one, while it's less obvious what one would do with a ceramic basket. But I enjoy making both, and am challenged by them in different ways. I like giving my customers a range of choices, from the popular to the esoteric. Clary Illian once told me, on the subject of satisfying customer demand, that she could probably make nothing but bowls. But she said it in a way that I took to mean, "They would all sell, but wouldn't that be a disappointing way to go about being a potter?" It's interesting how a single thought like that can stick in memory and grow in significance over the years. Maybe it's because we're constantly changing, so we find new ways to reinterpret old ideas.

I also like going back to a form I haven't made in a while, after I've forgotten my assumptions enough to see new possibilites. (I realize this is a direct contradiction of all my griping about losing momentum after a break and having to start over again. I guess it's different with forms where I'm comfortable enough with the basics that I'm interested in more options. For example, I don't know how many oval pots I've made over the years, but it's a lot. The challenge with them now is less in the throwing and more in assembling the parts into a good composition.)

The vases ended up bigger than I expected, because after throwing all those big jars last spring I unintentionally started them with more clay. That in turn suggested larger decorative lugs, which are pleasantly chunky, like my daughter's baby legs. The oval baskets got a bit larger than planned, too -- perhaps all that practice throwing vertical forms lead to pulling the clay more taut than usual.

Unintentional variations like that in the making process remind me of biological evolution, especially in the way that one new form suggests another, and then another. It creates a positive feedback loop that can be very effective. It also resembles natural selection, in the way that each change gets evaluated for whether it should be repeated or scrapped, although in this case the environment that determines fitness to survive is in my head. Or -- to put it in a way that might disturb my religious friends -- the Intelligence behind the Design is me, the Almighty of the Studio. "I kick the wheel and you are the clay," or something like that. (If that's the case, I think we'd have to call it Semi-intelligent Design.)

But back to the analogy. This iterative process of developing pots is also like evolution in that there's no skipping ahead -- each generation matters, and just thinking or sketching an idea is not enough to evaluate it. The repetition of making is the foundation of the entire process. Some might see these variations as errors, or the process as unacceptably inefficient, and try to correct for them. I see it as an excellent, organic way for my pots to gradually go in new directions.

In the studio on Saturday morning, during a lull in the music, I was listening to the cacophony of birds outside, and thinking about all the places I've made pots where you couldn't see or hear the outside world, let alone smell freshly-cut grass on the breeze. The hermetically sealed art buildings at ASU and Edwardsville, surrounded by the concrete campus at Iowa and Colorado. And then in my own basement studios -- Indiana St. and College St. -- where a small glimpse of daylight was the best I could hope for.

I complain when my studio gets too hot or too cold, about the maintenance it requires and my inability to clear out the junk and get it organized. But at times like this I'm reminded of how amazingly great it is. The Clash got it right -- it's not too much to ask to have a window you can open, a view to the outside world, and a tentative connection to the elements. I'm very lucky to have each of these in spades, and am grateful for it.

Speaking of clearing out junk, I did some long-overdue web maintenance this week. The most significant was breaking up the blog archive so that each year has it's own page. So now 2007 and 2008 each have a permanent home, and the current page is just 2009 to date. (There are links at the bottom of each page.) I'd neglected this task so long that there were two years of posts on a single page, and it was getting ridiculously long. So now it no longer loads half a megabyte of text each time you load the page! And that's not even considering the images. My sincere appologies to any readers still on a dialup connection.

That little project is a continuation of my resistance to migrating this thing to a proper blogging system -- like Wordpress or Blogger -- where things like archiving would be automated. I've been making websites for about 10 years now, which means I started in the days when you still couldn't completely trust software to spit out good HTML. Back then, most people who cared learned to code everything by hand; if you couldn't see how it worked, you didn't use it. That's still a very useful skill, and a good general principle, but it also means I'm probably a bit too suspicious of automation and new-fangled "Web 2.0" developments.

I guess that makes me kind of a techo-Luddite, "in the know" but behind the times, happy to clunk along with my funky, home-grown ways of doing things. The downside is that my site is always a generation or two behind the times, because it takes so long to add the features that most people already take for granted. (In web time, things go from brand new to completely standardized in, oh, about 6 months.)

The best example of this, and the project I'm currently mulling over, is an RSS feed -- the sweet technology behind subscribing to things like blogs, photostreams and podcasts. Several readers have asked for it, and for good reason -- it's not very user-friendly to expect people to remember to come here to see if I've posted anything new, when they could receive a notification in their browser or RSS reader instead. I've been an avid RSS consumer for years -- it's built into iTunes and the core of the podcasting boom. More recently I've switched to reading blogs with Net News Wire, instead of jumping from site to site. But I don't have any experience as a RSS creator and that's where things get technically tricky, if you're not going to let a pre-built system do the work for you. Given what I said above, I'm not inclined to. So I have an idea of how I might put one together and implement it in a way that doesn't add a lot of extra work to each post, but I still have to learn a few things and work out the kinks before offering you a handy Subscribe button. I'm not saying it will happen soon, but I think it will happen!

Also online and long-overdue, my 2008 Archive Gallery: the best pots from last year. I'm really pleased with these as a group. I see improvement from previous years and exciting potential in them, especially the stuff from the salt kiln. Stronger forms, interesting decorative developments, and a handfull of new glazes to pin my hopes on.

My birthday is coming up, and with it the 2nd anniversary of this blog, which seems like a good time to take a summer break. So no post next week (try getting advance notice from an RSS feed!), but I'll return with more the week after. In the meantime, how about seeing what Michael Kline and Brandon Phillips are up to these days? I highly recommend them, if they're not already on your radar.

Two years -- imagine that. Thanks for reading.

May 31st, 2009

"It's not healthy to run at this pace..." - Sting

Last week's cold kept gaining momentum, and this week it was just bad enough that I felt consistently terrible. But not so bad as to warrant spending all day on the couch, so I plowed ahead as best I could. I also made up some missed hours at the dayjob, so my time in the studio was pretty limited. I trimmed that group of 12 scalloped bowls, then made and finished a second group of eight; circular rims this time, less complex.

When I'm sick like that, it magnifies the perpetual dilemmas of the self-employed: How much work is enough? When should I take time off? Is there something else should I be doing instead? Do I have enough fuel in the tank to do quality work right now?

It's also more difficult to decide what to make. If the end result isn't something that will be worth firing, then I'm just raising the level of the slops bucket. With my enthusiasm, focus and stamina reduced, many things are just out of the question -- most of the pots I make require my A game to do well. So I tend to go back to small and simple, pots I know well from hundreds of previous repetitions. Fortunately, there are a few things like this that can succeed by drawing from experience, when those other abilities are temporarily unavailable.

Like these bowls. Looking at them after the fact, as my head starts to clear, they seem reasonably good. Not my best, of course; there are some weaknesses and details I'd like to do over. But acceptable. They're just this side of the boundary line -- murky, grey and shifting as it may be -- that separates the "good enough" from the things that I'd be embarassed to send out into the world with my stamp on them.

In other news, Cindy and I celebrated our 13th anniversary this week (if "celebrated" is the right word; I was half-underwater all day). And this Fall will mark 20 years since we met, during out first year of college. That's now more than half our lives ago, which seems kind of amazing. She remains my best friend, the strongest supporter of my work as a potter, and my partner in this crazy 8-month-old parenting endeavour.

Lastly this week, a couple links to some ceramics stuff I've been enjoying. The first is a web-based network of salt and soda glaze potters. It started about a year ago and seems to have some legs -- now over 200 members and the forums are accumulating some good info and interesting conversations. Here's my profile there. If you're interested in that sort of thing, I recommend you check it out.

Likewise with the second item, a podcast called The Firing Log. It's a series of 8 podcasts by an anagama potter in Washington state, focused on interviews with other woodfire potters. I've listened to most of them and really enjoy the depth of the conversations, even though it's been almost 10 years since I last fired with wood. Maybe that's what I like best about them, that it's kind of a nostalgic, vicarious journey into that way of making pots. There's one episode, recorded during a multi-day firing, that really captures the essence of what goes through a potter's mind while their work is in the kiln, including all the questions, hopes, doubts and anticipation. (And on the scale of a really large kiln, all those things get magnified proportionally!)

There's a wealth of other stuff on that site, too: lots of photos, technical info about woodfiring and an interesting blog. For example, next time I have a bad firing I'm going to refer back to this quote for some perspective:

"What I failed to consider was that when the kiln gets to temperature, the shelves become soft and then warp and bend. When the unsupported corner of the shelf drooped, the weight distribution changed, and it tipped forward. When it hit the shelf in front of it, it caused that one to tip forward, and the ensuing domino effect ensured that almost nothing survived the 6th firing."

May 24th, 2009

"We were raised by wolves, and we are still wild..." - A.A. Bondy

My efforts in the studio this week were hampered by a sick baby and the resulting lack of sleep, and by the weekend I was starting to get under the weather, too. I'm a much better potter on eight hours sleep than I am on six; on four I can go through the motions for half a day (hoping for instinct and luck to make up the difference), but that's about it. The same goes for when I'm not 100% healthy -- everything drags along in slow motion. So I didn't get as many pots made as I'd like, but those I did are pretty good: lidded jars, more pitchers and small bowls with scalloped rims (12 + 6 + 12 = 30).

It was interesting to go back to lidded jars again, after making so many of them earlier in the year. The form felt very familiar, and the details -- like making the flange for the lid and shaping the curve of the body -- came back quickly. It's nice to feel experience accumulate like that, slowly but noticeably.

I've always found pitchers to be a challenging form, primarily because the walls must be thin enough that the total weight is still reasonable after the pot's full of liquid -- too heavy and they're awkward to use. As with almost all pots that have a flat base (i.e. no footring), I leave pitchers as they come off the wheel, without trimming off excess clay at the leatherhard stage. That makes them a real test of how much volume I can get from a certain amount of clay, and how well I can distribute that clay throughout the form.

I also find it tricky to get a well-proportioned, narrow neck, relative to the lower part of the body. For this style of pitcher, that's important because it allows for a good negative space inside the curve of the handle. With smaller amounts of clay like this (2 1/2 pounds), it's a tight fit for my inside hand during the final stages of shaping and finishing. Then there are the dynamics of pulling the spout and handle so that they look as good as they work -- that's always challenging, with many subtle decisions to be made on the fly.

I made 12 bowls in a series, with a shape and rim treatment that's become kind of a standard of my repertoire the last few years. As kind of an ongoing experiment, I've been attempting to squeeze a bit more efficiency out of my studio time by working in longer series: 8 instead of 6, 12 instead of 10. The idea is to see if I can get a few more pots made in the same amount of time, but without compromising the quality of any of them. (Perhaps this is edging a little closer to "repetition" or "production" throwing while hoping to avoid the negative connotations and outcomes of either). This might seem like looking for a free lunch, but I think there are a few good reasons why it might be possible.

For example, once I get warmed up with a particular form, I tend to get into a rhythm where each pot comes a bit faster and requires less fuss to get the details right. Parts of the making process get passed off the the hands -- and/or the subconscious -- through the repetitive actions that go into forming each pot. I think a little less and do a little more, and when things are going well the results are the same. My experience in IT means I tend to think of my brain like a computer, so I imagine this process being analogous to loading some data into RAM and then processing with it as long as the current task continues, saving the overhead of repeated trips back to the hard disk. (A binary file with hash values for this algorithm can be provided upon request.)

(Not really.)

Alternately, and from more of a Humanities perspective, I think this working method is related to getting into a state of Flow, where the mental chatter quiets down and the inertia of making starts to work in my favor. That's a topic I seem to keep brushing up against lately, and something I'd like to address directly one of these days. It seems to me that it is very closely tied to doing manual work, and is perhaps a key part of learning to make quality things through satisfying, sustainable means.

Another example of the benefits of working in longer series, and perhaps a more obvious one, is that the setup and preparation are essentially the same whether I'm making one pot or a dozen. This includes things like arranging the workspace, getting tools ready, preparing clay and throwing slip to proper consistency, making trimming chucks, decorating, and managing the drying process. Each of these is a small thing in and of itself, but together they can eat up a surprising amount of the workday, so even a small efficiency gain would add up to a substantial difference over time. The quest for more pots and better pots continues...

In other news, Maggie is crawling now -- refusing to let the various ear infections and colds get in the way of progress. (I take that as a good sign!) While I have little basis for comparison, she seemed to figure it out surprisingly quickly. It was interesting to watch her put the component pieces together, and learn each stage in sequence (just like a beginning potter at the wheel): first rolling over, then getting her knees tucked under; rocking back and forth, then scooting backwards and in circles until the right combination of muscles asserted themselves in a forward direction; sorting out how to alternate hands and knees and stay on balance; and finally build up some speed and coordination. Now it seems so easy for her to see something, decide she wants to go after it, and then shoot across the floor to get it, like she's known how all along. It also gives us a better idea of what she's thinking -- being mobile means she can assert her desires in a lot of new ways. And I imagine how this process will continue and accelerate, from standing to running to asking for the car keys, probably all before we're quite ready for any of it to happen.

May 17th, 2009

"There's the right way, the wrong way and the Norwegian way." - Edgar Hansen

This was a really good week in the studio, both productive and fun. I continued with small vertical pots, 1 to 1 1/2 pounds each, and made them in groups of six, just to add kind of a numerical theme. After 4 days of work, I'd mostly filled a table with teabowls, mugs and small pitchers (6 + 30 + 6 = 42).

That's a good quantity for me in terms of output and -- if you're slightly geeky -- an auspicious, meaningful number, too. It's also an average of about 10 pots started and finished per day, which doesn't sound like much, but seems to be about my limit when I'm working at a steady, comfortable pace. (I'm always amazed by potters who can turn out dozens of pots in a day, especially when it's done without sacrificing quality!) My output depends a lot on the size and complexity of each pot, how familiar and fresh I am with that particular form, the time I spend on things like preparing clay and decorating, and the number of outside distractions that pull my attention away. This week was mostly free of them, which helped me start getting back into the groove. So I listened to a lot of Bill Frisell and gradually filled up the ware boards, put on a few dozen handles and did some domino patterns, stayed focused and learned a few new things along the way.

Speaking of getting in the groove, I've been watching the new season of Deadliest Catch -- the best show about process on TV. Despite some overplayed sentimentality and the various shortcomings of "reality television", I still really enjoy watching those guys work, and thinking about the parallels between catching Alaskan king crab and making pots. As I wrote last year, for the crab fishermen it's all about finding a good place to drop their traps, and when they do, they say they're "on the crab". It's like being in the zone, in rhythm, or in a state of flow. I get a vicarious thrill when they're on it, bringing up pots stuffed with crab, yelling and laughing as each one comes up over the rail and they imagine filling their quota (and the size of their next paycheck).

But it's equally compelling when they're on a dead spot, pulling up dozens of empty pots and doing all that back-breaking labor for nothing. I can really empathize with that, even if the correlation to making pots isn't exactly to scale. When I'm at the start of a making cycle after a long time away, like I was last week, everything's harder; patience is in short supply, normal tasks and patterns feel uncomfortable, uncertainty and self-doubt run rampant. I'd do just about anything to get back in synch, and recover where I'd previously left off.

Fortunately, it usually comes back faster and easier than I fear, and always by one (and only one) method: sit down and start throwing. The more pots I make the easier it gets; my mind and hands warm up and start to know what to do, crowding out all that introspection. Soon there's a momentum going, and the making starts to feel right again.

But I hate how the cyclical nature of making/firing/selling means losing that momentum at each phase just as it's really starting to flow. I often wonder about how I might structure my working patterns differently to minimize this. The way I do things now is driven partially by deadlines, some by necessity, some by habit. There are certainly other options.

For example, I was talking to Jeff Unzicker, another local potter, at my sale. He and his brother Tom fire an enormous anagama -- just the two of them -- which means much longer cycles in each of those three phases. In fact, he'd just finished firing almost a year's worth of pots! I can't imagine having all that work on the line in a single firing, but I also can't imagine having cycles that stretched out for months on end. That would certainly make a dramatic, interesting difference, and would probably affect the pots in significant ways. Not that I'm even considering building a huge wood kiln -- it's just fun to contemplate.

May 10th, 2009

"And someone with strengths, for all the little things you make" - Wheat

Things were out of sorts this week, starting with several sleepless nights with Maggie. It's awful to have her suffer through teething and ear infections, with only so much we about it -- poor kid! It seems like evolution would have ironed these things out by now, but I guess it doesn't necessarily work that way.

Beyond that, the week right after a sale is usually kind of a random mess, and this one fit the pattern. Out of my normal routines, tired, with lots of small tasks to put the sale cycle to rest and other chores to catch up on. As I was getting the studio back into making mode, I came across my calendar and sale plan from the last month, now nicely altered and marked up almost beyond recognition. How's that for obsessive?

This kind of planning and record-keeping is actually a new thing for me. I've always made lists -- for outboard memory, prioritizing things to do, and the satisfaction of crossing off the nasty stuff when completed -- but often neglected planning ahead or keeping good notes. Then, some time in the last year or so, the consequences of that gradually overwhelmed my reluctance. I realized that running out of time before a deadline (and rushing pots through drying and firing) or forgetting how I'd achieved a good result have a high cost to them, and that the frustration and wasted effort aren't worth it.

So I've been making an effort to develop a system of upcoming deadlines, "To Make" lists, glazing notes, kiln loading diagrams, firing logs and post-firing results. While these take time to maintain, and I'm still unsure about the optimally-productive level of detail, there are definitely benefits. For example, my sale preparation this time went off without a hitch. All the little things that have to be done weeks in advance were on the calendar, which made it easier to knock them out in sequence and with less panic. I realized that I needed to cut my last hoped-for bisque and soda firing before I'd started making the pots for them, instead of half-way through. The first morning of the sale everything was in place, without the sinking realization that I'd forgotten something until the last moment. The same goes for getting a good combination of pots made for the next kiln load and getting them dry before the bisque without heroic measures. And for remembering the amount of clay I used for a certain form or how I mixed a glaze or salted the kiln the previous time, and so on.

Like any set of rules or limitations, at first glance this might seem like it would bleed all the fun out of the process, or eliminate any spontaneous activity. But I'm starting to think that it's actually the exact opposite: the systematic stuff creates a framework that allows the fun, creative, random things to happen, within a protected boundary -- like putting endangered animals in a nature preserve so they have a chance to survive.

Near the end of the week I finally got back to the wheel. After almost two months away it felt odd and uncomfortable, like I didn't know what I was doing or forgot how to use my hands in the interim. So I started with teabowls -- small and simple. It helps to get my mind out of the way while my body warms up, reacclimating the muscle groups used for wedging, the posture at the wheel and the refined gestures of throwing. So I listened to Radio Lab, and tried not to think too much about what I was doing as the first wareboard filled up with pots.

When it was done, everything seemed slightly but significantly different, like things were back where they belonged, and I'd found the trailhead once again.

May 3rd, 2009

"It's your big day" - XTC

Another sale is in the books, and a very good one at that. By the metrics I keep track of -- attendance, new customers, pots sold and sales in $USD -- it was one of the best yet. (As I've mentioned, I tend to be a bit obsessive about these things. I guess it's because there's a certain satisfaction in seeing almost 10 years of history distilled down to the rows and columns of a simple spreadsheet.)

The lidded jars sold really well, perhaps helped by the fact that I haven't made them in a while. The second set of four celadon jars (from that commission) sold as a group, which was great. I hesitate to price pots in groups, even if they make a nice set, because I want my customers to buy them in whatever quantity they like, and marking every pot individually allows that. But it's nice when they are chosen that way, particularly when a stack of bowls or pair of bottles had that greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts thing going. That's one of the little things I notice during the blur of running the sale table: the pots that were made one right after the other, shared space on a ware board, decorated in sequence, fired together. It's interesting how some maintain that subtle bond, like siblings headed out into the wide world together, while most just scatter.

The new porcelain pots seemed to go over well. The white glazes really popped on the shelves, surrounded by the darker teadust and celadons. I like the variety they adds to the range of pots as a whole, in addition to their individual merits, and this is still just using my existing glazes. So much potential!

Sales from the web site were good, too; the promotion tends to make this the busiest time for shipping pots out, too. It's interesting to see where the orders come from each time, particularly for new customers who've just found me online. This time they included California, NYC, Iowa, Minnesota and Texas. That's a pretty good range.

After doing a one-day sale and minimal promotion several times the last few years -- barn, full-time job, teaching, baby -- it was great to go all out again and see a positive result from it. I mailed about 700 postcards, put more out at local businesses, sent a few hundred email announcements and advertised in the local paper -- which apparently is still actually read, because several new customers saw it! Having grown tired of the hassles of manually sending bulk email, and wanting a reliable way to design an HTML email message, I tried Mailchimp, an email marketing service. It's great! Easy to use, nice template wizards but completely customizable, automated list management, detailed reports and the price was just right (e.g. free). Yes, they offer a few hundred free credits as a trial, which is a smart move since after one try I'm hooked. Prices after that on the pay as you go plan seem reasonable, too: about 3c/email. Chances are I'll switch to it for good come December. (The icing on the cake is their mascot's a monkey, and the instructions are actually funny and kind of snarky. That's my kind of branding).

The firing I squeezed in last week (#36) came out pretty well. It added enough pots to top off the Saturday morning inventory, which was the main goal. I love it when the showroom is packed to capacity like that. My improvised patch on the metal stack held together well enough -- the firing was slow but made it to temperature. There were some great results from the porcelain, including a couple more white bottles with subtle salt texture over the bare clay; two new decorative patterns on mugs that I really like; and three nice large jars. I lost a couple others: one where the little handles pulled away from the body and another that had some amazingly severe cracks where I'd incised lines around the decoration. Both are new errors, completely unexpected, so that's this month's ceramic heartbreak.

That suggests and reinforces two things: one, the amazing forces at work on the pots, as they shrink from the heat and get blasted by salt; and two, that just because something works at one scale is no guarantee that it will at another. Larger pots are like putting the proverbial eggs in one basket -- they increase the possibility for both risk and reward. I was very happy with the ones that survived, but regret the lost work, potential, fuel and stacking space of the ones that didn't. Live and learn.

As is usually the case at the end of a sale cycle, I'm worn out but can't wait to get back to wet clay. It's been too long since I sat at the wheel or had a day of my regular studio routine. Rest and getting back to throwing are sweet rewards for the last month's work.

April 26th, 2009

"janky: (adjective) inferior quality; held in low social regard; old and delapidated; refers almost exclusively to inanimate material objects, not to people." - Urban Dictionary

This week was the beginning of (crazy) sale prep mode: trying to squeeze in one last firing, get the promotion engine running, prepare the pots, rearrange the showroom and coerce our wild landscape into a more presentable condition. There's one week to go and I think I can make it!

After the last firing, the metal stack on the soda kiln was in a little better condition than I'd feared, so I decided to see if it will hold together for one more go before the sale. It took a pretty janky patch at the base, but some hose clamps and a new piece of metal seemed to hold it together pretty well. It will get a very literal trial by fire soon.

I glazed and had the kiln loaded by the end of the week, but then postponed the firing. Here on our little hill, surrounded by miles of fields in all directions, the winds come fast and crazy this time of year. My kiln really struggles in those conditions, so I decided it was better to wait for a break in the weather than battle it all day long. I'm hoping one will come this week, so I can get those pots out in time for the sale.

But if not, I already have over 200 pots done and I'm pretty happy with their variety and quality. It's great to see the collective results of another making cycle lined up on the shelves. Even the small amount of porcelain I've done lately makes a big difference in the showroom -- that pristine white surface really holds it's own next to the teadust and darker celadons. All the larger lidded jars will arrange nicely amongst the smaller pots, and there's also a good range of bottles, vases, serving dishes and so on. It's exciting to think about them getting ready to make their way out into the world.

So, I'll close with one last pitch for my sale this weekend: May 2nd & 3rd, from 10am - 5pm. Elsewhere on my site are more sale details, maps and directions and a preview of some of the pots.

April 19th, 2009

"...the salt kiln was making surfaces that I really liked. I didn't feel like they were mine, and they didn't feel like they were a mistake; they were -- I liked them. I could just appreciate them without -- they seemed like they were part of the big world. It changed my attitude about the pots somehow. I don't know what it was." - Michael Simon

With two weeks to go until my spring sale, time is getting short and I'm a little anxious about all that's left to do, so I'll keep the posts brief this week and next.

After doing some post-winter maintenance, I fired #35 in the soda kiln. (It's occurred to me that perhaps I should stop calling it that. Without intending to, I've drifted into using more salt than soda over the last couple years -- it's now about 75/25. Maybe I should just call it a salt kiln? "Sodium kiln"? Urg... that's clunky. And for that matter, I'm also stoking a bit of wood along the way, so perhaps it's a salt/soda/propane/wood kiln?)

The results were good, with lots of nice new pots, but it was kind of a battle to get to temperature. I didn't have the right size pots for top level -- too many small ones -- so I squeezed in an extra shelf of short teabowls there, which ended up being a bad idea. (This is the kind of detail that I forget with 4 months between firings.) I suspect that made it too tight near the arch and flue, constricting the flow through the kiln, because it really crawled above 2000 F. But other contributing factors may have been the weather -- kind of a high pressure, windy day -- and the fact that the metal chimney is past due to be replaced. After being subjected to a long, cold winter it's more rust than shiny metal, and is starting to perforate down at the base when the heat and salt hit it the hardest. When that starts leaking in cold air, it compromises the pull of the chimney; less draft makes it harder to combust new fuel from the burner and climb in temperature. At least, that's the theory as I understand it -- what's actually happening could be something else entirely!

The bottom shelf has always been the sweet spot in this kiln, and as the walls gradually slag downhill and the pool of molten glass builds on the floor, it's getting better and better. My best flashing slip gets an orange peel texture on the wet side and cool metallic highlights there and the glazes get blasted by the salt and do really interesting things. I've got to remember to put the best pots there each time! In this load, I also had nice results from the celadon, some refires that improved the second time around, and more promising porcelain tests. Unloading a good group of pots like this makes me excited about the next one, and sparks a bunch of ideas for the next making cycle.

I'm hoping to get one more firing in next week for the sale. I have some big domino jars and more porcelain bottles that I want to get done, but it will depend on if I can patch the chimney together well enough to make it to cone 10 one more time. If you're on my mailing list, I'll send out announcement cards for the sale this week. You can also preview the pots in my site Gallery and here's some more general info about the sale.

April 12th, 2009

"And love it don't die, it just goes from girl to girl" - A.A. Bondy

I was hoping to get in another throwing session, and run one last bisque, before switching over to firing mode but after re-evaluating the schedule that looked a little too crazy to pull off. I'm trying to get better about estimating how long things will take, and not putting myself into such a bind that it's all drudgery and cramming for the next deadline. There were a few last year that got pretty ugly, so I've started actually looking at a calendar on occasion, and making a rough outline of how many pots and firings I can do every few months. Hopefully that works out to be the better part of valor.

So I glazed pots for my next soda firing this week, lots of mugs and small porcelain tests, with big jars waiting on the shelf for the next one. It's been four months since the last firing, so I spent some time studying my notes and getting the variables loaded back into memory: the number and size of pots that will fit, what the slips and glazes have been doing, which surfaces go in which parts of the kiln. After the last firing I stashed away a group of lidded jars that had come out exceptionally well, and that held a lot of new information for patterns and glaze application. They were very useful as reference for glazing this batch, which yet again reinforces my belief in the value of keeping a library of recent work on hand. I need to do some post-winter kiln maintenance, but then if the weather's good I'll load it up and fire next week.

I also shot photos of pots for my website gallery -- something I should do more often, but usually procrastinate on. They're sitting on my hard drive, waiting to be processed and uploaded, but I hope to have them done soon. So there are now about 20 new pots in the Gallery. I've been shooting my own photos for something like 12 years now, going back to the painful days of slide film and chemical processing, but always with just enough technical skill to barely pass muster -- and often not even that much. (Readers with a basic knowledge of photography should feel free to start laughing at any time.)

The irony is that my wife is a photography professor, and has offered to teach me the basics of aperture and F-stops any number of times. Yet I've muddled by on Auto mode all this time, usually because I wait until the last minute to shoot, when there's no spare brain capacity or margin for error. It hasn't helped matters that I'm pretty good with Photoshop (from my time as a web designer), and I've become comfortable with a "fix it in the mix" approach to making up for all the defects in the original image. It's interesting how digital tools are often both salvation and crutch.

But I've become increasingly frustrated by shots being tinted yellow, or the back rim being too out of focus, or wild fluctuations in brightness. So I gave it a little extra time and effort this time around. With Cindy's assistance, I switched to manual mode, which gave more white balance control and -- I think -- better depth of field, especially on a wide pot like a large bowl. With the quality of the displays on good digital cameras now, it's easy to see the effect of changing various settings before even snapping the shutter, which makes experimenting with camera settings vastly easier than in the "old" days. Not only that, but the bad shots are just memory space on a flash card, so there's no wasted expense of developing and printing all the mistakes. Even better, with a computer nearby it's easy to download the images during a shoot and see them on a big monitor, which gives instant feedback and reassurance that I'm not mucking up the whole session. In fact, I realized that I'd avoided making this transition for so long because, at least in part, I was imagining what it used to be like, and underestimating how much it had all changed. Pretty great. And of course, the key is that the results seem better -- fewer of those errors, less to fix in Photoshop, better images. Now I just have to figure out how to capture these new white porcelain pots. It's like grasping at fog on a cloudy day. Hmm... throws like Jello, photographs like mist -- what's not to love?

Speaking of photos, I sent the postcard for my upcoming spring sale off to the printer, having successfully resisted the impulse to put our daughter on the front again. (She's on the back, instead.) This time I chose a soda fired vase with my blue-green copper celadon glaze that's been doing great things lately -- it really reacts in interesting ways to the salt and soda. The sale will be the first weekend in May, the 2nd & 3rd. If you'd like, you can join my mailing list and I'll send you a card with all the info before the sale.

In other news, Maggie turned six months old this week. She now has two teeth, can sit up by herself, and is eating a variety of foods. One of those small porcelain bowls from the last firing was for her rice cereal, and it looks quite nice sitting on the high chair tray. It's amazing to watch all the incremental progressions, as she slowly begins changing from a baby into a toddler. Soon she'll be crawling all over the place, and the pots will all have to move up a shelf or two to compensate.

But in the strange double-helix that entwines life and death, this week we also lost our dog Patches. When we moved here four years ago she was a stray living in the barn, abandoned and almost wild. We soon discovered that she had a litter of ten puppies out there, which she was somehow able to keep fed in the middle of January -- her teeth were so worn from gnawing bones that the vet couldn't even guess her age. Her pups went to the Humane Society and were adopted almost instantly, each one white as snow and cute as hell. But knowing that no one else would want this battered old dog, we took a chance and brought her back home. She was very hesitant at first and showed signs of past mistreatment, but before long she was lying on the porch, then letting us near as she ate, and eventually giving in to being petted and scratched, learning to play and go for walks.

I spent a day digging a hole next to one of the 100-year-old concrete fence posts, near the remains of the barn, and building a rough box from its wood. Then I put her under the dirt and clay, with two of my pots -- her food and water bowls -- and we said goodbye.

Patches was a great dog, and perfectly suited to country life -- sweet and good tempered, smart and tough; cautious with strangers, but never hostile; a great alerting bark and just territorial enough to keep the wildlife at bay. Neither Cindy or I had dogs growing up, and hadn't particularly wanted to, so we were both surprised at how much we came to love this one. This place on Day Hill belonged to her before it was ours, and she knew every rock and tree by heart. It's already lonely without her.

April 5th, 2009

"The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling."
- Paula Poundstone

This week I taught at the U. for two days, subbing in for the beginning Ceramics classes, and worked a couple days at the office, but somewhere in the midst of it caught yet another cold -- so the end of the week was a bland blur of tax preparation and recovery time. (I'll resist the urge to complain about both.)

It was strange to suddenly be back in the classroom, and to jump right into doing throwing demos for a new group of students, but they seemed to go well enough. It's always eye-opening to watch students try throwing for the first time; it reminds me of how far I've come, and of the parts that I take for granted. I find it interesting that there's usually at least one person who just seems to get it immediately: good wheel speed, a steady touch on the clay, and an intuitive understanding of what they're trying to accomplish. It usually have to ask them, "Are you sure you've never done this before?"

The second glaze firing came out very well. I've started doing two loads back-to-back like that, so the first one is like a calibration test for the second. I usually split the pots into two equal groups, so that each load can have a similar stacking pattern. If I made four large bowls, for example, I'll save the best two for the second firing, and repeat that pattern for each group of pots. That way the best pots go into the second firing, when my feel for the glaze batches and firing cycle at its best. It seems like a good way to repeat what worked, avoid what didn't, and streamline the process.

This time around I had all those large lidded jars to fire -- sweet Mother of Feldspar, so many jars! For the commission, I wanted to get the best two examples of each of the four sizes into the same load, hoping for consistent firing of the celadon glaze. So that skewed things a bit, and the second load was a lot tighter than the first, but they still fired very similarly. The good news is that the jars came out well, with no major mishaps. I haven't cleaned and sorted them yet, but there may even be enough to make two complete sets, which would be great.

The porcelain in this load makes me even more excited about going in that direction. I find myself thinking about it as I'm drifting off to sleep at night, which is usually a good indicator of what I really want to do next. I used the same three glazes as the first load, but with a bit more knowledge about how to apply them. I can't decide whether I like the clear, glossy white better than the matte, opaque one... chances are that I'll end up using both. They're cool in combination, too -- a subtle white-on-white effect.

The clear glaze tests from John Britt's book were also really encouraging. (After writing about it last week, I had some doubts about the wisdom of singing its praises prior to seeing any of the glazes actually fired.) But of the five recipes I tried, at least four look really good and seem to fit the clay body well. Tight, but with minimal crazing. I'll mix small test batches of the best two and try them in the next firing cycle. I'm also looking to improve my standard liner glaze in the soda kiln -- the current one acts a little flaky sometimes, especially if it gets hit with a lot of vapor -- so I'll run the tests through the next soda, too. Next up are celadons.

I heard from the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento that they've acquired some of my pots, as part of a larger collection. They are launching a major expansion next year (including the obligatory glass atrium), and are planning a show and catalog of the collection. These are my first pots in a museum, and I have mixed thoughts about it.

On the one hand, it's an affirmation from the arts establishment that I've made some good work. Someone with the right credentials has given those objects the official stamp of approval, and it's another line I can add to my resume. But on the other, it's a bit daunting to have my work formally "institutionalized". I remember those particular pots, because I talked to the collector a few times on the phone and he made quite an impression. It was soon after I first put pots for sale on my website, around 2001. Knowing they'll represent me in a fairly permanent way makes me wish I could trade them for something more recent. Those pots were fine, I suppose, but the ones that just fired last week are a lot better.

And now that I think of it, there are certainly places where I'd be proud to have my pots wind up. But while getting into museums would be a nice legacy to a lifetime spent making pots, it's not my primary goal. Ideally, my pots go to people who genuinely like them, and who will use them regularly. Almost everything I make is utilitarian, meaning that it can function in some capacity, even if it may end up serving mainly as decoration. At least in someone's home there's always the possibility of use, and of touch and personal interaction. That possibility fulfills my intent as the maker, so it's preferable to having them displayed under glass, listed in catalogs or stashed away in permanent storage. If a few go there, as representatives of what I've done, that would be great. But I want most of them to live out in the everyday world.

Which makes me think about how we have some pots at home that I feel lucky to own, but am cautious about using -- a Warren MacKenzie bowl, a Byron Temple jar, a Clary Illian pitcher. There are some like these that we've used and broken, which is always a regret. But I know those potters would be disappointed if we just set their work up on the shelf, or packed it away for safekeeping.

Set aside for when? Kept safe for what?

March 29th, 2009

"...then dirt in truth is clean" - Procol Harum

This week I did a pair a glaze firings -- waxing, glazing, loading, firing, unloading. The first one came out quite well, and the second is cooling to door-opening temperature as I write. I put about 20 of the new porcelain pots in the first load and am really happy with them. Even just using my existing glaze batches -- a white and a clear that are liner glazes in the soda kiln, and the celadon I've used for years -- the results are already pretty exciting. There's such a difference between a clay that's almost white and one that really is. I like the density and feel of them, too. At it's best, porcelain has this otherworldly quality. Holding a good example of it in your hands, it's easy to imagine why this material caused so much fuss over the last 500 years.

I also fired tests of 4 other porcelain bodies: two each from Standard Ceramics and Laguna Clay. The domestic clays (Standard 130 and Laguna Dave's Porcelain) were darker grey, as expected, and looked very similar to the Amaco 38M white stoneware that's been my normal clay for the last several years. The Grolleg bodies (Standard 257 and Laguna English Porcelain) were both very white, and almost indistinguishable in color from the Turner porcelain. So I think in terms of choosing a premixed porcelain, it will come down to how they feel to work with and if there's any difference in their resiliency; i.e. how much they tend to warp, crack, sag, stick to the kiln shelves, etc.

I probably won't use the cost of the clay as a major factor in this decision. I would rather work with a better material than save a small amount of money, especially since I don't go through tons of clay each year. From an aesthetic standpoint, of course, I want the finished pots to be as good as possible. Clary Illian once wrote to me that if you're going to make simple pots, your materials must be of "jewel-like quality". That idea really stuck, and some of my interest in moving towards porcelain is to put it into practice more fully.

Tom Turner makes a similar point, while factoring in technical considerations, in this article about his porcelain body:

"The least expense of being a fulltime potter is the cost of our materials... If a porcelain throws better for you, is whiter, is translucent, and eliminates some of the problems associated with porcelain, isn’t that worth a few pennies?"

On the other hand, it might come down to defining what constitutes "a few pennies". For example, when purchased in 500# lots, the Standard English Porcelain is $0.57/#, while the Turner's Best Porcelain is $.90/#. Is 33 cents per pound "a few"? Or, to put it another way, is $33 per hundred pounds too much? Turner makes the argument that if a one pound mug sells for $30 or more, that price difference is somewhere around 1% of the finished product. So is 1% worth the difference between the two clays? Probably.

The second kiln load has a group of clear glaze tests in it, mixed from John Britt's excellent book The Complete Guide to High-Fire Glazes. In the intro, he writes that this is the book he wishes had been around when he was just beginning with glazes and firing, which is exactly what I thought when I discovered it. This book might have literally saved me hundreds of hours of ignorant, wasted effort if I'd had it ten years ago.

I particularly like how the recipes are grouped by glaze type, and laid out in a table with the glazes as columns and the raw materials as rows. This makes it very easy to compare the composition of similar glazes, and gives some insight into how their differences affect the fired glaze. It's also very well illustrated, with photos of test tiles and finished pots, most of them well-labeled to facilitate matching photos to recipes.

I'm planning to use it to help develop a clear, a semi-opaque white, and a new celadon for porcelain, trying to improve on the recipes I'm currently using. I'd also like to develop an amber celadon and revive a carbon trap shino, but those are a bit farther down the priority list.

Lastly this week, the 2009 AKAR Yunomi show is now online. Here are my pots in the show -- it's nice to see that several of them have already sold. As usual, the show is an astonishing array of forms, styles and working philosophies. Too much to take in at one sitting.

March 22nd, 2009

"Time after time" - R.E.M.

Last week I made the cardinal error of counting pots before they're done, and jinxed the lidded jars in progress. Within hours after writing "I think they'll be OK," I went out to the studio to discover that 3 of the 4 largest ones had cracked through the base while drying. My first thought was that it was caused by an extreme change of thickness, like a too-thin base meeting a thick corner at the wall. But upon breaking them open I found that they all looked fine -- uniform thickness, good consistency in the base. Strange and surprising. Other possible causes are lack of base compression, too much throwing slip left inside, or uneven drying, but I think I avoided all of these mistakes. Also, the problem didn't occur with the smaller sizes, so I'm guessing it's something I did unintentionally during throwing, since my attention was focused on wrangling that big mass of clay up in the air. So, another ceramics bummer. Live and learn. I squeezed in time to make a couple more, thrown in two sections in an attempt to avoid the cracking this time. (I'll refrain from making any comment whatsoever about their current status -- more on this after the glaze fire.)

Then it was on to the rush of getting everything dry enough to go in the bisque, and pushing through two more loads in the electric kiln. I generally like having a small bisque kiln, but all these big jars really eat up the space, and I didn't have a good selection of forms to pack in around them. That makes for semi-full loads and the feeling that I'm being sloppy and not conserving resources well enough.

We've finally turned the corner into early spring here in central Indiana. As usual, I was getting desperate for an end to the cold and a chance to get out the short pants. One of the great things about living in a rural area is watching the landscape change with the seasons. With spring, it's always a long, slow wait and then -- bang! -- everything's gone green all at once and the plants start sprouting out of the soil at an astonishing rate. But some nice remnants of winter carry on for a couple weeks, like starting a small fire in the woodstove or morning ice on the hood of the old dumptruck.

I'm still thinking about Gladwell's book Outliers, which I wrote about a couple weeks ago, and especially about The 10,000 Hour Rule. As I thought about elite musicians versus good ones and the Beatles' years in Hamburg, I couldn't help wondering: So how many hours have I put in? Have I reached that magical 10K threshold yet?

It took some careful coaxing of my creaky memory, but here's what I came up with:

Year	Place	Estimated hours in studio
1971-92	Various	0
1992	U of Iowa	300
1993	U of Iowa	300
1994	U of Iowa / Clary Illian's	500
1995	Arizona State / Clary Illian's	1800
1996	U of Colorado / Boulder Potters' Guild	300
1997	Boulder Potters' Guild	700
1998	Boulder Potters' Guild / So. Illinois	1100
1999	So. Illinois / Indiana St. studio	850
2000	Indiana St. / College Ave. studio	200
2001	College Ave.	500
2002	College Ave.	600
2003	College Ave.	600
2004	College Ave.	600
2005	Fillmore	350
2006	Fillmore	1400
2007	Fillmore	1350
2008	Fillmore	850
2009...	Fillmore	200
Total		12,500 hours

These numbers are based on making conservative estimates, and counting just time working in and around the studio. That means mostly the hands-on stuff, and not much of the ancillary stuff; e.g. things like kiln building and clay mixing are included, things like reading about pots or interacting with my customers aren't.

I was generally surprised at the total -- if I'd had to place a bet, I would have said it was less than that. But I'm also disappointed that some years were so low, like both times we bought houses in need of a lot of work, or when I was in between studios. Seeing it listed like this also makes me wonder what else I was doing along the way, which other projects or distractions kept me from the studio. And if, in the big picture, that was time well-spent.

Assuming that these numbers are vaguely accurate (say within +/- 10%), I passed the 10K hour mark sometime late in 2006, almost 15 years after taking my first ceramics class. Coincidentally, that's also right after I built my first kiln and quit my dayjob to work full-time in the studio. Or did I make that decision, at least in part, because I'd logged enough practice time to feel comfortable doing so?

Another thing that jumped out at me from looking at this table is that I have never worked 2000 studio hours -- the equivalent of a full-time job -- during a single calendar year. But there were at least three 12-month spans where I did that and more: in '95/96, when I spent the summer at Clary Illian's and the school year at Arizona State; in '98/99, during my year of grad school at SIU Edwardsville; and in '06/07, when I worked every day on pots and had just clocked in hour 10,000. Interesting.

My mind's still unravelling the possible implications to all this... maybe I'll come to some more conclusions about it next week. Until then, I encourage you to ask yourself, whatever your thing may be: How many hours have you put in? Is 10K still in your future, or back in the distant past? What does that say about your relative mastery of your field, the quality of your work, how you spend your time, and what you have left to accomplish?

March 15th, 2009

Hoffman: Number four, do we really need it?
Bateman: If you like squares you do.
Hoffman: Oh, I like squares.
- Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium

This was an intense week in the studio. I finished the last of the lidded jars, and at week's end made two series of plates and some bowls, then fired another bisque load. It was a struggle to get the largest jars done, and required extending the limits of my throwing skills. It seems I'd underestimated the challenge -- 10" x 9" is a lot bigger than it sounds! I ended up using 7# of pretty stiff clay, and lost several of them along the way. They seem a bit heavy to me now, as they're drying, but I think they'll be OK after the glaze firing. (Maybe it's just my imagination, but the pots always feel heaviest to me when I first lift them off the bat... the collision of expectations and reality.)

The idea of "acceptable" weight for functional pots is a tricky one, inherently subjective and entwined with issues of craft and skill. I think each potter has to arrive at his or her own standards over time, and that the thickness and weight of the pots is an important consideration. For most people -- including those who buy handmade pots -- the default assumption is that thin is good, and thinner is better. This idea is hammered in by extensive experience with mass-produced pots made in molds, where the goals of uniformity and economy win out over aesthetics on a regular basis. But while a thinly thrown wall demonstrates a potter's experience and control, it doesn't always make for the best pot. For example, because these jars will be used as kitchen canisters, I think they can stand to be somewhat thicker and sturdier than, say, a mug. Typically, they don't get carried around much and when they sit on a countertop as a group, they tend to get jostled around and bumped together in daily use -- or at least ours do! (Planters and mixing bowls also come to mind as good examples.)

Three memories from my student days about thickness:

1) Chuck Hindes told our class a story about being at the Archie Bray Foundation, where another resident potter was making these elegant, featherweight pitchers. A woman bought one but returned with it the next day, broken. Apparently the pot was so thin that when she threw ice cubes in to make tea, the bottom fell out.

2) My first summer at Clary Illian's, we were talking about throwing and she held up a large ovoid jug as an example. Turning it in her hands around the vertical axis, she told me that a uniformly thin wall is not the ideal, but that deliberate variations in thickness, such as could be felt by shifting the pot's balance in space, are often far more interesting. I sort of understood what that meant at the time but didn't really grasp it until years later, studying the cutaway sketches in her Potter's Workbook and comparing them to some of her pots that we own and use every day. The best ones are a little heavier, a fraction of an ounce here or there, but in ways that make the pot more dynamic and more enjoyable to use.

3) In grad school, we were unloading the big anagama kiln with visiting potter Bob Archambeau. I'd been making these vases and teapots with really stiff-cut faceting, to the point where the remaining walls were almost paper thin (sometimes intentionally, often not). As he lifted one of these out of the kiln, Archambeau said, "Whoa... looks like someone's running out of clay!"

It's interesting how certain things like that can stick with you for a long time.

For the commission that started this series, I have 3 good versions of each of the 4 sizes -- 12 in all. But to get there I ended up making almost 40 pots, including a half-dozen during the warmup phase, more than a few that fell over or got torqued on the wheel, several of each size that turned out well, but weren't quite the right shape or dimensions, and a few where I couldn't resist going off in another direction, like exaggerating the swell of the belly or adding lugs and underglaze decoration. That's a lot of jars! So there will be an excess of them for my spring sale in May -- hopefully my customers will be interested!

I probably should have used some of that time making a wider range of forms for the sale, but that's how long it took to finish the job, and it made for a memorable, valuable experience. It's rare for me to spend so long narrowly focused like that, and it's also a great way to advance my knowledge and skill of that particular form. It feels like I now have a much better understanding of its properties and how to get there -- I could practically make the smaller ones in my sleep. The other advantage is that it required a stretching of scale that was probably long overdue. I routinely fail to get geared up for making the big pots, and so they're often left undone on my Make list at the end of a throwing cycle. Working at this size increases my confidence and interest in it, and reminds me that the only way to pull something new into my comfort zone is to flail around outside of it for a while.

I ended up throwing the larger jars in groups of 4. That's about as many as I could do in a morning, because of the complexity and physical strain of making them, and I generally avoid the high-difficulty stuff after lunch. (I try to sort tasks throughout the day in descending order of required skill; late afternoons, I'm only good for donkey work.)

For the last few years, I've avoided throwing in groups of 4, as another of my goofy, semi-sincere numerological superstitions. Instead I'd do groups of 3's or 5's or 6's. Maybe 8's, but even that felt kinda hairy. But I've gone back to 4's lately, perhaps just out of the contrarian impulse to buck my own habits. Ironically -- given all my attempts to become more efficient with my studio time -- I've rediscovered why quads are such a good quantity to work in. It's an easy number to wrap my head around: two pairs of pots to make and finish. As a bipedal mammal, I can carry two bats across the studio at a time (have tried three; usually a mistake). Weigh out a chunk of clay and wire cut it in half, and you get two chunks of equal weight. And it just so happens that I originally built my shelves to hold 4 12" bats in a row, so it's the most efficient use of scarce horizontal space. And yes... and I really like squares. After circles, they're my favorite shape.

That's the great thing about an irrational belief system like numerology: when its rules don't suit you anymore, you can just change them, and then easily justify the new ones as being correct and good. What's not to like?

March 8th, 2009

"She's a jar, with a heavy lid." - Wilco

More jars this week, working on the two bigger sizes with 4 1/2 to 6# of clay. I haven't quite nailed the largest size yet, and may need to use 6 1/2# or more to get it. That seems kind of heavy for the finished pot, but so far the completed ones feel about right for their size, so I think it will work out. It takes a lot of discipline to stay on task when working at the edge of my abilities like this. That's the hard work, doing the next most necessary thing, continuously pushing the scale. It's also physically challenging in a way that reminds me that being a potter is a contact sport (and that I need to get back to the gym).

I've lost a few on the wheel, either pulling the wall too thin in the lower half or letting a twist work it's way into that swelling curve, so that the top goes off center. I've always hated dropping pots -- the momentary failure of having one fall over -- so I usually play it safe and at least get something off the wheel (instead, I edit just before loading the bisque). So it's rare to lose one while throwing, but doing so reminded me of why it's important, and how it's a way to improve my skills.

For one thing, it creates the opportunity to cut the pot in half and see the cross section of the wall. This gives immediate visual feedback about the wall and base thickness and how I'm throwing that day. It usually identifies where the pot went wrong, too: a thin spot at a key part of a curve or an unseen air bubble in the middle of the wall. Another advantage to making the occasional failed pot OK is that it encourages taking risks and pushing each one a little further. Throwing often comes down to damage control, fixing the parts that haven't gone just right. Making a habit of pushing the limits builds experience with fixing things for when I'll need it later.

So I'm hoping to get the large ones thrown and make all the lids next week. I've made a lot of progress, and enjoyed focusing on one thing for a while, but it's time to finish off this project and move on to some different forms -- plates or maybe large bowls.

I just finished another book: Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. (There's an excellent, praising review on the NYT site; a more critical one at The Guardian.) As with his previous books, Blink and The Tipping Point, I enjoyed reading it and feel like I learned a lot along the way. I admire how Gladwell's writing is direct and clear, yet explores complex topics and intricate detail. After having something worth saying, I think that's the real craft of writing, and something I try -- often unsucessfully! -- to emulate.

Outliers is about the root causes of personal success, and it challenges the conventional wisdom about the roles of talent, individual effort and genius in achieving it. Gladwell he wants to prove "that we vastly underestimate the extent to which success happens because of things the individual has nothing to do with." So if you hold the prevailing view, this new theory prompts resistance and skepticism. His method, which I find very effective, is to use interesting storytelling and a variety of facts and scientific research in a way that walks the reader through to his conclusion. The results are completely logical and hard to disputem and he does this in such a compelling way that you can actually feel yourself changing your mind as you read. That's an uncommonly cool way to learn.

I was most impressed by chapter two, "The 10,000 Hour Rule." He begins by describing a study of musicians at the Berlin Academy of Music in the 1990's. It showed that the elite students at the school were always among the group who had logged the most hours of practice, and that the quality of the students went down in direct correlation to their total lifetime hours of practice with their instrument. That part makes intuitive sense, and lays the groundwork for the argument that doing the hard work of practice and repetition is a pre-requisite for success, and that this is vastly more significant than "innate talent."

But here's the really cool part: in a field which is so commonly thought to be full of prodigies, gifted from birth:

"The striking thing about [the] study is that [it] couldn't find any 'naturals,' musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any 'grinds,' people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn't have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder, or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder."

So nobody gets to the top without doing all the hard work, and everyone with some reasonable amount of initial ability succeeds if they do the work. And the difference between the very good and the best, like the difference between earning a B and an A, is all practice. Hours and hours of it.

Gladwell tells some great stories that support this view. For example, the Beatles, in the years before they became famous, played strip clubs in Hamburg, often grinding it out eight hours a night, seven days a week.

"All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, in fact, they had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times. Do you know how extraordinary that is? Most bands today don't perform twelve hundred times in their entire careers."

All those performances added up to about 10,000 hours of playing time, which he shows to be more than just an arbitrary threshold. Apparently, it holds true for a variety of fields that require experience, skill and craftsmanship to master. Which gets to the part that relates to making pots. If I had to pick one quote to give an aspiring potter, it might be this:

"Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good. The other interesting thing about that ten thousand hours, of course, is that ten thousand hours is an enormous amount of time."

March 1st, 2009

"I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill." - Wallace Stevens

It was all lidded jars in the studio this week. I'm working on a commission for a group of 4 cannisters, in a sequence of sizes from 6" to 9" tall, with each one about an inch taller than it is wide. Over the past few years, I've become more selective about which commissions I take on. The best ones are for pots similar to what I typically make, so that the goal is reasonably attainable, but that push some aspect of my skills in a new direction or past their current limits. Then there's a dual reward: when it's done I have both the pots and the progression to show for it.

This one is a challenging way to stretch my throwing skills. I realized, belatedly, that the last time I made a set of jars was in Ceramics III at Iowa, now fifteen long years ago (!). So I'm rediscovering the parameters: repeating the same shape consistently while accounting for the changing scale of each jar; figuring out exactly how much clay to use for each size; and deciding how large to make them to account for shrinkage. I've never done a shrinkage test on this clay body, so I estimated about 12% total, from wet to glaze fired. (I'm hoping it's a bit less than that, so that they err on the side of too big than too small.) So I'm throwing each jar 112% larger than it's intended final size, which involves more calculation and careful measuring than I'm used to. And of course, I need to make more than one of each size, to hedge against mishaps along the way. Ideally, I'll have three good candidates of each on the way in the bisque kiln, even though that means making 12 to get 4. Going to have lots of lidded jars for the spring sale this year!

I started out using 3 - 4 1/2# of clay for the two smaller sizes. The larger ones will be right on the edge of what I can make as a single piece, with minimal trimming at the leatherhard stage, so I'm working my way up to them and practicing as I go. The hardest part of throwing cylindrical forms -- at least for me -- is getting all the clay from the base of the wall either pulled up into the pot or trimmed away before removing it from the wheel. I've wrestled with the thickness and weight of thrown pots practically since day one, including how it relates to my skill or craftsmanship, and the function and aesthetics of the finished pots. It's a complex issue, and kind of a moving target. What seems "right" at one time doesn't later on. Sometimes it feels like I'm throwing heavy, other times like the pots are too preciously thin and delicate. I doubt there are any absolutes or "right answers" to this, but weight can be such a critical aspect of a pot that it seems worth the effort to continue refining. (It's worth mentioning that there are pots in our collection that are very stout and others that are remarkably thin, and that's often what I like most about both of them. More evidence for the idea that it's the strengths we admire, but the flaws we love.)

As I've said before, if a pot won't have a trimmed footring (or "turned", depending on where you learned your potting vocabulary), I strongly prefer to get it right at the throwing stage, without going back later to trim off excess clay. There are a few reasons for this. First, it retains the character and texture of the surface made by throwing, so that it is consistent through the entire form, rather than transitioning to the surface left by a metal trimming tool. Second, it avoids a step that can be tedious, particularly because trimming often feels more like erasing mistakes than adding or refining a pot's qualities (I think it often looks that way, too). Third, trimming the lower part of a flat-bottomed pot also means reworking that spot where the walls and the base meet, that bottom outside corner. This is another small detail, but I really like that spot to remain as it came off the wheel: there's a precise fluidity to the way that last small bevel cut with the knife merges into the texture where the cut-off wire separated the clay from the bat. I try to touch that part as lightly as possible, just a light wipe of my thumb at the leatherhard stage to take any sharpness off that edge. And lastly, trimming is prone to the fatal flaw of a perfectionism. It's easy to obsess about the weight and balance and "feel" of a pot, so that the trimming drags on as long as you let it. I'm all for doing whatever it takes to make the pots as good as possible but, at some point, repeatedly taking the pot off the wheel and feeling for that last fraction of an ounce in the wrong place leads to diminishing returns -- and effort that could be better spent on something else. It's like when beginners try to weld broken pieces of greenware back together with slip... most of the time you're better off starting a new pot instead.

Details, details... but I hear that if you want to find something beyond the mundane, that's a good place to start looking.

February 22nd, 2009

"There is a certain satisfaction that comes from full ware boards." - Earl Brunner

My next commission is for a set of lidded jars, so to warm up and get reacquainted with the form I made a couple series of them this week, 2-3# each. It takes a few to get back into the groove of making the flange on the rim, where the lid will sit, getting it just so, and then pulling the body of the jar up from below without disrupting it.

I imagine that the knowledge of how to do things like this lives somewhere between the subconscious and muscle memory. That information exists, and is available for recall, but I can't really access it by just thinking about out -- I have to be at the wheel, with the clay moving between my hands. It's the same with many other skills in making pots, especially those that get used regularly but with a lapse of time in between: pulling a handle, shaping the spout on a pitcher, grabbing a mug in just the right spot with glaze tongs. I guess at some point, given enough repetitions, many actions sink in completely, to where you can do them without any conscious thought at all. For me, these include wedging, centering a ball of clay, tapping a leatherhard pot on center for trimming, etc. Maybe a good measurement of one's mastery of a craft is the amount of stuff that you've successfully loaded into that permanent, unconscious reservoir of knowledge. I'm not sure if that's true, but it's an interesting phenomenon.

On Friday I made a run to Indianapolis to buy clay from Amaco, so now I'm restocked on white stoneware. Because it's about an hour's drive, I've always bought as much as the car could hold -- about 800#. But since I have a half-dozen boxes of various clays still sitting around and I'm planning to go back to working in the Turner porcelain this summer, I only got about half that much this time.

Premixed clay can last a fairly long time in the box, and it has the advantage of aging and improving while it waits. But I've made the mistake of letting it sit too long, so that it gets too stiff to throw -- leaving two 25# blocks that are a real pain to reconstitute back to workable consistency. So I decided I'd rather risk running out and needing to make another trip than buy more clay than I think I'll use in this cycle. Also, with hundreds of pounds of scraps already taking up space in the studio, waiting to be reclaimed, I really don't know where I'd put a full load anyways. Stacked on a pallet in the middle of the floor?

There were enough dry pots to fill the electric kiln again, so I loaded up a bisque and let it fire on Sunday, my day off. Automated controllers on electric kilns have to be one of the best advances in ceramic history! A few trips across the driveway to check on it, and then the next day I've got another batch of hard, porous pots ready to go on the shelf and wait for glaze.

Returning to last week's topic, here's a list of the books I've read in the last few years:

• The Backyard Lumberjack - Stephen & Frank Philbrick
• The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
• Bird By Bird - Anne Lamott
• The Replacements: All Over But The Shouting - Jim Walsh
• A Long Way Down - Nick Hornby
• The Perfect Thing - Steven Levy
• Amazonia - James Marcus
• Straight Man - Richard Russo
• Mouthpiece - Edward Hayes
• Play Money - Julian Dibbel

And these are currently in progress:

• Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell (excellent)
• The Complete Guide to High-fire Glazes - John Britt (fantastic)

I tend to stall out with some books, particularly non-fiction where the first half often tells 80% of the story and the rest is supporting detail. These are on the shelf, currently half-read:

• The Now Habit - Neil Fiore (ironic, eh?)
• The Gentle Tasaday - John Nance (interesting, but repetitive)

On deck is Anathem by Neal Stephenson, one of my favorite fiction authors. I'm saving it for a time when I can really dig into it, blow off everything else, and go novel-crazy for a while.

I think this list suggests what's going on outside the margins of this page, or at least where some of my inputs are coming from (for better or worse). I read a lot less now than I did in my 20's (if you're interested, here's the whole list going back to 1990), but I sit around less than I used to also -- there's definitely a correlation. I used to read mostly fiction, but tend towards non-fiction now, and my schedule these days favors short bits over longer books, even though that's like substituting snacks for a full meal. For example, I usually read a good chunk of the New Yorker each week, and I'm always excited to get the new issue of Studio Potter. Since it only comes twice a year, and the articles can often occupy my mind for hours or days, mulling over the implications, I tend to milk stretch issue out over a long period of time; just an article or two at once, usually during my morning break in the studio, sitting in the big rocking chair, eating an apple.

February 15th, 2009

"Life is too short to spend it doing what other people want you to do." - Cormac McCarthy

I've been thinking a lot about scale lately. This week, I finished those extra-large mugs, with handles and more underglaze decoration. The handles were tricky, as the mechanics need to change once the mug body gets this large (about 6" x 4"). Just scaling up the same shape and proportions doesn't quite account for the weight, and to have a good balance they need room for a 3- or 4-finger grip. So I made the handles longer and also a bit closer to the body, proportionally, than on a standard mug. More like a strap, I guess.

The catch is that handles are very fragile as greenware, and still have a lot of shrinking to do, so they really can't be tested for fit until after the bisque firing. And even then, you can't get a sense for the weight and balance it will have when full of liquid until after the glaze firing, so refining these details is yet another iterative process stretched out over time, like glaze testing and firing technique.

A few people have requested XL mugs, including my friend Bob, who's been waiting for years. I finally moved them up on my make list after we had Thanksgiving at his house last fall. He showed me a small pitcher of mine that his wife was using for gravy. "This size is perfect," he said. "I've even used it for coffee!" The way he pantomimed turning it just so, in order to take a sip past the spout, was the final straw. Nobody should have to drink coffee from a pitcher.

At the other end of the spectrum, I made a series of small mugs with one-finger handles, also on request from a long-time customer. It's interesting to think about what different people want in a mug, and why they want it -- from the size of hands and fingers to the types and quantities of different drinks. One person's gravy pitcher is another's coffee mug; one's coffee mug is another's expresso cup.

I also started some vases, which will get the new Woo Yellow glaze, and a few large planters, about half again as big as I usually make them. Five pounds of clay felt like a lot after all those small porcelain pots and 1# mugs, especially since the clay was from a reclaim batch that had gotten almost too stiff to throw -- kind of a workout! But it's gratifying to have some bigger pots around for a change; such a dramatic difference in volume. I've got another commission on deck that will require scaling up -- a set of lidded jars -- so I'm heading that direction the next few weeks.

The only good thing about being sick was that I finished two troublesome books which had been sitting on the shelf half-read for over a year, taunting me in their incompleteness. The first was Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a supremely bleak, minimalist, post-apocalyptic novel. It won the Pulitzer Prize, came highly recommended by people whose tastes I admire, and is an excellently-crafted, brilliant book. But it's not a good choice in the dead of winter when your barn's just collapsed in a tornado.

It wasn't much easier to read while feeling terrible, and with our snowed-in landscape resembling the one in the story much too closely. But I think there's a limit to how bad you can feel at any one time, so it was kind of like killing two birds with one rock. To my sensibilities, the glimmer of hope at the end didn't quite redeem the brutal starkness of the previous 250-odd pages, but then again I'm not one who needs any help seeing the nihilistic perspective on things. I guess it's a book that I'm glad to have read, but wouldn't want to read again.

(The part I couldn't figure out was how in the hell this ever got picked by Oprah's book club. I can imagine legions of the nice, middle-age women who comprise her audience getting to the first bit about cannibalism and keeling over right there in the breakfast nook. Then I watched her interview with McCarthy, and was impressed at how seriously into it she was. So much for stereotypes! I really liked him -- especially his seeming indifference to the trappings of success -- which made me want to like the book more, even though I think a novel should stand on its own merits.)

The second was Air Guitar, a collection of essays by Dave Hickey that's equally brilliant -- it even has a gold seal on the cover announcing his MacArthur "Genius" award -- but was just as hard to plow through. I really enjoyed many of the essays, which range from art theory to cultural criticism. And I liked his approach, which is to address low-brow, pop culture with the seriousness and intensity normally reserved for "fine art", usually taking a contrarian, unconventional perspective along the way. (I suspect this was a more unique and shocking approach when these were first published, but something that's gone mainstream since.)

But for all of that, large parts of the book were over my head. My undergraduate English degree is pretty good all the way up to semiotics, but from there on, forget it. I'm baffled by signs and signifiers, and my brain goes blank when it sees references to people like Foucault and Derrida. (For that matter, I've tried to read Ceramics by Philip Rawson -- twice -- and failed to get much of anything from it either time, despite it being quoted often by every thoughtful potter in the universe.) Hickey also writes in such a dense, sophisticated vocabulary that I frequently couldn't parse out what he meant. It often goes from simple and conversational to very abstract and complex in mid-sentence, and -- despite knowing I should -- I can rarely be bothered to look up words I don't already know.

My favorite essay in the book is "Dealing", which is about his realization that, after three years of work, his dissertation topic was almost certainly too weird to be approved for a degree; and that, if it were, "the optimal positive outcome would be a little job at a big university in a place where it snows -- and a six-year battle for tenure." Ha!

The description of his decision to quit school and open a gallery is fantastic:

Even then I prided myself in being a gambler, but this was a bad bet. You don't send good money after bad, ever. So I dropped that stack of white bond back into its stationary box, placed the box in a drawer, and closed the drawer. I walked into the kitchen, where my wife was sitting at the table reading The Crying of Lot 49. "I think I'm going to quit this shit," I announced. She looked up and stared at me for a minute, then she smiled and said, "Great!" That night I called up all my artist pals and told them I was going to become an art dealer. They all said, "Great!"

I like how he saw staying the course as the risky bet, but making a radical change as the reasonable alternative. I've quit a variety of things, too -- graduate school, jobs -- but never quite that impulsively, because to me quitting the status quo always felt like the real gamble. (Perhaps because very few people around me were saying, "Great!")

Then he describes the kind of art he wanted to promote with his gallery: one which lives in a fragile, uncommon niche between the norms, and which sounds very familiar:

"I had this idea of an art made for the living, you see -- of an art that may flourish in that crazy zone between the priests of institutional virtue and the bottom-feeders of commercial predation -- of an art that might embody the marriage of desire and esteem (which is, of course, what a marriage is). So I liked to distinguish my practice as an "art dealer" from that of "picture merchants" and "curators." Because picture merchants were dedicated to exhibiting what they thought the public wanted, and curators were dedicated to exhibiting what they thought the public needed. Everything I did as an art dealer, however, was based on the hopeful, Emersonian premise that on occasion, sometimes, we just might find, we want what we need -- that private desire and public virtue might find themselves embodied in a single, visible object."

Functional pots, anyone?

February 8th, 2009

"The self-discipline required to make a living as a potter
can slip sneakily into nuttiness." - Clary Illian

I finally started out of my sickness tailspin this week, and managed to get some work done. I made more mugs for the soda kiln, including some extra-large ones -- 1 1/2# each! That's a tricky cylinder to throw well, without leaving an awkward chunk of clay at the base. I'm really enjoying pulling handles lately; into kind of a good groove with them. I got out the black underglaze for the first time in a while, refreshing my brushwork skills and trying some new patterns that have been cropping up in my sketchbook. Dominos in diamond shapes instead of just rectangles.

Then I got around to one of those studio maintenance tasks that's been pending for a long time: replacing the canvas top on my main worktable. The old one had been in place since about '99, and was covered in a decade's scribbled notes, ink spills, layers of clay dust, and various glues, goos and grime. One whole edge was torn and frayed by a bad encounter with our dog, and I've been working around all of it for far too long. It only took about an hour to tear it off, then stretch and staple on a new piece, which makes me wonder why I waited so long to get around to it.

It's now pristine and lovely, particularly since replacing the canvas required moving the piles of junk that had accumulated along the back edge: books, scraps of paper, jars of pens, dozens of test tiles, tools I never use, etc. I deliberately put back only those things that I use regularly, and which couldn't go anywhere else in the studio, and the result is a nicely ordered workspace that is both inviting and a restful to the eye. It reminds me that I need to keep doing these cleaning and sorting tasks throughout the studio; that all the clutter not only gets in the way physically but also creates a lot of unnecessary mental friction.

February 1st, 2009

"Black rain, black rain, don't fall on me
Can't you see I'm doin' my best?
Black rain, black rain, don't fall on me
When I lay to take my rest" - A.A. Bondy

Jumpin' Zeus on a unicorn, do I ever hate being sick. Hate it. [* If the editorial standards here at St. Earth would permit it, I'd add about 37 a's in "hate", to suggest the proper emphasis.] I got a wicked cold early in the week, then had the flu for a day, then back to the cold, which morphed into a sinus infection and is still dragging along... As if feeling terrible isn't bad enough, watching the days go by with nothing to show for them makes me crazy -- it's so frustrating to lose momentum in the studio and feel myself falling behind schedule, accomplishing nothing.

We also had about a foot of snow and sub-zero temperatures, which made for lots of shoveling and trudging around on ice. That's not my idea of fun on a good day, and with a sore throat and runny nose it's miserable. But for all that, I shouldn't complain; I stayed remarkably healthy last fall despite pushing myself to the limit, so this was probably overdue.

This week was also the one-year anniversary of our barn's demise. It still gives me a jolt sometimes, to walk out of the house and look up at the bones of its frame, standing above the weeds. I have hopes of saving one part of it, the lean-to on the east side, but it would be a big project and is pretty far down on my list of priorities. Such regret that it didn't turn out differently.

Before winter arrived, I sawed up some of the boards from one of the many piles of debris littering the yard, and have been burning them in the wood stove -- salvaging a last bit of use from the materials. This wood was bone-dry decades before I was born, and burns with a ferocious intensity.

Towards the end of the week I managed to get back to the studio and make a little progress, but it was hard to focus and I didn't have much energy. On days like those, I'm not sure if the results are good enough to justify the effort, but at some point I just can't lay around the house anymore.

So I used up the very last of the Turner porcelain, which seems to have gone a long way for only starting with 150# of clay -- lots of small, thin pots. I now have a good inventory of porcelain pots on hand that I plan to use for testing. I'll put a few in each firing through the spring, hoping to find a couple interesting, reliable glazes before I buy another batch of clay and return to working with it this summer. I have high hopes for this stuff.

Then on Sunday I switched back to my standard white stoneware, a reclaim batch that I processed last fall, and made a few mugs. They're a good way to get a feel for the clay body again -- and there's no such thing as having too many mugs around. If the switch to porcelain was surprising, the switch back was equally so, even though I knew to expect it. Suddenly this clay that I've used for years seems very strange, really dark grey, and every little speck of grit feels like a boulder. It's weird, like putting on an old pair of shoes that you haven't worn in years, and fitting your feet into all the creases and dents that make them yours.

January 25th, 2009

"Remember: Clay goes on the wheel, baby goes on the changing table. Not vice versa, though both are equally pliable." - parenting advice from my friend Byron

This was a great week, the first one on my new schedule without a lot of wacky exceptions. I spent 2 days on campus at the job, 4 days in the studio, and 1 genuine, certified day off on Sunday. It's a nice balance when it works out like that; the bills get paid, I get time to dig in and get some pots made, and then a chance to catch up on the little stuff, hang out with the family and recharge before starting again the next week.

I'm still going strong with the porcelain: more mugs, bottle forms, and some oval dishes. I got handles on the mugs while they were a little softer this time, and they seemed to attach better -- the first batch had a few small surface cracks at the edges at the lower attachment, which I don't score. Porcelain tends to warp and crack at joints as it shrinks, more so than other clay bodies -- or at least, that's the conventional wisdom. So to finish of this series of tests, I'm trying the things in my standard technical repertoire that push those limits the most.

For the bottles, I used my two-part or "extended" throwing technique. It's similar to the traditional "capping" method, used by the southern Turners & Burners to make those wonderful jugs, but rather than throw both parts and assemble immediately, I make the base section and let it stiffen overnight on a bat, then throw the top ring, attach to the rim of the base, and then throw the top. It's an elaborate method, and requires some visualization to arrive at the form I have in mind, but it allows me to make taller pots, with more exaggerated profiles -- like a long, narrow neck -- without leaving an overly thick base, or needing to trim away clay at the end. (I'd like to do a photo tutorial of the process sometime, but need to have someone else around to hold the camera.) I've been wanting to make this form in porcelain for a long time; thinking they should be very minimalist, quiet -- just the form and a pure white glaze. I'm calling them Milk Bottles; the name came out of my subconscious like I'd just seen it flash by on a billboard. I guess because the form resembles an antique glass milk container, and I've been thinking about milk, and bottles, a lot lately.

The oval dishes are another form I make often, and another test of how much the clay can tolerate, because they're thrown round and stretched into oval shape, with a slab base attached. That's a major join, and merging two parts that were made in completely different ways, with creates competing stresses and "memory" in the clay as it shrinks. Like the bottles, I'm drying them extra-slow under plastic, just to be safe. So far, so good.

January 18th, 2009

"...and hearts pumping blood in 3/4 time." - AA Bondy

We've had a lot of company lately: my parents last week and my brother's family this week. My niece, age 4, gave us an idea of what's ahead as parents a few years from now and my nephew, age 22, was really curious to see how my pots were made. He studied archaeology in college, and as I was throwing more bowls in the studio one morning we had an interesting conversation about how fired clay outlasts virtually every other human artifact (including, as he told me, bones and teeth -- that's fascinating!). Apparently, when you go down deep enough into the historical layers, all that's left is pots and stones. Which reminds me yet again that every single thing that goes through my kiln will outlast me, even if it's just as shards, by thousands of years. That's a humbling thought, and one which facilitates making the hard editing choices.

For instance, this week I was planning to glaze the series of stoneware teabowls I made last fall, thinking I'd squeeze in a rare January soda firing before the deadline for the AKAR Yunomi show. They came out of the bisque kiln fine, and have been sitting on the shelf for a month or two, so I was really surprised to discover that most of them now had large chunks of clay blown out or cracking away, caused by a dreaded contaminant called lime popping (AKA: lime spitting; lime blows; chalk springing; or the sickening sensation that you have 1000# of wet clay mixed up that contains a fatal ceramic virus.)

Whatever you call it, it's really discouraging -- but it goes with the territory. Any time I change something in the process, particularly with clay and glaze materials, there's a good chance of the unexpected happening, and usually not for the better. On the plus side, the teabowls made a really satisfying sound as they hurled towards the side of the old dumptruck behind the studio -- like the whoop of a tiny helicopter blade -- and an even better one as they smashed against it. Done and done.

Switching to Plan B, I selected five teabowls from the Reserve and packed them up for the show, coming to the web in late March. All things considered, I still feel pretty good about them. As a group, they're different than last year's pots, in ways that show how my work in the salt/soda kiln is evolving. More black underglaze brushwork this time, and more glaze too, pale celadon over grooved faceting.

As I usually do upon discovering some new way for things to go wrong in the studio, I did a bit of research into lime popping, particularly what causes it and how to avoid it in the future. My source of first resort for this sort of thing is a Google search aimed at the Clayart archive. The results for "lime popping" made me pretty sure that this is what's going on with my clay, confirmed what I thought I knew on the subject, and filled in a lot of new detail. Here are some highlights:

Ron Roy (a materials guru of the first order) said:

My clay is about 90% Hawthorne Bond, and they sat on the shelf after bisking for a few months...

Michael Banks said:

Generally speaking, "explosively" and "bomb" are not words you want associated with your pots...

Snail Scott said:

That's a great explanation. It also might explain something else I noticed, which is that while most of the pots did some popping, the ones that I dipped in thin slip at the leatherhard stage popped the most. This makes me think that the extra water in the slip soaked in and was absorbed by the lime, but if that's true, I wonder why they didn't blow during the bisque, instead of afterwards. Hmm... some questions answered, new mysteries revealed.

January 11th, 2009

"I will light the match this morning, so I won't be alone
Watch as she lies silent, for soon night will be gone" - Pearl Jam

This week I started back at the web job and Cindy returned to teaching, so between that and trading off baby care I didn't get a lot of time in the studio. But I managed a couple throwing sessions, making a few mugs and bowls, and continuing with the Turner porcelain. I'm finishing off the last box of that clay, then will switch to my white stoneware next. The mugs were informed by one I just added to our collection. It's by Wisconsin potter Karl Borgeson, and recently purchased from the online gallery at Red Lodge Clay Center. It's a beauty, with a nice wood/salt-fired satiny celadon, lightly crazed and flecked with crystals. The bowls are an ongoing exploration of making these really stout, rolled rims -- I'm seeing how far I can exaggerate them and also testing what this clay can do with regards to a transition from a thin to very thick wall section. So far I like the results, and they haven't cracked apart during drying (yet)! I had the minor realization that it makes a big difference if that coil of clay at the rim sits in line with the wall below, versus being inside or outside of it. (That seems obvious in retrospect, but I hadn't quite made the connection previsously.) On these, it comes inwards, which gives a closed feeling to the form and will, I think, make for a nice place to grab onto the pot.

I've been shepherding the boards of greenware around the studio to avoid the sub-zero temperatures we've had lately, trying to keep them in the furnace's zone while at the same time preventing them from drying out too quickly. I haven't lost any pots to frost this winter, with the new digital thermostat holding the studio at a constant 45°F when I'm not around to stoke the wood stove, but with the frightful cost of propane these days I'm in need of a better solution. I'm imagining a wheeled cart with some sort of cover, which could be rolled into the warm part of the studio overnight and pushed out of the way during workdays. Hmm... sounds like another great project that I don't have time to start.

With the turn of a new year, I'm marking my pots with one more tick -- now a balanced grid of three tiny squares across and three down. I started adding the year to my maker's stamp sometime in 2006, I suppose prompted by the realization that I often look at an older pot and have little to no idea when I made it. Next year I think I'll switch the mark to an X, for ought-ten, and the year after that I guess I'll start over with a single mark for '11. (Identifying a pot to within the decade seems good enough, while perhaps retaining a bit of mystery.) In any case, I've discovered that I really like making those little repetitive pokes with a wooden stamp -- it's nine marks with the same stamp, not one stamp with nine prongs -- and so that's beginning to work it's way into other decorative aspects of the pots, despite being obsessive, subtle and labor-intensive. Typical.

January 4th, 2009

"Happy new year, baby..." - Counting Crows

We were home for the holidays this year for the first time ever, which meant I was able to sneak in a few studio days around the festivities. It's been cold, icy and wet, but good as ever to be back at the wheel. I'm still working with the Turner porcelain, trying out most of the things I regularly do with my regular clay and building up a small inventory of pieces to test glazes and firing. My early impressions are that it is a very nice clay, seductive in its purity, precise in how it holds detail, from an edge or line of slip down to the smallest fingerprint. Also a bit fussy, but not as difficult to work with as I'd been expecting. (Perhaps because I'm coming to it from a white stoneware, which is mid-way between porcelain and a more traditional, sturdy stoneware claybody.) It's exciting to look at my prior tests of it and imagine those pristine, striking surfaces on these pots.

One of my end-of-year purchases was a new Shimpo banding wheel, which I've been coveting for quite a while. It's a beautiful tool; built like a Soviet tank, but if they'd outsourced the precision engineering bits to Toyota. (My old one, purchased from a vendor at NCECA and made in China, is built like a Soviet tank, but if they'd outsourced the engineering bits to... well... China.) I use the banding wheel at some point in the making of almost every pot, even if just to hold it for finishing touches and adding my maker's stamp. It's very useful when attaching lugs and handles, or for doing any sort of decoration. I love how solid this new one is, heavy and thick, but also how fluid and smooth the action is as it spins on it's bearings. Nice upgrade.

Continuing with an item from last week's 2008 recap, I've been thinking more about what this blog is for and why I'm doing it. The desire to keep it up is strong, but I'm also feeling the need to justify the effort it takes, given recent changes in my life (baby) and schedule (dayjob). I've come to realize that my primary motivation is all the ways it benefits me directly, and that how it might benefit others is actually just a subset of that. Selfish but true!

What do I get from it? As I suggested back in June, doing the writing and photos prompts me to reflect on things in a focused way that's qualitatively different from fleeting thoughts or writing in my private sketchbook. It improves my pots by forcing me to think about what I'm making (and how and why) on a regular basis, and to compose those thoughts into a public format. It serves as an outboard memory -- a way for me to scan backwards to remember what I've been up to and orient myself in time. It's making me a better writer, I think, albeit slowly. And lastly, I get a lot of satisfaction from knowing that other people benefit from it, too.

What others get from it is hard to say exactly, but I can guess based on the feedback I get (site traffic statistics, comments from friends, and email from readers, most of whom I've never met). Probably the most common is technical or process information -- for example, I get a lot of questions about my glazes and soda kiln. Second would be a general understanding of how these objects are made and what my intentions are, which is very cool, and was one of my initial goals -- equal parts teaching, proselytizing and marketing. And third, which I really hadn't anticipated, is inspiration: other potters finding things here that prompt a new idea, or give some encouragement amidst the vast range of possible ceramic disappointments, or help nudge them back to the studio with a bit more fuel in the tank. That last one, however hard to quantify, is probably the most rewarding of all.

By way of illustration, here's the best email I've received yet:

Hello,
I stumbled onto your blog (which is lovely) and it shook me out of my I-got-a-ceramic-bfa-2-years-ago-haven’t-made-a-pot-since-and-have-a-great-desk-job funk. Thanks for the inspiration! I was just floored, especially by the images and how they brought me back to what working in a studio day to day was like.

Best wishes,
A. Reader

That's just excellent, and more than I could have hoped for; like a small start on repaying the tremendous gifts of knowledge and encouragement that I've received from others at every step along the way.