At the moment:

I think a work of art is any discrete, non-inevitable phenomena emerging through the active and idiomatic influence of a small number of humans, which has subsequently accreted a critical mass of relevance to other humans.

What a mouthful! I'll unpack this later. I'm doing a bit of exploratory writing as research for an upcoming series of sculptures, and apparently I needed to define what I felt could encompass what I think of as "art". Now I'll go work on my concept of "coffee" and "lunch."

will ceramic decals let me do this?

One of my goals for 2010 is to discover whether ceramic decals will allow me to reproduce or transfer my hand-drawn illustrations on to ceramic forms. Of course something is possible, but what? and will I like it? I am not happy with the idea of separating the act of decoration from myself by getting decals made somewhere else. I have screenprinting experience, so perhaps I can make them myself.

Here are some examples of the kind of drawings I make:

Sprint versus Marathon: Preparing for my first solo exhibition Jan 2011

How do I make sculptures that exhibit more than "mere" technique? This question is on my mind as I begin to seriously plan for an important solo exhibition deadline in January 2011. It will be my first solo exhibition, and I want the work to be great. In my zeal to improve, I realize I jump to the assumption that the current work isn't interesting enough, the ideas are too old, and I want to develop my ideas a notch or two. But in order to impress myself, I have to work to get out of a trend I see in my work that I wish to get rid of.

I want the sculptures to be more than tricks, more than technique. I am nervous at the exposure the exhibition will bring, since I can't begin to imagine the range of experience represented by the audience. The cross-section of society at an art exhibition opening is really large. Anyone could see the work, from a museum curator to a fry cook. Shudder! The idea of such great exposure is awesome, and winks at the embryonic voyeur in me.

I'm not worried who will like pieces. (Well, not much!) I worry that the work cannot be taken seriously. I want the work to withstand criticism without expecting it to be immune to it. I would love for the harshest comment to be, "I don't personally care for the work/idea/concept, but I can't find any fault with it. I think he treats the viewer and the materials with respect."

Artists love to anthroporphize their favorite material, and then extoll the virtues of treating it with respect. How might one disrepect clay? Perhaps I should re-examine my metaphors!

To date, I have done a lot of work which if feel has the qualities I associate with runner's sprints: flashy, possibly interesting to others, requires intensity and training, executed in-the-moment. The work itself takes a variety of forms, and can be a "finished" drawing or a sculpture, a set of exploratory drawings, or essay about The Next Great Idea. Usually the labelling of "sprint" happens after the flush of activity is over. I like it or I don't like it, but I won't return to it to make changes or corrections. If there's something I really like, I'll take those elements and make something else when the mood strikes again.

I have been making art and keeping records for long enough that I have a great deal of older work to look back upon --much of it sprintwork. The greater time and emotional distance from the work allows me a more objective reaction. A new sensation arises. Sometimes I change my mind about it! A few pieces manage to appeal to me even after a long period of time. I won't say they're "good" but simply that they seem to become more relelvant to me as time passes, rather than less.

Perhaps the works which I still love dearly are starting points for new work. Can the premises they lay out be expanded into more detailed explanations? Can I leave behind the sprint and train for a marathon instead?

SCOPE OF THE EXHIBITION.
I'm thinking of building 12-20 works for the exhibition. I would like two of them to be as large as I would like, which seems to top out at 3 feet; real attention hogs. At the other end of the size range, I'd like maybe 6-10 to be rather small, which for me would be in the 12" range. The rest would be mid-range size.

We'll see. More later.

description of laminate process

(Note: A fabulously detailed and lucid explanation of the general process and specific appliations is presented by Vince Pitelka in his text "Clay: A Studio Handbook" and is well worth reading. I'd read anything he wrote.)

I'd like to fill in details missing from the earlier post's commentary. The murrini/laminate process is based upon a few premises, so forgive me if I repeat something you already know.

1. Clay is usually soft enough that you can force it through tiny openings, or extrude it, as the jargon goes. The contraption used is usually some kind of barrel with a tight-fitting plunger that passes all the way through from one direction. These can be large wall-mounted units where the barrel is several inches in diameter, to small crafty versions about the diamter of a nickle. In between are home-brew versions made from sections of PVC pipe and an altered caulking gun ratchet thing.

In all extruders, clay is loaded into the barrel and squeezed out the opposite end by pushing the plunger. Obviously, if you want something other than the shape of the barrel, you have to create something for the clay to pass through. The end is capped by anything strong enough to withstand the pressure of the clay, and the forces can become quite tremendous, especially if the clay is harder than necessary. These caps are often called extruder dies. in commercially made sets, solid simple shapes are common, such as circles, ovals, squares, triangles, etc, but more elaborate profiles, including hollow shapes, are possible.

For my process, every different element of the design will have its own die made for it. Were I smart, I'd try to simplify the overall design to include not 7 different sizes of circle, but perhaps 3. At the moment of extrusion, I have a long strand of clay, which has the cross-section of the die opening, which is one of the separate components of my design. Many clay artists have used this process for their work, but I might be stretching the limits of what a person is likely to do.

2. Clay can be colored by mixing ceramic stains into it. The color range of these mixtures is usually broad enough to satisfy most artists' needs.

For my project, not only will the sections be the correct shape for their position in the overall pattern, but also the correct color, because I will have mixed the color of clay I need before extruding it.

Here's how I think the process will work.

a. Design the pattern using as few shapes as possible.
b. create dies for them all.
c. decide what colors are available (tested separately) and assign colors to each of the sections.
d. extrude as many of the different elements as needed to create the overall pattern.
e. fit the extrusions together like a 3D jigsaw puzzle and make sure they stick. A simple overall pattern log might consist of piles and piles of circular extrusions in a variety of colors. Note that stacks of fairly large circular extrusion will have blank interstitial spaces which need to be dealt with. It is possible that the laminate will hold together despite the holes between the perfect circles. It is possible to squash the whole log so that the spaces close up as the circles are forced into each other, becoming oval or some other distorted shape. Another way to deal with the holes left by perfect circles is to use some liquid clay slush, possibly also colored, possibly a contrasting color, to bathe all the separate extrusions and act like spackle.

(at this point, the log is finished)

f. remove thin slices from the short end (or whatever face lies at 90 degrees to the direction the extrusions were created in.
g. use a slice, which is nothing more than an elaborately created thin floppy bit of clay, and apply it to whatever ceramic object is waiting for it.
h. take a bow.

There are technical timing issues, which can wait to be discussed. The clay object was formed in whatever way was convenient, in the bird whistles' case, they were cast. I'm guessing a Day in the Studio would look something like the following.

a. design pattern log.
a. Cast a goodly number of birds and prepare them as much as needed so that decoration can take place.
b. Get a blank bird. Slice off a thin slab from the pattern log and wrap it around the blank bird. Smooth everything down.
c. Repeat until you run out of something.

If the entire bird is not covered in the slab (which would be difficult anyway, given that while the slab is fairly elastic, the pattern might distort unpleasantly), then there's going to be naked bird parts. There will probably be a basecoat of bird background color applied before the laminate. I'm going to have to live with is the visible boundary between the slab and original surface. It might not be a big deal.


This ought to clear things up. :)

Next up: How are the dies made? In normal practice, discs of metal are sawn to fit your extruder, and the pattern element design is transferred to the metal and pierced and filed. In normal practice, a pattern might have 6-12 different elements. Mine might have dozens; in fact, I want them to have many dozens of shapes. (Do we really need more checkerboard murrini??) But, sensibly, I don't want to do all that sawing. But I have an idea that might make things much faster.

Stay tuned!

What's my work like, you ask?

This blog is new, but there's a great collection of photos of my ceramic work and other artwork over on flickr. Below are a few examples of my ceramic animal whistles, and an elaborate drawing.

46 Days until ACC Baltimore: veneer tests await

You may have heard that my work has been accepted into the American Crafts Council 34th Annual Trade Show in Baltimore. Their site: http://craftcouncil.org/ I'm excited to the point of hyperventilation. I don't know if I can manage the logistics in order to go and make a good impression. In order to help me make up my mind, I need to convince myself that I can make my work a little faster without losing the control I want.

I'm fond of deadlines, just like the old saying says. The show, bigger and more elaborate than anything I've tried so far, is literally around the corner. However, my eyes are not yet focused on February 23rd-28th. The next few days --until the 11th of Jan-- I have to prove to myself that the new decorating method works, because if it doesn't, I should wait until next year.

A bit of history. I draw lots of patterns on paper with my favorite black thin pen. These patterns form the basis for decorations on ceramic things, from pottery, to sculpture, to little whistles shaped like animals. But at the moment, my pen and paper drawings are far more detailed than I can achieve on ceramics. I'd like to close that gap in time to go to Baltimore.

When making patterns on ceramics, I like to hand-draw the pattern on the blank piece and then color it in with ceramic underglazes and glazes, much like you might see someone using a coloring book. I'm pretty fast at drawing a pattern on the piece, but it takes a while to fill in the colors since the patterns are usually pretty complex. I learned this the hard way after struggling to get out a bunch of orders. I decided to improve the process, and have decided to borrow a technique from polymer clay jewelers and sculptors.

Veneer, Murrini, Laminate: Whatever you want to call it, it is faster than handpainting. (A term often used is millefiore, which specifically refers to flower patterns, since it means thousand flowers in Italian.) This decorative process involves building the pattern not just in two dimensions -as you would draw it on paper-- but in 3D format. Think of a log or loaf or some other shape. The pattern runs in one direction through the block or the log. Thin slices of material are taken from the face that runs 90 degrees to the pattern, sometimes a few degrees less. You might remember seeing the way cheese or meat is sliced at the deli counter. Every thin slice of the block or log yields the pattern.

Many ceramics artists already use this technique in their work. While all of the work I see using similar techniques is lovely, specific challenges will have to be overcome before the technique outperforms my handpainting:

(1) Are my patterns too complicated for veneers in my chosen size range? Polymer clay artists achieve breathtakingly detailed patterns with intense colors and very clean transitions between colors. However, waterbased clay used for slip casting and handbuilding and wheelforming is generally coarser than the polymer clays. Will it work? That's what I need to find out. Problems include loss of small details due to the coarseness of the material, unacceptable distortion of pattern when laminated onto blank form, boring color intensities.

Encouraginly, even if I am a bit disappointed by the resolution I can achieve building the patterned loaves, --with only a couple of weeks of experience building them--it will still be much smaller than I can render by hand directly on the piece with the marking tools available for ceramics It will certainly be faster. I'm going to be laminating the patterns onto animal shaped whistles in the 2-3 inch range, ceramic boxes between 3-5 inches on a side, and onto vases that are a good bit larger. I'm only worried about the animal whistles.

(2) Can I apply the veneers quickly? This seems to be true, and will cut down my decoration time from 15-30 minutes to as few as 5. Dare I hope for even less time? This is very encouraging, and I'll be watching the clock closely. The convenient thing here is that I can devise dozens of different patterns, and they all apply equally quickly, whereas before, when patterning the work by hand, a few minutes more drawing meant 15-30 minutes more painting.

Note that the time to build the veneer or laminate blocks will take some time, and will vary widely. So the next consideration is

(3) How many slices can be gotten from one log? Based on quick tests, I can get a slice of 1-2 mm, and probably closer to 1mm with consistent practice. If my log is 120 mm long, I can expect to lose 10-15 mm for natural distortion at the ends. I would get around 100 slices. If one slice covers a bird whistle, I've made enough patterns for 100 bird whistles. The log itself might take 50 minutes to build. Distributing the log-building time into the number of slices available, that's 30 seconds per slice of prep time. I can't even sharpen the pencil that fast. But will they outperform handpainting? Oh, my will it! The question is only a matter of measuring how much. As a time gauge, if I could hand paint, say, 5 birds an hour, such that 100 bird whistles would take a mind-numbing 20 hours if I perform like a machine. On the other hand, if a laminate takes 5 minutes to apply, then the time to decorate 100 whistles plunges to less than 9 hours.

Moreover, the effort to build the log and apply the slices is methodical and relatively easy, whereas handpainting requires constant attention.

I sure hope this works, eh?

More to come as experiments continue.

Welcome 2010

There is a lot to do in 2010.

I have ideas for new ceramic work, lofty goals for retail and wholesale clients, and a handful of seriously important exhibition deadlines.

The methodical part of me wants lists, documentation, and proof that I've done things, which is the part of my mind which thinks a weblog would be cool. The marketing part of me agrees that it might be a good way to attract people and keep them interested in the process. Let's see if it works, shall we?

Good luck, everyone, in 2010!