Anderson Ranch: Day Three

So, I just got home from Paul Soldner's house. That's right, THE Paul Soldner, father of American Raku, first student of Peter Voulkos, and creator of numerous hilarious pottery equipment print ads. Soldner founded Anderson Ranch in 1968 and has a home in nearby Aspen. He and his daughter Stephanie host open houses in the summer about every other week, and all of the students at Anderson Ranch are invited. I got to sit at the dining room table with Soldner for a few moments, and when I left I felt like I'd just met Madonna. It's electrifying just to be in the physical presence of a man so important to American ceramics. By the way, this image is of a poster that was hanging in his studio. I'm sorry it's a bit blurry. The tagline reads, "Entertainment for Potters." Don't you just love it?

Today was a busy day in the studio. With the open house tonight, we all buckled down and worked, worked, worked. I didn't even have any time to take any photos of the new work created today. Our only bisque kilns get loaded early tomorrow morning, so everything had to get transferred to the drying room, which is a wood shed of sorts loaded with heat lamps and fans. It's kept at about 95 degrees and a night in that room will sure dry out any pot! It's like a little pottery sauna.

I feel like I've made some tremendous progress in these three short days. Aside from the fact that I miss my husband, pets, and my own bed, I really don't want to go home! This is such a truly fabulous opportunity to drop out of daily life for a short period of time and really surround yourself with great teachers and fellow artists. I may just come here every summer!

Anderson Ranch: Day Two

Anderson Ranch is truly a fabulous place. After lunch today, I was sitting on a porch swing outside the studio, just feeling incredibly lucky and fortunate to be here. A beautiful campus, incredible teachers, happily focused students, good food, gorgeous weather. It's awesome.

Yesterday, we made some pots that incorporated two circles, either in shape (think foot or rim) or volume. After that, we were to choose one pot and draw the contour or profile line of that pot. This is much harder than it sounds! What you don't realize at first is that you're drawing what you WANT the pot to look like, not what it actually looks like. It took me seven sheets of large newsprint, full of contours, to actually draw what was there. After that, we were to pick a couple of contours that looked good to us and throw some pots with those contours. That's what we have on the right here. The original form is the bottle on the left, and the bottles on the right were thrown to the chosen contour lines.

Today, we were to add a third circle to our pots, again as shape or volume. Here are the drawings I did before I sat down at the wheel. I'm realizing that it's much easier to work out these visual design issues on paper than on the wheel. I love this sheet of drawings. It may find a place on the wall in my studio at home.

The next goal was to throw some pots from these drawings. Here are mine. I never make bottles, so I'm pretty happy with how these turned out. I think they make a groovy little collection. I'm fortunate that we're working with a sandy stoneware body, because I had to push this clay around a lot to get these forms!

I'm beginning to see how this "design" process can be a fabulous tool in a potter's visual toolbox. It's important to learn from our teachers what questions to ask ourselves, and to learn exercises to help us move forward in our work. Most of us make good progress in classes or workshops, when someone else is asking the questions; the thing to take away from them is HOW to make progress when your work gets stagnant. I think these design exercises, combined with the "What grabs you?" exercise from earlier this summer, could support an artist for a lifetime.

Anderson Ranch: Day One

Man, I am behind on the blogging. I've been working hard on a dinnerware order for my dear friend Alanna, and have been holed up in the studio working away. I was trying hard to finish it before I left for my workshop with Chris Gustin at Anderson Ranch.

So here it is, Day One at Anderson Ranch! My workshop is called Architecture of the Pot, and it's focused on the underlying design of pots (or architecture). Chris spoke today about how you can have great ideas and context for your pots, but without using good design, those ideas won't be expressed as well as they could be. Chris called design "the dirty little secret of art." It gets de-emphasized in school, regulated to freshman level design courses full of exercises that seem to make no sense. But design is the language by which objects speak to us. We approach all objects in relation to all objects we've experienced before them. Good design (which incidentally, is found everywhere throughout nature) makes one's pots speak on their own.

We spent a lot of time today looking at slides of historical and contemporary pots, pointing out their design strategies, such as division (into halves, thirds, fourths, and so on), framing, movement, scale, etc. After that, we headed into the studio to start throwing and then analyzing our pots. I'll explain a little more in the next few posts, I'm not far enough into this workshop to quite know where I'm going yet!

The Anderson Ranch campus is just beautiful. It's truly a lively, vibrant artists' community, full of excited, energetic students. I'm looking forward to a great week!

Triumph over teapots

I'm back! I haven't been on the computer much in the last two weeks. Every summer, Arapahoe Community College offers a two-week "bootcamp" ceramics class in between the spring and summer semesters. This year's class was on teapots, and since I had never made a teapot in 10 years of pot-making (I know, shameful), I decided to sign up. So, I've been holed up in the studio, feverishly working on teapots.

The class was great, but it was fast-paced. Adding to the challenge was the fact that I sliced halfway through my left thumb two days before the class started. I was cooking dinner, chopping stuff with my chef's knife, and next thing I knew, I had a really deep cut through my thumb. I figured they'd stitch it up at the ER, but they actually glued it back together with a skin adhesive called Dermabond. It worked great, but you can't get the glue wet! So I got to throw my teapots with a latex glove on my left hand, taped around the wrist to keep the water out. It was difficult to throw with the glove because I couldn't get a sense of how thick the walls were, and everything wound up too thick. I also had trouble pulling handles and attaching spouts, because I couldn't hold anything with my left thumb. There were a few really frustrating moments in there!

Despite the fast pace and the clumsy left hand, I got through the class with ten full teapots made. Here's a few of my last ones, which I feel were the best. The real test will be how well they pour once they're done!

What grabs you? (part III)

Another thing that grabs me visually is traditional Japanese design and art. I think this is rooted in the childhood memories I have of dressing up in a kimono that my grandfather purchased while stationed in Japan after World War II. I'm sure that by traditional standards, it probably wasn't a great kimono, but I thought it was so beautiful. In the fourth grade, my class did a unit on Japan and I still remember almost everything I learned. I was fascinated by the language, the culture, and especially the visual flavor of the buildings, textiles, and papers we were looking at. I still make paper cranes out of gum wrappers.

As an adult, I've become fascinated with the visual appearance of geisha and their elaborate kimono. I recently read a wonderful book called A Geisha's Journey about a young modern-day Japanese teenager who elects to become an apprentice geisha (maiko) in Kyoto. It's an absolutely stunning book, full of beautiful full-color images of the elegant maiko Komomo in all her colorful finery.

The complexity and color of kimono is starting to work its way into my ceramic work, which is a profoundly new direction for me. My work has always been elegant and much of it has been colorful, but in a stripped-down and minimal fashion. As my skills have increased, I have grown more interested in complexity and detail, and those things are starting to show up in my work. It will be a while before any of these complex pots make it onto the public stage of the Internet, but they're on the studio shelves as we speak, slowly coming into existence.

What grabs you? (part II)

Continuing the discussion of what "grabs" me in this world, I have to bring up plants and flowers. Now, this is something that grabs a lot of artists, as evidenced by the amount of botanically-inspired artwork out there.

I think what I notice the most about plants is their colors. I can't get enough of the brilliant, saturated colors of flowers in bloom, and the soothing green of trees and open fields. I've never been as interested in the specific shapes and forms of plants, although the shape and proportion of a lovely tree or orchid blossom will catch my eye from time to time.

No, what I love the most about plants is their very vitality, the fact that they are growing, moving, changing, and filling the world with their color and life. I think this is why I've never been a winter person. The monochromatic grays and browns of the winter landscape leave me feeling weary. The brilliant, shining colors of summer are energizing and uplifting, and I think that's why I've always been attracted to them in my work.

What grabs you?

I have been entertaining the idea of applying to graduate school next year. I'm going to spend the summer working with my teacher Kathy at ACC in order to try to advance my work as much as possible over the next six months. I don't know if my work will be ready at that point for the competitive world of MFA spots, but I'm going to give it a shot.

One of my first summer assignments from Kathy was to answer the question, "What grabs you?" Specifically, what catches your eye or heart in this world? What interests you that you want to share with the world through your artwork? This is precisely the question I've been trying to answer for years, but I've been coming up a little empty-handed. I've never felt a clear understanding of my sources of inspiration. So I just sat down with my sketchbook and started a list. I figured I'd share of few of the things that grab me over a few blog posts.

Numero Uno on my list is old houses. I LOVE old houses, and other buildings for that matter, with a passion and fervor other people reserve for soccer teams. I know I've gone on about this before, but old houses are probably my greatest visual love in this world. They may even top pots (gasp!).

Old buildings of any sort are great, but there's something about houses in particular that grabs me. Pretty much any American house built until 1940 is amazing to me. Maybe it's that they're each different, despite the fact that you could buy kit houses in the 1920s. Maybe it's that they each have a level of detail that you just don't see in residential architecture anymore. Maybe it's because they tend to be located on tree-line streets (also a great love of mine). Maybe it's because being inside one feels like living inside a piece of art.


At any rate, I have a serious crush on this house right now. I love to search through Realtor.com for beautiful old houses for sale. This one is in St. Petersburg, Florida and I am in love with it something fierce. It's drop dead gorgeous, inside and out, and I can't stop thinking about it. I want to buy this house despite the fact that I don't live in Florida and already have one mortgage payment to make! It's got a little guest cottage out back that would make a great studio. My perfect world would be made up of houses like this.


That being said, I don't know exactly how to translate this love into my pots. I've never made a ceramic house, but I don't think I would like to just literally translate the gorgeousness of an old house into a ceramic replica. Maybe I need to think about making the kinds of pots that would live in this kind of house, that would enhance it's interior landscape. Maybe I can capture the level of detail and color in this house that is attractive to me. Maybe answering this question will be my next assignment....