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.