Earthen-Passion
I know, silly. But, I really got into the beauty and uniqueness of this bust right away, I had a special vision for her, defined etc..this was my only attempt at sculpting a person. Since she wa from my imagionation it wasn't too difficult. The hard part was getting her through the firing process alive. She feel all three times she was fired. I used a liquid gloss glaze called Metalic Brown.
This is a slap structure. My first Slab sculpture. This won a Scholastic Art Award from RIT. Honorable Mention (oh yes indeed). The glaze is layered like most of my work. Christmas Red as the base, then black arroya (a crackling glaze), then clear glaze. The thing is: I hate the way the glaze looked after the first firing. So I put a coating of white arroya on top of all that and it came out amazing. It comes in two pices that connect near the tail end. Its nick name is the Rhino-Shark (for pretty obvious reasons.)
Scraffitto is a method used to decorate greenware (clay that has not been fired yet). I used it on these three object. You apply velvet underglazes then scratch away a design, it can bee seen best on the object farthest to the left. I three these objects ont he wheel. It takes about 8 hourse to do the more complicated ones.
This platter is a slip cast, 18 inches across. Liquid clay is poured into a mold made of plaster. The plaster sucks the moister out of the clay and you open the mold to a semi moist object. I took advantage of the large plain surface and scraffittoed a complicated and varried style design. I aimed to contrast the areas while keep the colors similar. It took me about 10-13 hours to scraffitto this one., but it is one of my favorite pieces...ever.
Contrary to the scrafittoed objects, I really like plaid, earthlike glazes. Most ofmy slab structures are large this vase stands at about 16 inches. I used some left over slabs to put this together so that the clay would not dry and go to waste. Two trapaziodal slaps pintched together and opened to create a pocket for this rather simple, crude looking vase. (The cruder the better). I used these ruber leaf reliefes and a rolling pin to dent the leaf design into each side. After I fired this the first time I used Metalic Brown on the top half and sponged most of it off so thatis would take on the texture left by the slab roller and the leaf depressions. The bottom is a velvet underglaze called sandstone that was pretty chunky. I had already used slip to stucko the lower surface, but I found it neccisary to sponge on this thick, chunky, pastey glaze. I was amazingly happy with the results.
