Texture texture texture!

Gary Jackson over at Fire When Ready Pottery just rocked my world. Yep. He tipped me off to artist, and I mean serious artist, Amy Higgason of Pigeon Road Pottery. Whoa. I really hope I can see one of these in person (she’s out in Wisconsin).

Laurie Erdman

Catching up on email on Mondays is sometimes an arduous task, but not today. Today there were many great things in my box including a timely post from Laurie Erdman on her blog The Spirit of Clay. I read through it a couple times and thought about what I’ve been making, finding my voice through my pottery making, and the what comes from my hands when I’m really listening.

It reminded me of when I was painting large canvasses (like four ft by eight ft large). I could spend half day focusing on one area stepping back from it and then stepping back in to where it was leading me to go. It was an intimate process where whole days could disappear, where I would disappear.

It would become clear when I wasn’t truly listening. If I let myself get too sucked in, too into one place in the canvas, I would step back and immediately see the whole thing thrown off balance. It could have been the color or the shape, a million things, but I was too in my head thinking about to do lists, or grocery shopping, or the load in the laundry I didn’t switch over, whatever. I wasn’t listening, I was too busy thinking.

This article reminded me of getting back to that zone. Finding where the clay leads me instead of trying to tell it where to take me where I think I want to go.  Time to go get my hands dirty…

I like where this is going…

Still on the texture train, I went through Lucy’s bucket of cool old stamps. This is WAY too much fun. I bought some recently that I may need to go find and try out!

Step away from the clay…

It was the right thing to do to attach the handles and then walk away until today.  I was so close to them I couldn’t see how off the size was to the size of the vessel. Lucy caught it in time so that I could make adjustments before it was leather hard. I am looking forward to the next round to finesse the design further.

I really like the backlight of looking at them on the window sill…