Orale, Little Loca! (Talking to Ghosts)

It was the last day of the workshop today. It was a long, exhausting, inspiring week.

This is my girl, the little cholita calavera bust, built and underglazed in Janis's style.



The rest of the class used a smooth, lily-white porcelain/stonewear clay,  and I did try it on the first day, but on day two I chose to use this rough, groggy red sculpture mix, similar to the clay used to make bricks. I don't like using white clay; it's cold and unsettling, like talking to ghosts. The minute I switched to the red clay and started building, Little Loca up there came out.

This is the back view:


(I wish I had made the hair longer.)

I was trying to recreate the hairstyle of the cholas who used to live in my neighborhood when I was a kid. I was fascinated by these women, with their over-the-top makeup and hairstyles and their way of dressing like men in baggy chinos and oversized shirts.

In this workshop, as is often the case in the clay world, I was the only brown person in the room. At the end of the day when we went around showing our finished pieces, I tried to explain to a bunch of white people (most of them from the east coast) how I had been inspired by the late '70s/early '80s chola cultural phenomenon, but it was like talking to ghosts.

Anyway, she and I had to part ways for the moment since I didn't want to transport greenware back from the workshop. She'll dry over the next couple of weeks and be bisque fired up at the studio in Santa Fe and I'll go and pick her up. After that, I'll finish her makeup and add other details and do a final firing at the studio.

Here are a coupe of test tiles that I made to see how the underglazes were going to react to the red clay:



Janis admired them, so I gave them to her, both of them. (She had to take both because I was afraid that if she only took one, it would be lonely in the inhospitable land of Ohio where Janis lives. When I told her that, she laughed, and my friend Judi said, "She's not kidding," which kind of pissed me off since it seems common sense to me. But again, there's no understanding the logic of ghosts.)

These are larger, more lurid skulls, wall hangings, still green:



I've never really embraced this lurid, florid style--I'm more about taking this type of style and reverse engineering it (so to speak) to try to add some sophistication to it via austere restraint--but I thought it would be interesting to adopt (and adapt it to) Janis's own exuberant style.