Start Where You Are

Janis Wunderlich works away in the background while I photograph one of her tiny figures:



My attempt at...what? A figure in her style, washed over with my own style.


Hers was finished, mine is only halfway done.  It's been underglazed and bisque fired once but I have yet to add more underglaze and/or glaze, perhaps a bit of iron oxide, and most likely some Gerstley borate to it. I won't spend a lot of time on it since it is just a little practice thing, but it is an interesting exercise for me to copy the work of a more experienced artist who works in a vastly different style.

This is more me:

Not just the calavera, but the smooth expanses of it. But this is a little blank, even for me. I like texture to be...grainy but natural. Does that make sense? The best texture I know how to create mimics the feeling of running my hand over a stuccoed or plastered adobe wall. 

This little calavera I ran through a firing to test some new brightly hued low-fire glazes on the flowers. I laid the glazes on over bright underglazes bisqued then washed with black underglaze. I think. My firings are so infrequent these days that I need to start keeping notes again. I don't mind keeping notes (I almost never look at them again, but it is nice to have them if I need them) but I was hoping to build something of an intuitive knowledge base to work from, a fool's errand, I know.

Did I ever tell you about the time I made one of Dave's students at the old studio cry over not keeping glaze notes? She was always asking about glazes, which is good. Lots of student work went through the kilns and every once in awhile a nice piece would catch people's interest and we would try to work out what the glaze was before we could talk to the person who made the piece. Because Dave and I had been working with the glazes for a long time--hell, Dave made a bunch of them to begin with--we could usually answer questions like that accurately.

One time, this particular woman came over to me and handed me a piece of work and said, "What glaze is this?" It was a strange glaze combination, so I turned over the bowl to look at the mark to see who had made it. The signature on the bottom was hers! It was her own bowl! I said, "I don't know. Why don't we check your notes?" She said, "Oh, I don't keep notes." And I reminded her (as Dave had done numerous times before) how important it was to keep notes on the glazes you used on your pieces so that you could recreate combinations you liked. She just looked at me blankly. My suggestion went in one ear and out the other without making the slightest impression on her, same as when Dave had made it to her again and again.

A few weeks later, she did it again! She came up to me while I was sitting with some people and she handed me one of her own pieces and asked me to identify the glaze on it. I said, very loudly, "This is your piece! So let's check your glaze notes! Why don't you go get your notes so we can look and see what glaze this is! I'm sure you wrote it down, right? After we talked last time, I'm sure you started keeping notes!"

She stood there and her lip trembled and a little tear ran down her cheek. I handed the bowl back to her and walked away. And she never asked me again to identify a glaze on one of her pieces. And she never started keeping glaze notes either. So I guess it was kind of a draw.

Anyway, I'm sure it seems like I was being a total bitch to that woman, but how many times should a grown-ass adult be expected to be treated like a child and have the same things patiently explained to them? Once? Twice? Three times? Infinite times?

So that's my story of making someone at the studio cry. I'd tell you about another time that I lost my temper at the studio and yelled at some racist old white lady, but I'm sure you already think I'm a monster, so instead I'll tell you about my Tuesday.

Too's Day

As predicted, the caffeine I had with my dinner Monday night kept me awake all night. I stayed up watching garbage on Netflix and reading garbage on the internet. I also read some more of the Bradshaw book and got on Amazon and ordered a couple of books he recommends, one about grieving, one about adult daughters of alcoholics. I made Dave's lunch and packed it up for him. I finally fell asleep around nine in the morning, long after Dave had gone to work.

When I got up, it was late. I had some leftovers for lunch, caught up on my email, read a little bit. It was so late that I went ahead and prepped for dinner. I'm happiest when we have a loose plan for the week's dinners, but nothing so strict that it can't be changed at the last minute to suit what we have and what I feel is not beyond my patience to cook. Today, I prepped for felafel in pita, using a bag of prepared felafel that we picked up out of curiosity on our last trip to the co-op. I sliced up some veggies,  yellow and red heirloom tomatoes that needed to be used, cucumbers, and onions. I made two kinds of dressing for the sandwiches, one tahini-lemon-garlic, one simply crushed garlic mixed into Greek yogurt. I cut up and steamed a head of green cauliflower that Dave bought last week. I took the pita out of the freezer.  Along with all that, we had feta cheese and a container of mixed olives from Whole Foods. It's hardly a late winter/early spring dinner, but it was tasty and filling.

Dave came home and we sat down to dinner. For a few months now at dinner or on walks, we've been going over five things that have made us happy in the last 24 hours. Today, we both included the late afternoon rain. Because, yes! Rain! (Of course it was gone before we sat down to dinner, but it still counts.)

Despite the possibility of more rain, after dinner we decided to take the car to the car wash. It was the first time we've washed it since we bought it in early December. (We figured out that the old black car had been washed three times in 15 years, so we're ahead of the game already.)

 $10 for a three minute car wash! But we got the "Super Charged Wash" (whatever that is). 

When a driver meet a driver coming through the wash.

After vacuuming out the car and wiping down the dash and putting up a new air freshener (pine scented gigolo, smells like), we headed over to the co-op.

We picked up some fruit and toilet paper and ice cream, the trifecta of dash-in-dash-out grocery store shopping, vegetarian style.  I wanted mint chocolate chip ice cream, and we by-passed the usual brands we buy (Straus Creamery, Ben & Jerry's, Talenti) and opted to try a new brand, Three Twins. If you ever have the chance to try Three Twins ice cream, don't bother. It tastes like someone said "ice cream" in the next room. Not very good, like whipped non-fat milk, frozen. Why bother? And it was the same price as the Straus stuff, which I know is good. I'm very disappointed, obviously. Well, live and learn.

We're back home now, back to the computers.