I guess I'll hit a few highlights:
Simon had the kiln before we left on day one, then had unloaded it after we left. (He wanted to film a youtube video of the unloading.)
First thing the next morning, we got to see all the work out of the kiln, and I immediately picked the piece I wanted to buy. In the pic below, it's the little brown bud vase in the back row of bud vases.
(Those pictures are by another workshop participant, Rachel, who kindly sent them to me.)
Here's a pic of our little vase that I took later:
Cute, no? It's only a few inches tall, glazed with tenmoku over celadon.
So that was a nice little souvenir.
After looking over all of that, we got almost immediately back to throwing.
While I was throwing, I had a conversation with Simon about his mother. Simon is fairly reserved and private, but a few years ago, he posted this video to youtube in which he shows his very elderly mother some of his work.
Something about that video--especially the part where she is excited to see the white slipped pots (at about 2:30 and again at 4:20 on the video)--stuck with me, and for some reason I brought it up with Simon. As soon as I did so, I realized that probably, given the age of his mother in the video and his response, his mother had died in the years since he had posted the video. (In fact, there is another video, made about a year and a half later, in which he says that, yes, she had died and the house where he grew up was having to be sold.) I asked him if his mother had also been a potter, and he said, no, she was a painter with a good eye and some talent, but she hadn't really pursued a career in art.
Later, I had another conversation with Simon about my throwing skills and my crazy habit of reversing the wheel direction according to what I'm doing. When I'm throwing a pot, some steps I do with the wheel going counter-clockwise, some steps I do with the wheel going clockwise. Simon was a bit...concerned maybe about that, and told me that I wasn't doing myself any favors. I tried to explain that I was perfectly content to do things my way and that I only did things that way because I wanted to, not because I had to. To convince him of that, I switched wheel direction to show him that I can throw on either side of the wheel, with the wheel moving in any direction. That confused him, I think.
See, the thing is, I do things my way because I'm happy doing them my way. Since it doesn't do any harm to do things my way (as far as I can see) I will keep doing them that way. And too, if I had to force myself to learn to do things with the wheel going in only one direction I could, but then all the joy would go out of the process for me and I'd probably give up throwing all together.
So those where two stand-out conversations. Otherwise, we watched Simon do some demos. I requested that he show how to throw a lidded pot and its accompanying lid, and he obliged and threw two pots with two different style lids.
We practiced, practiced, practiced. Had lunch, then practiced. About two hours before the end of the day, we stopped throwing in order to practice pulling handles. Rachel got a funny shot of Simon demonstrating the hand position for pulling:
I think he could see the light at the end of the tunnel, because he was in a jovial mood, hamming it up for the camera. Lucky thing too, because as we started to pull handles, he asked if we minded his filming another youtube video. When no one objected, we found ourselves on camera--and a few hours later on the internet.
So: Yay?
Anyway, that was day two.
I will say that it was an interesting workshop and I did learn a few things that I brought back with me, so that's good. I like that it was limited to five people and that it covered some basic things (reclaiming clay, rolling rims) that are useful to know and have some experience doing (even if I never do them again).
There are a ton more photos, if you're interested and want to click through them, on my flickr account.
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