Almost famous...

Here in the bubble of the Chautauqua Institution at the art quadrangle, we have marathon "Raku Fridays". They can be long and grueling starting around 9:00 am and going on until well after lunch most of the time. We fire the class work as well as visiting faculty and resident students' work too. Mostly its small things but once in a while we get some whoppers...I'm always up for a challenge and a new burn. This past week we did our little Raku circus for the benefit of a film crew that was here making a documentary on the history of the visual arts at Chautauqua. It was a blast and thanks to Maria Mangano, who serves as the print studio tech, we got a whole lotta great images as they shot their own of us. (She also has a great blog that you should check out too.) The ceramics studio tech Dan Kuhn and I have both done plenty of raku in our lives and we have the firing/pulling and holding of the breathe down to a science.

We went through the motions with the film crew so that they could get their set up for the shots over and over and then we went for it! They were an easy going crew led by producer John Grant. They are from a PBS station called WNED out of Buffalo, NY. and the entire program will air a year from this coming Fall. The above shots are of Dan and I rolling back the handy dandy raku kiln and then us being as dramatic as we could be while handling the hot pots. The below is of me being a ham for the camera...grrrrr, be a fire tiger...rowrrr...much more Cha to come...