Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes...

Summers up north are so much different than mine ever were growing up in Florida. We have an ebb and flow of summer heat here in the foothills of western PA and the further north you go it feels less and less like the summers I knew. The past few days we have been having a bit of a dip in temperatures and it seems to slow life down even more than the season has already done. The cool evening breezes remind me of the oncoming of Autumn but I know its way to soon and all it ends up doing is conjuring a strange sense of nostalgia and melancholy more associated to the Fall season. Speaking of nostalgia, I just returned from a short visit to Chautauqua, NY. The weather up there...even cooler and really,really wet...kinda typical early Chautauqua weather.

If you have been reading the homefry blog for the last few years you would know that about this time of the year I am posting from the art school there within the Chautauqua Institution. At the end of the season last summer I opted out of the summer long gig there to teach here at home. But I did visit for a couple of days to enlighten the new "Kilnmaster"about some of the intricacies of running the program there ... in fact I just returned. The new "me" there is a good guy named Frederick Bartolovic and he seems to have everything ready to rock. Frederick has a very competent new tech and after a week or two they should have everything down pat. It is a unique program with plenty of unique personalities and some rather unique quirks that do take some getting used to. Enjoy boys...

It was nice to see a few familiar faces in the art school but for the most part it felt like a totally different place. It was always different year to year...although the art school and the Institution are highly resistant to change, there was always new faces hanging out for the season. This year, visiting and not being covered in clay, I just felt like I was one of those many people coming for a sequestered and damp holiday on the lake. It was a little bit of a nostalgic trip for me...and how could it not have been, Chautauqua is a 120 year old Victorian community that calls itself an "American Utopia"...it revels in nostalgia. After haunting the grounds some like a good tourist, I hit a couple of my favorite breakfast spots(Steadman's and Bo'Nars) and eventually did what I think I did best while living up there for the last three summers...drink beer and eat wings! We escaped the rain by hunkering down over in Bemus Point at the Village Casino...which is not really a casino, but a marina bar and restaurant. I was joined by John Moses Girdler, whom I met last year(and has returned for a repeat performance to bust out a load of work), and Frank and Polly Martin. Frank and Polly are old hands at the Chautauqua business and were very helpful to me when I started working there. I have a great deal of respect for both and admire each of their work, and it was great to hang out with them, John, and the kids. Here's my souvenir picture below. That's my daughter, Frank, John, me, Polly, and the Martin kids.

Before I hit the highway and headed back to PA, I got a chance to check out the galleries and see the exhibition that Nancy has work in. The show was carefully curated by my friend and Director of Galleries, Judy Barie. The exhibition is an animal themed show that showcases ceramics, pristine large format black and white taxidermy animal photos, and a host of mixed media critters.

Here are a couple pics of big pots by Christian Kuharik and a few crazy clay birds by ...somebody whose name I forgot...sorry, but those birds were pretty cool. Outside in the piazza between the two large galleries, the new large "pedestal toppers" by Kuharik were recently installed...here's a pic of two and there are two more at the other end not pictured here.

Below are a few shots of Nancy's wood fired works sporting different birds...Kingfishers, Herons, and Cowbirds on the floating shelves right next to Wesley Anderegg's fierce little dogs. As usual, its a great looking show in a great looking space. Click to enlarge.

So ends my nostalgic Chautauqua wandering and its time to check back in to my very real life here in PA this summer...back to my failed pots and crappy clay body(more on that next time), back to teaching and tending my garden.

nos·tal·gia - a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happinessof a former place or time.

Working towards...

...a sustainable practice.

Sustainability is the capacity to endure. In ecology, the word describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time. For humans, sustainability is the potential for long-term maintenance of well being, which has environmental, economic, and social dimensions.

sus·tain

 - to keep up or keep going, as an action or process.

This is a word that is thrown around quite a bit these days. We apply it to a lot of things like agriculture, energy and communities, but what does it mean when applied to your own studio practices? Now, I do not mean the "green" implications to this word as it relates to your studio, but more so an approach to being able to create and to continue to create your own body of work by making a small investment and having modest space.

I have been mulling this question over while I have been teaching beginning ceramics this summer here at IUP. The question in my head is, "how is what I am teaching applicable to my students' needs?". Can I develop a course that will sustain them throughout their collegiate career and even possibly beyond? Because in my mind, that's what a beginning level course should do...lay a solid foundation on which to build. And while I focus on the physical aspects of ceramics, I also plant the seed for critical thought to happen and hopefully continue to happen by presenting current discussions and trends from contemporary ceramics and pit form against surface and function against sculpture.

Before teaching this class I brushed up on all my old clay tricks...reviewing hand building techniques and a wide variety of surface decoration techniques. I know that I learned these things at one time but these days, I rarely employ some of this highly effective,tried and true techniques when working on my own pieces. I think people get used to the way they do things and simply stick with methods that work well for them. I admit it, I'm guilty of this. But, what I'm teaching is forcing me to revisit my own beginnings and maybe even getting me to add a new trick or two to my own repertoire.

I went on to consider that not only should the techniques being taught be applicable to the students continuing on to an intermediate or advanced level but also to those that might go on to want to work in clay later as a hobbyist or art educator. This is also why we are only firing at the low fire level, completing all the work in electric kilns. Most people after their college experience will only have access to electric kilns unless they work at art/community centers or residencies that support different types of facilities and kilns. Besides, these days with the digital setter, you can tailor your firings pretty nicely and achieve effects at a mid range that before was only seen in a high fire gas kiln. For a broader definition of creating a sustainable studio practice check out a brief but loaded article by then graduate student Brian Kluge in the March 2010 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

Hand building; including coil and slab, a basic introduction to wheel throwing, intro to slips and glaze, basic understanding of electric kilns and cones, all topped off with a continued emphasis on surface design or decoration...this is my idea of teaching a sustainable practice in clay. Make your plaster molds in another class with another teacher...strictly nuts and bolts here.

I'm also applying this idea of sustainable practice to my own work...finishing more pieces like the ones in this post, above and below, in the electric kiln. Keeping the level of equipment usage down doesn't diminish the work by any means. I will post images of these mugs, at least, before the end of the week(hopefully)...cone 5, wax resist lines revealing what will be the rich brown clay body, laser printed decals and maybe some lovely kitsch and bling to round it all out. The sculptural piece however might take me a little longer to finish... what I am jokingly calling my "loving balls" piece(pictured below). Work like this often makes me obsess for a while over the permanency of the possible imagery. I think I have my glazes set, but now for the images...hmmmm...critical thought is my mental stir stick. Tune in later for the results.

Keep it real.

LMCP Gallery and Volunteer Foxgloves...

As I mentioned in the post just before this...recently I spent a little time up at Little Mahoning Creek Pottery aka. Nancy Smeltzer's aka. studio where I'm generously allowed to squat pot. While up visiting, Nancy showed me her new gallery addition...almost finished! I did post some pics of this place back in January but here it is pictured above and below almost ready to go! That's Nancy there peering up at the 10 x 24 foot new gallery space. This is a really great new space completely made from re-purposed materials. Nancy hauled all the old barn board that was used in this building from a barn that was being torn down near her home. The windows and door are also on their second life, now reincarnated in the service of this rustic and lovely pottery gallery. I can certainly see a whole lot of wood fired pots in that space. MMMMMM.
Speaking of wood fired, I am getting busy on two sets of work...throwing a nice sandy high fire clay for the bourry box kiln up at Nancy's and making mid range brown ware pieces for the electric kiln. The second group being similar to the pieces in the slide show in the previous post.

In between time I am home...teaching at IUP for the summer and enjoying the quiet life here in the greater metropolitan area of Indiana, PA. This also means I get to kick around in my yard and garden all summer. You have to understand, I'm a serious garden geek and for the last 3 summers I have been leaving to live and work in the Chautauqua Institution up in Chautauqua, N.Y. Well, I felt it was time for a change of scenery for me at the end of last summer and I now feel like I made the right decision. Now I can be like normal people(whatever that is)and not have my life stretched out in two states and I can really tend to my garden. I have enlarged my veggie garden to include onions and asparagus as well as a couple rows of zinnias. My 3 story high "rhodo-zilla" is in full bloom and looks like a giant purple blob swallowing my back deck. All of my bulbs and perennials are jamming right now and there is still so much more to come. However, I have to say that my very favorite thing out in my garden would have to be the foxgloves. I inherited them along with a few other backyard gems when I bought this old coal miner house. Each year they reseed in different places, sometimes not so much and sometimes a whole lot. This year I have bunches...tall spires of speckled slippers in shades of pink. Not only do I have them in almost every flower bed, but they are in big clumps and there are loads of this new creamy white color.

And in keeping with my wood fire talk, here are a couple gems that I gave a final firing of gold luster and commercial decals. These two babies turned out pretty sweet.

The Chinese menu mug is a nice big cup with a lot of flash and ash that add to the layered band around the top. The other is another "double flamingo homage to FLA." mug that I added the bling to...and I'm happy I did...look for more flamingos in my upcoming work.

How does your garden grow?

Flamingos, Flowers, and Cocks...

Finally...I'm posting new work that I have recently finished. This is all mid range stuff...cone 5 and then fired a couple more times to incorporate the laser decal images (04)and then the commercial decals and gold luster(018).

Its a very funky bunch, full of pattern collisions and assorted imagery combining together to create a sort of painterly surface. 9 of the best of the bunch have already headed to The Chautauqua Institution to be sold in the Strohl Art Center Gallery Store. You will be able to find the rest in my Etsy shop soon and in a Self Serve Pottery Kiosk near ...me. Speaking of Chautauqua, I was up at Little Mahoning Creek Pottery today with Nancy to meet with Judy Barie, the Gallery Director for Chautauqua. Judy was stopping by to pick up work for an exhibition that Nancy has been curated into there... in the "new as of last year" Fowler-Kellog Gallery. It was really good to see Judy again, she is a hard working gallery lady that does such a wonderful job putting together exhibitions and coordinating so many of the events that take place within the galleries. Seeing her today made me a bit nostalgic for my last few summers and I will miss some of the familiar faces that I have come to know over the last three years up in CHQ. as I will not be returning this summer to be KILN MASTER!...click here for my farewell post. It looks like my beginning ceramics class will make here at IUP for the summer and there's an online 101 class that I also hope to be teaching second session too. Anyways, it was great to gab about our past adventures with Judy and I'm sure I will see her down the line.

Check out the slide show of my snazzy new pieces...I hope to be posting more new work all summer!

Kizoa slideshow: New Mid Range Work 2011 - Slideshow

Crackers and Sincerity Revisited...

I'm back in grey, overcast western PA after almost a week down in sunny FLA visiting my family. Its great to have family who live at the beach. I'm tanned and recharged full of Bloody Marys and fresh seafood ready to start making new work and teaching classes. I will stop "rubbing in" my sun filled beach lounging right after I tell you about an extra bonus that happened while I was there.

The long strip of beach living along 30A there in between Panama City and Destin is teeming with restaurants and bars and lots of young, good looking, hip folk who really appreciate good music. I saw a couple of good local bands while there but the highlight came from a place called Central Square Records(who apparently do not have a website) in Seaside. This is a great record store...a record store among record stores...a long surviving example of "back in the day" located directly across from the ocean. Its always a destination for me, not because I can get great food and Bloody Marys "to walk around with" at the restaurant next door but because I can go and hang out...talk new music and really geek out. They never disappoint ...here's a pic of the place above from my cell phone...the record store is upstairs and there is an equally great indie book store downstairs. Below are a couple pics also from my handy cell phone of the in store event. David Lowery formerly of Cracker formerly of Camper Van Beethoven played a short but sweet mini gig right in the middle of the store. It was packed with beer toting, beach going hipsters from all over...Patrick Carney from the Black Keys even stopped by.

On another note, while I was baking in the sun I got a cool email from a potter who writes a blog that I have recently been checking out. Carter Gillies wrote a response to my sincerity rant/post. He emailed because he had a well thought out, "too long for the comment box", response...so I decided to post it here. Its great to get some real dialogue happening once in a while. I often try and often just hear crickets. That's the blog world though...it seems like a one way street sometimes, so I was thrilled to have some new content based on issues I have been scratching my head about. You should also check out his blog...good solid content(more consistent than me) and really nice looking pots...there is a link on his name here and he is also on my blog roll on the sidebar. So thanks Carter...nice to meet you online and its too bad your not closer because I think you would make a nice edition to our 7 dollar import pitcher night! Below is Carter's perspective on the issue of "sincere" and how it relates to him as a potter. Please chime in on the ol' comment box to add your own view...or bring a few beers and come sit on my back deck.

Kyle, I just tried to post this comment to your "sincerity" entry, but it was too long. I thought you' maybe enjoy my flailing about on this issue since we seem to be kindred spirits in a lot of ways. Here is what I tried to post:


Hey Kyle, I just found your blog today (which only means I need to get out into the internet stream more!). I love what you have to say. I know this post is a few weeks old but I've been wrestling with some of the same issues and I'd love to hear your further thoughts.

I think you are absolutely on target that these days art is so many things, only one of which is sincere. In my mind art is just one more form of human communication and as such it expresses an artist's take on things, events, and the culture's pervasive idioms. So sometimes art aims at being sincere. But with the establishment emphasis on 'content' quite often we are treated to commentary by artists whose agendas include everything from challenging the viewer to expressing abstract or mundane notions. And more. Sincerity seems to be more about a person's intent to communicate honestly than something that can be trapped once and for all.

For instance, two people can say the exact same thing but one person can be sincere and another not, or the same person mean it differently at different times. So sincerity also seems difficult to pin down, and can float through our fingers as soon as we try to grasp it. This especially seems to be an issue if we pretend our sincerity has been permanently placed inside some fixed material object. Whatever truth it has died the moment we change our minds and move on to new interests. Sincerity is like looking at a stop watch after a race: It embraces a mere moment in time.

And the reason potters are having such a hard time of it is that we don't do these other 'content' things very well. The idea of beauty and function is less important in the new art domain than it was in years past. Or maybe I'm making that up. But it seems like potters have sought refuge from the batterings of the establishment in ideas such as 'sincere', 'authentic', and 'original'. It seems as if we can't walk the walk in the other conceptual avenues very well, so we at least pretend to talk the talk with soul searching vocabulary like this. It gives us the idea that we are at least still clinging to the foot of the pedestal that contemporary art is occupying.

But it also seems like we are playing games with poorly understood words when we fixate on ideas like 'original', 'authentic' and 'sincere'. And because they are the new $10 words we potters often feel the need to apply them to our own work as well. The problem as I see it is that we also face a huge and incompatible pressure from our need to satisfy the demands of a marketplace. Customer's don't really want our authentically disgorged 'who I am at this very moment'. They don't want the sincere expression of how we are feeling at the moment. They would much rather have a stock answer of "I'm fine and this is the kind of pot I make". All that sincerity, authenticity, and originality is supposed to refer back to is really only a shifting target that grows as we experience new things, contradicts itself from one moment to the next, and is polluted by everything it sees, does, and experiences. But through this straightjacketing of commerce we force all those little inconsistencies aside and pretend to a relatively unchanging ideal of 'self' that hides behind the mask.

Sometimes our work as artists seems more habitual than anything else. We don't allow ourselves to break free of our momentum and this becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. The ruts of our habits become so deep that we can't change our art no matter how many different new things are going on in our lives, no matter how much what we like and don't like changes, and no matter how we have actually outgrown the tiny seedling that started the ball rolling in that one direction.

So I would say that if we really wanted to be honest about our sincerity we wouldn't put it in such tight little boxes. It might be something one day and something different the next, kind of like what I'm going to have for dinner this week. I sincerely like more than one thing, and only eating Mexican food for the rest of my life would be sincerely disappointing. We just aren't simple creatures. Except in how we express ourselves through art. Doesn't that seem strange?


I hope you had a good laugh reading this! You seem like a thinker and you obviously care about issues like these. I hope you take all my noise as the floundering it really is. I'm just trying to figure this stuff out myself. I wish I could have been there at the bar with you guys when you were discussing this. Maybe you can still talk some sense into me. I will read your blog with interest!

sincerely,

Carter

And the livin' is easy...

The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life. ~Robert Louis Stevenson

This was time well spent.

Space is the place...

Everybody needs a little space. Space to do what ever it is that you do. Space away from the other things that you have to do. Space is not always that easy to come by however. I have mentioned the phrase "squatter potter" when describing myself on this ol' blog in the past...and it still fits pretty well. I am currently uprooted and spread all over this county it seems right now. I left Little Mahoning Creek Pottery in the winter to work at Stoke Hole Pottery which I left in March and have since been working out of a couple rubber maid tubs. I do need to get back out to LMCP and start firing the wood kilns with Nancy Smeltzer. Its been slow going due to our weather, (IUP)work, and gas prices. And also I have been holding out because I am possibly teaching beginning ceramics here at IUP...if my class makes that is. I need a few more students and it will fly for both sessions...keeping my fingers crossed. I was really hoping to use and abuse the school studio for the summer while I teach. So now I have some of my stuff in the back of my car, some stuff still over at Stoke Hole(sorry!), my wheel and other stuff at Nancy's and tubs of unfinished mugs and cups and other random pieces now on my front porch. They were all on my dining room table up until Easter, then I had to make room for our small feast. Honestly, its not a great feeling but I understand its temporary until all the cards fall where they may. If my class does not make I am hoping that Nancy will welcome me back and we can start cranking out some wood fired work. I would like to wood fire some new mugs and cups with Nance either way...

As for my new space...the one since Easter...its pretty comfy. Its not a space to throw work or really do any wet work but its a good space to finish stuff. Now that the temps have crossed over to steady 60's and once in a while a random 70's my 3 season front porch is back in season! Here's a couple pics of my "late spring decal and gold luster studio"...like I said, comfy. Its littered with a collection of pieces from friends and older, experimental things and wood fired keepers from me. The Buddha bunny slab piece on the top of this post was when I was starting to get into a more graphic ceramic practice...hippity hoppity karma is on its way. My goal is to finish these pieces and give them their final 018 firing within the next two weeks.

Finally, speaking of "space" I ran across a great little article titled "Forty-one Glorious Square Feet" by Jennifer Barbe in the back of a Ceramics Monthly. It appears in the November 2010 issue and documents the trials and tribulations of claiming a space to make work. She moved from one place to another and traded large studio space for virtually no studio space but learns to make it work for herself...flooding floor, encroaching domestic appliances and all. That's what it is about for me, I have to work and I will work where ever I have to. Believe me I have made work in odd places and trucked it around to farther away places to fire the pieces. I have faith that one day soon I will be able to have my stuff in one place and be able to almost roll out of bed and hit the studio for a while...but until then, I know how bad I want to make work...so I make it work.

How bad do you want to make work?