Smoke and Fire

Greetings from the "Cha", gentle reader! My postings have been sparce this summer as my kilnmaster duties have consumed so much of my time. Stay tuned as I will be making a larger post soon. Until then, I would like to share with you an article that was written recently in the local newspaper, "The Chautauqua Daily", about one of our recent raku firings. You will need to scroll through to page 11 for the photo spread.

CLICK HERE: http://www.ciweb.org/Chautauquan%20Daily/2008%20Newspapers/24-July18_2008.pdf

CHOO CHOOOOO!

Hello again gentle readers. I had to post again soon once I received this last batch of images from Nancy back at the studio in Smicksburg! If you have been following along with me for the last month or so, you might know that Nancy and I have been building a new wood kiln. It is a train style based on a Robert Sanderson design. Long story short, I ran out of time and had to come to my summer job here in the Cha.... I did not get to finish the kiln...but she and the guy who is filling my space in the studio for the summer Mike Mintzer(spelling?) knocked it out and actually fired it off on the

first. Here are a couple of images of it finished...

Nancy said the firing had a few glitches, but that could be expected for the first firing. There might be some things we need to do before the next firing...when I return in August...but all in all she says the results were pretty good and thinks that this will be a good kiln. Nancy was also super enough to send me a few pictures of some my pieces that came out...

Hey Nance, if your reading this...Thank You. I really wanted to finish the kiln and was a little down about not being able to be there to fire it, but being able to see some of the results and to have a friend that will take the time to email me stuff, sure means a lot. My body may be working overtime here in Chautauqua but my heart is still in a little town nestled in an Amish community called Smicksburg. I miss the slower pace and working with the big side doors to the studio open...breeze blowing through the space...I look forward to being back for the Fall and I often picture the big mature Oaks and their yellow leaves drifting everywhere. I leave you gentle reader, with a great picture Nancy sent me of the train kiln blowing its stack...enjoy, and think Autumn thoughts with me.

Hello form Chautauqua, NY...

Greetings gentle reader...I am now posting from Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, NY right on the shore of Lake Chautauqua...it seems to me they(whoever named this area) was at a loss for other clever titles...maybe something shorter would have been a good idea...I am going to go out on a limb here and refer to this place as the Cha., who knows maybe that will catch on with other lazy typers like myself. Anywho, the above piece is a recent installation in the new sculpture garden here within the bubble. The Chautauqua Institution has been in existence for well over one hundred years and is a summer haven for those looking to immerse themselves in the arts as well as some serious lake time. It is truly a beautiful community that blossoms in the summer months. Oh yeah...the big hand was made by Joe Molino...ceramics professor at Carnegie Mellon.

The above image is the side entrance to the ceramics studio located in the fine arts quad. The orange and brown panels are rolling doors to the kiln palace...my personal kingdom, since I am KILNMASTER!...do you here the echo too? Everyday I spend the majority of daylight and a good portion of the evening hours here. I have a great crew to work with and everybody pitches in to help keep the studio up and running...stocked with clay and glazes...and answering millions of questions from the Chatauquans taking morning and afternoon classes with the visiting artists/instructors. Speaking of, for the first 3 weeks we are graced with a wonderful couple who both teach at universities in Tenn. Frank and Polly Martin. They have been patient and easy going and a pleasure to work with. Polly's interest is in making beautiful functional pottery to be used in the home and Frank creates assembled objects based in pottery finished with vividly colored glazes. They also gave a lecture together...great work and interesting talks... Both are so worth the google...

But let me acknowledge somebody who has been indispensable here in the studio...without whom I could not keep things rolling along. She is the studio tech and my right hand here...Ladies and Gentlemen...Ms. Ashley Dodge!

Ashley is a recent graduate of WVU...she earned her BFA in ceramics. She is a very nice person with a great attitude...knowledgeable and best of all...somebody I can count on. She has been busting her butt for the studio as well as trying to find her own time in her studio to make new work. Below are featured a few of her cups and stem ware...her pieces are cone 6 porcelain with flowing sumptuous glazes...my favorite part of her stem ware is that they all jingle! You can shake them like a bell after you finish your libations...such a cool idea...I hope to come home with a few of her pieces at the end of the season.

Ashley has great things in her future...as for me...I have been working hard and also trying to get some me time in my studio too...I have been working on some big super wonky mugs...over sized and made from a porcelainious stoneware...working on some super funky decal images to finish them off with...and thinking that they will be in my first cone 6 soda fire here. This is them, with a couple other pieces drying in my studio window...all possibilities for the soda firing.

So ends my first post from the Cha...stay tuned for more from within the bubble.

Bursting before Chautauqua...

The garden that is...bursting.... just before I leave for NY and just as I have returned from Fla. on the worst plane ride of my life. A great vacation with the family in a beautiful location in the panhandle right smack on the beach. We ate good seafood and all browned our buns on the beach. But the ride home from the Pensacola Airport to Atlanta and supposedly to Pittsburgh...was a much different story. The AirTran flight was late...one hour from the jump at Pensacola. Then 25 minutes late in Atlanta and another 30-45 minutes because they could not get the door closed...it was jammed with the jet ramp that people use to de-plane. That alone should have been a warning to me...let somebody else have your seats. Finally after circling the Pittsburgh airport in a holding pattern due to the zero visibility caused by heavy fog, the captain says we are flying to the Akron/Canton airport in Ohio. After much deliberation from the captain and crew after landing at this tiny airport that was closed for the night...yes...CLOSED...nobody there until the morning, we all spent the wee hours in a very uncomfortable air terminal. There were not enough pillows or blankets...really nothing was provided to all of us. Finally at 9 am another crew came and we flew the brief 20 minutes to Pittsburgh...Kelli and I had been awake for more than 24 hours and stranded in Ohio since 3 Am. We finally made it home at 12:30 Sunday afternoon. YOW!

After all that I need something to meditate on, and my flower beds are really starting to rev up. So enjoy the slide show posted above and check out my new bird feeder from Nancy...you can find more stuff by her on her etsy shop, the link is on the side bar...also, does anybody know what type of allium I have in the images? I planted two types and cant remember either...I would like to get more bulbs...hmmmm. Well, anyways, breathe deep buckaroos and enjoy my flowers...next post from NY.

June...

Wow. It is the beginning of June already...wow again. Please pay no attention to my simple amazement of this change of months. June means a couple things for me...numero uno being I will be heading down to Fla. to visit my family and stay on the beach for a week. That means sunning my buns and eating a mess of good, fresh seafood. Numero dos is that I will be starting my summer job just as soon as I return. This means I will pack up my laptop, clay tools, and a bunch of studio clothes and head further up north to Chautauqua, NY.

I will be taking on the position of ...get this...KILNMASTER...honestly, that is what they are calling this job title. In reality I am more like the studio manager for the ceramic department...The place there is the Chautauqua Institute...it is a resort like arts community on Lake Chautauqua that has been there for like 120 years. They offer professional quality dance, theatre, music and visual arts classes, performances, and exhibitions for all who are lucky enough to be inside the gate. No cars anywhere on the premises...looking forward to it.

My gig there is setting up the studio for the new season and making sure all is going well, but most importantly, making sure everybody gets their work fired. I have 4 work study students and 1 full time assistant that will help me in maintaining the studio. I will be there until the third week in August...8 weeks of classes rolling through the studio. I hope to make a whole lotta new work while I am there...they are providing me with a semi-private studio space and I aim to make use of it.

This is the new wing to the visual arts building that was recently added and the fancy orange and brown building is the kiln palace.

The walls are all on overhead rollers and completely open up on all four sides...too cool.

They have this super special German or something kiln there. The Blaauw. It is a fully programmable digital gas kiln...super insulated...looks like it came from IKEA...That should be interesting...verrrry in-ter-est-ing

(Is that a Col. Klink or Shultz quote? How well do you know your Hogan's Heroes trivia). Anyways, I have allot of work ahead of me...there was construction during the off season and the studio looks like a bomb went off inside...

But, you know what? That is a couple weeks down the road yet and I still have Fla. in front of it. Sun on my buns first. And since I most likely will not post another for a couple weeks I am packing this one in...Here are a few new pictures from the on going kiln building that Nancy and I are doing ...its getting there!

Looks like we are not going to be finished before I leave but I will come back for the firing and have my pieces already glazed and ready to be loaded. I wish there was more time for me to stick around and finish the kiln off but alas, it is not to be...yes, "alas" I said!

While I am at this verbage filled frenzy let me send a big shout out to the hardest working man in the etsy clay business...thats right, the James Brown of the etsy mud team...Keith Phillips. He recently posted a long clay convo that we had about atmospheric firing...thanks for putting that out there, very cool. If you do not know his work, whats wrong with you? Mudstuffing, his shop on etsy is a very popular place and a good place to check for recent additions to the inventory...Keith's blog is on my side bar so you and I can visit frequently.

I will enjoy reading my emails and other blogs and posting new work and images of Chautauqua, NY this summer...new surroundings, new people, new climate (well sorta). Heres to the begining of a good summer gentle reader, heres to June.

A productive day in the studio...

Sometimes a productive day in the studio is gauged in a different way...this past Saturday was one of those days. It wasn't that I sat down and made 20 cups and a couple sets of plates, it was a day packed with quality more than quantity. My wife and daughter came up to the studio on this warm sunny Saturday...we ate lunch and my 5 year old worked on my wheel for awhile. She has always liked to hand build in the studio with me and it is just recently that she has been asking me to teach her to throw...she is getting there...and we will keep practicing. I loved these pictures, the light was streaming in from the wide open barn like doors on the side of the studio
and the breeze wafted through the space. Look at that face...what concentration...what focus!













After the girls left Nancy and I worked on the train kiln some...so far so good...this Thursday we are going to try and finish a good portion, if not most of the kiln. The images below show the begining of the fire box and the floor of about 1/2 the ware chamber.


















And somehow, I even managed to finish a couple bigger pieces, trim some cups and put handles on some mugs...it was a quality day no matter how you look at it...stay tuned for more kiln updates!



PS... I am a huge music geek...check out my cool album quilt in the side bar...you can click on the rotating images and it will take you to last.fm which is a nifty music site that lets you build playlists and search out music...I have another widget from them in my myspace that shuffles and plays my playlist automatically...so if your hanging out for a while or if you make multiple visits, you can hear different songs. On my album quilt you will find some of my perennial favorites and some interesting new artists too...put your needle tool to the vinyl and pug with a beat.

The Slab!

Watching concrete dry...sound exciting? Well, actually it is pretty exciting...especially when that concrete is the slab for the new kiln that you will be building. Nancy and I will be building a train style kiln originally based on a Robert Sanderson design. She researched it all out and found several different variations of the plans...scavenged out all the bricks...and got me and a few others to wheel the concrete over and dump it into the footprint. Nancy and I framed up the space, then leveled it all off a few days before...we were ready!

We had a perfect day to get the job done today...Andy,who is up from Florida for the summer,(he uses Smicksburg as his base while he does festivals around the Northeast) and I wheel barrow loads of concrete from the truck over to the other side of the studio. There, Nancy, Dan Boone and local potter friend Josh Floyd spread it out and level it off. After the concrete was all in Dan and I finished smoothing down the surface while neighbor Ellis carefully supervised.

Nancy set a couple large shards in the drying concrete and we were done for today. More postings to come of the kiln in progress...stay tuned.