More shameless self promotion...

So, after my last post about ZENCLAY... I thought, duh, why did I not show what pieces were going to be there for their exhibition. This is the sole reason for this little piece of propaganda. Here they are...The Male Fantasy Rattle and The Egg Cup. The rattle is one of three that I made for my thesis show at the end of '06...it is actually a rattle with a nice low tone...the dish or 'docking station' has a nice big gold lustre elk's club decal in the center and is polka dotted with gold lustre Moose Lodge decals. The rattle can sit in the upright or erect position as well...it will not slide due to the rubberized bottom, holds it securly in the 'up' position. However, I tend to feel a little more comfortable showing it in the 'cigarette and ashtry position'. The Egg Cup is much more about the visual rather than the utiltarian...it also is two pieces that 'nest' together...most everything I was making at this time had to do with the symbiotic relationship of a cup and saucer.
The other toot of my own horn is news of me showing this little jewel at The North American Ceramic Cup Show at Sienna Heights University in Michigan. The show runs from March 10th-end of the month. I do like this mug. I was using an iron rich course sculpture body clay to throw with...I made a small number of pieces and switched back to the lighter clay body. The clay body itself really reduces well in the wood fire..going brick red to dark brown sometimes..nice looking rugged body, maybe not for everybody but...I still like this funky psuedo-Japanese meets pop culture mug. I am happy it was juried into the show. And thats my fanfare for today.

Zen and the art of traveling with a five year old...

ZENCLAY...almost heaven, mountain momma....something something ...Morgantown, West Virginia. I loaded up the mini SUV and headed south...me, the wife,and our five year old daughter. We packed a suitcase, computer, camera, cooler full of waters and snacks, and plenty of DVDS for the road! We were off!...and in a little over two hours we were there. I juried into a show there called "The Four States Ceramic Exhibition," and we came to deliver the two pieces that got in the show. The show runs from the beginning of March through the middle of April.

Sometimes I send my work away barely knowing what the exhibition space will look like or what the people will be like who are handling the work and setting up the exhibit, but today was not one of those days. I was very pleased that I had taken the time to drive the relatively short distance in order to deliver my work in person. ZENCLAY is a three-story building that is going on its ninth year of being ZENCLAY. The bottom floor is a nice sized studio space with an attached gallery that is small, but clean and bright. The middle floor is a hopping little cafe/coffee and tea bar populated by WVU students, and the top floor is another open, clean gallery space with chairs and tables for overflow of the cafe. The owner/instructor/teacher/resident potter is a very pleasant Susan Ting.

Her story was pretty amazing. She has actually owned the place for about twenty years. Believe it or not, it was a chinese food restaurant and a laundromat on the bottom floor. WHOA! She has truly realized a dream in establishing this studio/teaching facility/gallery and cafe. Also, her own intricately carved porcelain vessels were featured in the front gallery.

So after having increased my good karma by at least two from our visit with ZENCLAY, we three found a nice hotel with an indoor pool and hottub...my daughter loves the hottub!...plush beds and free HBO, maybe even a complimentary breakfast between 6 and 10:00 AM. Then, it's off... pack the SUV! Make sure we don't leave anything behind, and hit the road. Long, perilous...not really. In a little over two hours we will be back in the greater metropolitan area of Indiana, Pa....country roads take me home.

Cloud Trucker

So you are sitting around again on a perfectly good Saturday Night...well here is something fun you and yours(the computer) can do together. www.doublerespect.com/party This is a live feed from a party in Pittsburgh, Pa. where my friends are playing ...Cloud Trucker! The show is Saturday, Feb.9..starts around 10:00 pm ...They are a great, fun, kinda goofy band...think Ween or in their own words; freestyle, ghettotech, pop. Its sure to be a fun little gig to tune into...not only fun to see/hear them, but remember it is a party, so anything could happen! Tuning into a webcast is a great excuse to go absolutly nowhere and always be there too.

You can also see/hear more of Cloud Trucker: www.myspace.com/cloudtruckerpants

Hope you check it out, I will be watching in my jammies too!

Little Mahoning Creek Pottery

Little Mahoning Creek Pottery is nestled in the heart of a tiny little town with a small artist community, called Smicksburg, PA. Smicksburg also happens to be smack in the middle of a large Amish community. Nancy Smeltzer is the person who started up L.M.C.P. I first met Nancy in the fall of 2004 and immediately caught on to her good vibe.This image is to provide you, gentle reader, with a better visual understanding of place and the sometimes difficult (during the winter) trek it can be...on the road to Smicksburg.

Here is Nancy thinking about making some pots inside the studio and again outside the house with me distracting her from actually making pots ...
This is the studio in the dead of winter...note the snow and dreary sky. Nancy has been generous enough to offer me a space within the studio...I moved my wheel and all into the studio this past fall. I have been firing the wood kiln with Nancy for around two years or more now.

Nancy is a mad wood collector! One thing I learned real quick...it's all about the wood, baby! These are some of Nancy's stacks of wood as well as the stacks of the kilns...wood fire kiln and salt fire kiln under there.

Here is where all the magic takes place (and sweat, and back problems, and drinking!) This is a bourry box wood kiln. The stoke hole is covered by that little metal door on the lower right, and the ware chamber is that big open space and the chimney is just on the other side. What a sweet firing kiln! Nancy and I have it down to about 24-26 hours!

Here is some of the beautiful wood fired vessels that Nancy has recently finished...

The birds are a common motif of decoration for the quirky Ms. Smeltzer as are cats and the occasional horse.

Nancy is a serious bird watcher!

Nancy Smeltzer's work is wonderfully loose, well designed, and very well fired! Most of her work is decorated with her unique style of drawing directly into the clay surface and then adding glazes and slips to finish the pieces. It has been my good fortune to know Nancy Smeltzer and to consider her a friend, and to also be able to call Little Mahoning Creek Pottery my home base studio.

If you would like to see more images running in a slideshow go to :www.myspace.com/homefryceramics

Top Ten from 07'

Dear gentle reader,
If any of you are like me, you might say 2007 was not that great of a year...but it did have a handful (two handfuls really) of memorable and/or standout moments... or maybe just some things that made the whole stinking year a little more tolerable. So this is how bored you can be on snowy days stuck in the house, here is my top ten from the year that was 2007. These are in NO ORDER...none, nada, that would be way too much work for this blog writer. Feel free to get cozy and bored with me and leave your top ten list in the comments. Here goes...(are you hearing a drum role too).

10. Graduating with an M.F.A.
9. Wife, daughter and I cruise to Bermuda for the week!
8. Wilco CD...Sky Blue Sky
7. Daughter's first day of kindergarten
6. Dale Chihuly exhibit at Phipps Conservatory...great plants, surreal glass landscapes,awesome
5. Artist residency @ Artist Enclave at I-Park...1 month...East Haddam, CT. work,work,work
4. Having my work chosen for the postcard of 'small works' exhibit...Lillstreet Art Center,

Chicago,Il.
3. First big NFL game...Steelers vs. Jags...my hometown and my adopted new one...SNOW!
2. Seeing the Yo La Tengo "concert" at the Warhol, intimate,wife and I sat in 2nd row middle,

amazingly cool and beautiful

1. My little girl's face this past Christmas...Santa is so alive at five...

Return to the mothership...

Winter whipped through my garden and left only skeletons in its wake. This disturbed the colony of of sheepish garden squid that had sought refuge in the tall zinnias. Only so very rarely had I ever caught a glimpse of those elusive creatures, and usually it was only a tip of a tentacle sliding behind the dense lower growth of the garden. Recently, this all changed and I became a believer on the last full moon.
That evening as I grappled with the garbage can, I heard a rustling from the stiff and mostly frozen corpses that I once called echinacea, giant dahlias, and zinnias. More rabbits making their winter burrows in the aftermath of my garden I just figured. When all of a sudden there was a flash of pink light in the sky directly over the moon. As I looked up I could make out the faintest linear shape coming into slight pinkish focus and layering over the bright full moon. It looked to be petals unfurling from a central point and stretching out and across the illuminated night sky only to dip downward towards my frozen patch of western Pennsylvania. And that's when I saw them, tentacles reaching to meet the crisp black air currents coming from seemingly everywhere. There were two or three already rising from behind the large winter structure that was my green and yellow stripped zebra grass and from the corner of my eye I saw a larger one ascending into the breeze. Several more escaped my mountainous rhododendron and the last one deftly maneuvered through the barbs of the roses. They floated upwards and followed the path that the strange pinkish petals seemed to be making in the sky. Their long bodies moved like kites jerking on a string in a strong breeze. They were awkward in the air but still moved with direction and purpose. Tentacles touched the rooftops and flapped like streamers moving steadily upwards. Within a minute it was over and all traces of this strange happening were gone. I debated about telling my wife about the encounter because she would think that I am doing more than just taking the garbage out.
I knocked the snow from my boots and tossed them in the corner of the mudroom as I came in the house. Still bewildered from what I had just witnessed, I walked through the kitchen and into the large windowed nook on the back of my dining room to once again stare blankly up into the full moon sky. There my five year old daughter stood with her eye still affixed to the lens of her new telescope that Santa had brought for Christmas. Without looking up she gave me a thumbs up sign and said, "Don't worry Dad they'll be back".

New mugs and...

I'm posting images of some of my new work that won't be appearing on my Etsy site...well, at least not any time soon. This first image is a wood fired mug with shino glazes and a Rob's green over the lip. It sports one of my new decal images in a wrap-around fashion...this series of images I'm calling "winter structures." This particular image is the top portion of a large tree near my home now bare for the winter season.

This is the "Fool's Gold" mug ...a wood fired beauty that I have refired 2 more times. The first 04 decal is that of a prostitute which I lifted from a 15th century German wood block print. The second is a gold lustre commercial decal that was fired at a much lower temperature...gotta have that bling!

Here's a great little tea cup....I love this piece, the picture does not do this cup justice. Juicy, juicy glaze...rich, reduced slip... good ash...it must have been in the sweetest spot inside the kiln.

These are wall tiles that I created in collaboration with my friend Nancy Smeltzer. Nancy is a wonderful potter with a unique and distinctive style. She is the one person operation that is Little Mahoning Creek Pottery. This also happens to be where I have been wood firing for the last couple of years and the main place where I am the squatter potter! Nancy made the forms and I created the images by layering laser printed decals and commercial decals in a surreal collage.