Paul Chenoweth

At some point this last year, I looked at Mitchell Grafton‘s amazing characters in ceramic enough to say, “I really need to give this approach a shot.”  Matt Chenoweth, my instructor for this last semester,  encouraged me to go beyond just brushing on underglazes and to experiment with the blending possibilities that come with airbrushing.

I’m not quite to the airbrushing stage, but I am starting to get a feel for what happens to different colors of underglaze as they are applied to bisqueware then fired to very high temperatures (Cone 10).  Parts of me like the idea of applying a material to a piece that actually fires out at the same color…that certainly isn’t the case for many ceramic glazes.  Parts of me aren’t crazy about the results because I am not yet comfortable with the fit between color, form, and control that show up on the finished product.  There is a fit out there somewhere, evidently beyond my comfort zone, where a series of ceramic musical instruments with varied human facial expressions will communicate my vision of a Face the Music series.

It isn’t a stretch to connect music and human emotion.  It isn’t a stretch to understand that not all of those emotions/expressions are the same.  What remains for me to see is whether a new approach with more color under better control can take me down a path to a successful series of ocarinas like the one pictured here.

I would like to attribute my March writing-absence from the world of potters, ceramics, and all things clay art to something besides getting older.  There was this Madness thing going around…and my family stays up to their eyeballs in basketball when the Belmont Bruins are playing.  Then, there are these little guys (and one princess) that are called grandchildren that seem to provide an endless source of entertainment. Then again, old man winter kicked me out of the studio for an extended period…I could go on.

Surprising to me, is the amount of clay work that I have accomplished in the last few months.  I re-discovered the hypnotism of doing raku firings and have enjoyed my venture into the world of whimsical masks that have been raku fired.  Those pieces now outnumber any other artwork hanging in my office.  I fully anticipated that it would be something else (like several ceramic musical instruments)…but, no.

And, after a year of procrastinating/pondering the use of custom decals, I have made several, applied them to test pieces, and successfully fired them.  It took a little digging, but the discovery that my old HP LaserJet printer ink contains iron in the pigment, made it a good candidate for water-slide-off, paper decals.  Like so many things in the word of ceramics, making one’s own decals takes a bit of planing and set-up time, but the results are simply cool.  If I can quit jumping up-and-down long enough, I might even get images of new cityscape bottles online with the decal embellishments.

So. March is gone. It was the best of Madness. It was the worst of missed writing opportunities. It was the age of procrastination. It was the age of re-discovering lost arts.  I evidently missed the Dickens out of March!

The modern day context of an employee reporting the wrong doings of an organization, (i.e. Whistleblowing) is reborn here. Whistleblowing crusaders rarely wear a mask or a visual identifier of their actions…being real people builds credibility more-so than anonymity.  However, it frequently means less than pleasant consequences for the individual.

But what if that elite fraternity of credible whistleblowers wore a mask. And what if the mask wasn’t a means to conceal the intent but instead to clearly identify the wearer’s intent to be a whistleblower.  Well, here it is.

Let’s not get all practical and explain how silly this is. This mask is more of a narrative.  The person behind the mask has a covert view but displays an overt intent.  The cynics of the world might say that real life whistleblowers are more likely to have an overt view, but a covert intent.  For me, I see this as a piece that hangs on the wall greeting the owner with the message, “there is a Whistleblower watching you, you have been warned!”

The freshly formed Lizella Clay piece pictured here will fire to a terra cotta color in the first firing and will be highlighted with stains and glaze in a second, Cone 6 oxidation firing…available in early March 2014.

Looking at the list of The 10 Best Cities to be an Artist, I feel like Nashville is in pretty good company and should be pleased to be holding down the Number 6 spot…and I am really surprised/pleased that Atlanta, another city in the South, is ranked Number 1.   I’d like to actually hear from some of the artists in these cities to get their particular perspectives.  For instance, I can see where Nashville is a great place to be an artist, but is there a strong community of artists, particularly in the visual arts?

This is another test of the 3-D gears-on-tiles that I started a week or so ago. This time, I used old clock gears to make imprints into the tiles as a textured background for the project.  Hopefully, a little stain or wiped-off glaze in the imprints will add dimension to the piece.

When finished, this set will be mounted and framed 12″ x 12″ panel.  I’m still pondering if the mechanics implied by the gears should produce something that overflows the half-cup in the lower Left-hand quadrant..or, if light emitting from the cup might be a better effect.

The best news about this sort of project is it can be spread over several days of preparation and the actual construction completed in a relatively short span of time.  The 3-d gears begin as small bottle-top flanges that are cut from a larger lump of clay on the wheel (throwing off the hump).   That first part, the preparation, really does give new meaning to getting it in gear.

As the popularity of JK Rowling’s characters exploded, the likelihood of successfully searching Google for a local potter /craftsman by including the word “potter” in a search string diminished dramatically.  I posted that issue on a forum over at ceramicartsdaily.org just recently and received good reactions to my post, “Google – Find a Potter“.  The consensus of opinion from a small group of responder (but very engaged/passionate responders) is that the following search terms are most likely the best to use when searching for a potter/clay-artist…obviously, if you know the individual’s name or the name of the studio your chances of success are excellent.  But what if you are in a new place and just want to see who-is-doing-what with clay?  Here are the recommended search terms:

• pottery
• ceramics
• potter
• crafters
• hand made

I like this list, even though I’m scratching my head about still including “potter” on that list (no offense, Harry).  So, here goes.  I reviewed the meta data, title tags, and content on my own site and have made sure that these words are included…ok, I excluded crafters to avoid the whole clay is a craft not an art debate.  In the next month or so, the amount of time that it seems to take Google to circle back around to index the content on my web site, I hope to enter “Nashville” plus some of these terms and have my site show up on the first page of the search results.  I tried it today, and…nothing – not even page 2 or 3, so today is my baseline for this experiment.

For those who actually use Google to find clay artists and potters when you are on the road, I would be curious to know if you use other search terms…I guarantee that there are artists out there who need to know! And for the hard working potters in the world, take note: look at your web content and make sure that your copy includes descriptive words that people might actually use to find you (see list above).  Don’t be a muggle…use your magic to be discovered on the web!

P.S, And bless all those clay-artists/potters whose actual name is “Harry“.
P.P.S. Yes, I get it. This very post is the most likely to return in search simply for the concentration of key words…we shall see:)
P.P.P.S.  No one uses “Home Page” in a search engine  to find you, so use something else in you title tag…trust me on this!!