more cullet glass

He's a rock star.

Again, I don't know what this glass will do in the kiln, but I'll be interested to see. In the meantime, I might try and affix some of this stuff to some eyes after firing (though that seems like cheating).

Face Jug of the Month Club

So, I had an interesting idea:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190282610007

The auction is for a subscription (the only one so far) to my Face Jug of the Month Club. Every month or so, I'll send along a new face jug to the winner. I'll include my usual mix of creepy things and even creepier things. . . .

It'll be fun to see how things turn out.

In the meantime, here are some in-progress jugs:



The crazy shiny eyes are cullet glass, the kind that makes reflective road stripes reflective. I found a pile of it on the way home a few months ago. . . I just wish it would shine that way after firing, but there's no hope.

melting clay for eyes

I spent a pleasant hour or so watching Peter Lenzo work this morning. He is a meticulous glazer.

The devil jug in the post before this one, which I still like after a few months, and which is therefore looking down on me now as I type, has got a melted left eye. I know that it's obvious, but what surprised me is how well it turned out.

To come up with a melting clay, I ran a series of experiments. I started with a base of Highwater Clay's white earthenware and added frit (Ferro 3195) in varying percentages (by weight).

For the electric kiln, cone 6, 80% clay and 20% frit worked best.

So I guessed that for the wood kiln, cone 10, 90% clay and 10% frit would work well. It did, by and large -- it produced the eye in the devil jug below, as well as this guy's eye:



But the same mix also produced this unmelted result:



A mystery.

This blog has been neglected, among the various vagaries of our lives. Fortunately, we don't have any readers.

We're going to put in another wood firing with Michel Bayne in a week or so, but I still haven't had time to make it out to the shop. Today is slipping away, and tomorrow is booked. Such is the way of things.

Included in this post are a couple of my favorite pieces from this year. Note the heavy Peter Lenzo influence. (He's told me I don't need to pay any licensing fees.)

marketing theory and practice

I have a theory that we'd sell more pots if this were a quasiliterate screed.

alkaline glazes: a failed first glaze

When I finally started working with Greg on making pottery, we decided that we should mix up our own glazes. The commercial offerings we'd seen weren't all terribly impressive.

We wanted a variety of colors, but the glaze we most wanted to make was an alkaline glaze -- something that would connect our pottery to the folk tradition that began in South Carolina.

We had some successes later on. . .




. . . but I want to talk about the failures first. They're much more interesting.

We misremembered the first recipe we got -- what we heard was a 3:1 ratio of clay body to lime. Nothing else. For our cone 6 firing.

We didn't know that was a problem at the time.

We did some things right. We weighed everything out very carefully and wrote down exactly what we'd done. We were keen to try the glaze, so we didn't try it out on test tiles. We hadn't even made any test tiles yet. . . .

So the glaze went onto two or three mugs and went into the kiln. We waited out the firing, and anxiously opened it when things had cooled down a bit.

The mugs that had been glazed in our first alkaline glaze looked like sandpaper. They felt like sandpaper. They _behaved_ like sandpaper: the grit would come off, but only if we rubbed vigorously, and it abraded whatever we used to rub the mugs.

We tended to underfire the old kiln just a bit, so we refired the mugs when we got the new kiln. The glaze improved, but the mugs are still unusable -- there are spots that look great, and there are spots that look rough. Like sandpaper.

I'll see if I can get a picture of the mugs to post here. They're still in the barn, as a warning (and because they look pretty cool, as long as they're on a shelf ten feet up).

Greg's African face jug

I've got a great piece of Greg's up on eBay at the moment:


There's a similar piece of African artwork -- a bust -- that Greg used as a model. He shaped the face before he added the upper part of the jug and spot, then added in the finer details to finish the jug.

The glaze is our homemade iron oxide glaze.

I think the piece is amazing -- it's one of my favorites of Greg's, and I'm sad to see it go. It'll make a buyer quite happy, though.

altered face jugs

I began altering the wet clay of face jugs in May -- I'd been turning for six months at that point. We'd just gotten back from several shows in Georgia, where I had the opportunity to talk with a few potters about composition methods. The face jugs I found most interesting had been shaped while the clay was wet. The potters hadn't just added clay, and sometimes hadn't added any clay at all (or nearly none). They shaped the face in the wet clay, then added details as necessary. (One potter said he'd throw the jug up to the neck, shape the face, then throw the neck. . . .)

When Greg and I got back in the workshop, we started experimenting with the technique. It seemed to fit our general aesthetic, whatever that might be. :)

Pretty soon, Greg came up with the Fat Ghoul jug, pictured at left. I really like the shape -- the bulbous head combined with the strong features, and the fairly deep-set eyes and sharp browline. The poured-on ash glaze completes the look. (At the edges of ash glaze, there's a wet-looking area that's darker than completely unglazed clay. It's more pronounced on the Lizella than the redstone that's in this picture, but it adds to the creepy effect of a piece like this one.)

While Greg was coming up with this monstrosity, I produced a few pieces in Lizella (which was a new clay to us at the time -- Greg still hasn't really had the chance to give it a go). I found the wetness of the clay perfect for this sort of project. The Lizella also took the ash glaze even better than the Highwater redstone clay we usually use.

I've continued to experiment with shaping the wet clay of jugs, occasionally going so far as to add no details except the eyes. I've experimented with a couple different ways of shaping the face: I've thrown bottomless jugs, or cut off the bottoms, and I've cut a poking stick that has just the right curve to press out from the inside of a jug. I've also used a few classic works of art for reference.

One of my favorite pieces so far is a bust face jug of an old man, pictured at right. I used a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci as a reference, which gave me new ideas for the shape of the face as well as which details to emphasize. I was quite happy with the final product. . . even though it looked nothing like the source material. On the plus side, I can probably use the same piece for reference again. . . .

(And even as I was working on my sculptural skills, I let my potting skills slide. I made the bottom too thick on this guy, and it suffered during bisque firing.)

We've been trying to keep things new in the workshop: new glazes, new techniques, new clay, whatever new ideas occur to us. We hope it's interesting to viewers. It certainly is to us.

a bit of history: Town Drunk

One of my favorite recent pieces of Greg's is his Town Drunk jug, pictured to the left. It's tough to get a good sense of scale from this photo, but the jug is a large one, even for Greg. It's a generous gallon. . . at 10 inches high, it's an inch or so shorter than his usual gallon jugs, but a good bit broader.

I particularly like the expression on this guy. . . his eyes are expressive, but a little unfocussed. The simple punctuated pupils accentuate the vaguely blank look. The ears and nose are generous, and the lines show some wear in this character's life.

My favorite elements, of course, are the tiny jugs affixed to the head. When he began working on the face, Greg had just finished making a batch of small jugs. He turns these on the wheel, more or less just like the big ones. Usually, Greg decorates the small jugs just like the big ones, but he's been seeking out ways to add more and more detail to the jugs he's making. Greg planned out the additions carefully, then joined all the little jugs in a sort of crown around the head of the big jug.

Each is a separate vessel, so they can be played like tiny little jug-band jugs. (Three of them in a row are tuned to play "Mary Had a Little Lamb", which is a nice coincidence. :) They could each hold a tiny bit of mixer, but I digress. . . the really interesting elements to me are the visual complexity all those little pieces add, and the story. He's the town drunk, so he's got liquor on his mind.

The jug has provoked some great reactions. People have suggested new names (the best of which was Pothead), admired it, and commented on the detail. Most people realize immediately the amount of work that went into this piece, since it's clear that the little jugs are also handmade. One boy at a recent show even launched into a long story about the jug: if the little jugs were pressed in sequence, a diamond would rise up from the middle spout. Of course, an ominous voice would warn those present to beware. . . .

I'm impressed by Greg's imagination, but I'm really impressed by the spark it gives to viewers. They react to his imagination by coming up with ideas of their own.

Hiawassee Mountain Arts Festival, etc

We're back from a nice weekend at the Hiawassee Mountain Arts Festival. The venue there (the Georgia State Fairgrounds) is really nice -- a wooded lakeside loop surrounded by a series of small booths. The festival was well run and quite enjoyable.

We also had the good fortune to meet quite a few nice people. Lots of people seem to be interested in face jugs, whether or not they're interested in making a purchase, and we're always glad to talk about them. A good source for information on South Carolina potteries is the book Great and Noble Jar. A few of the early details are up for debate, so you can hear Greg's and my competing theories as to what went on. :)

Meanwhile, we've got an update to make, but our webpage is inexplicably down. I hope to have our webmistress straighten things out before too long.