August 2021 – Ornamento

Smooth Your Bottom

By: ornamento.blog August 26, 2021August 25, 2021

Art, creativity, pottery studio tipsArt, pottery, Pottery and Ceramics, pottery wheelLeave a Comment

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to smooth the bottom of bisque fired pottery. Simply take a square of 80 grit wet-dry sandpaper and affix it to your wheel head with a glue stick. Hold your pot bottom to the sandpaper and spin. This will kick up dust, so you might not want to do it in a shared space. You should also wear a mask. You can sponge a little water onto the sandpaper to unclog it and to cut down on dust. When you’re done, just wipe off the wheel with a towel and it’s clean again.

Always better to start with a smooth bottom though!

Here’s a video I just came across on YouTube with some great pointers for sanding safely. Try dipping the bottom of your pot in water before using the wheel. I think this would be more effective than wetting the sandpaper on the wheel.

More Teapots

By: ornamento.blog August 19, 2021August 18, 2021

Art, Pottery and Ceramics, teapotsArt, Made at Fleisher, Pottery and CeramicsLeave a Comment

More teapots even though I don’t drink much tea. I’m not sure where these are going to end up. Some of my little teapots have found new homes.

Not Your Mother’s Majolica

By: ornamento.blog August 12, 2021August 3, 2021

Art, Ceramics, Fleisher Art Memorial, majolica, pottery, Pottery and CeramicsArt, Fleisher Art Memorial, Low Fire Glazing, majolica2 Comments

Majolica glaze is a white tin or zinc-based glaze that provides a smooth coating on terracotta clay and acts as a perfect foil for underglaze decorations which are painted on top of the Majolica glaze. The beauty of the Majolica is that it doesn’t move, so anything you paint on top of it stays put. For an explanation of the process, press here and here.

Here are some classic examples: tiles from Portugal.

MajolicaTilesPortugal

So I probably should not have been delighted when I took this out of the kiln.

8-out-of-the-kiln

And yet, I was. To be fair, I didn’t start off conventionally. I took a terracotta bud vase, dipped it in a cone 04 dipping glaze called Ice Blue (you can get the recipe in a free booklet on the Ceramic Arts Network site here. )

The glaze has chunks in it and it’s supposed to run and collect in crevices. It can look interesting when you use it on white earthenware (see right) and beyond boring over terracotta (middle).

We have a bucket of Majolica glaze in the studio and I decided to experiment. I had to dip the vase three times to get a good coat, letting the glaze dry completely between coats. You can see the crackling and crazing from the Ice Blue glaze in the right hand picture below that might have looked interesting had it been on the right kind of clay.

7-underglaze-decoration

I let the glaze dry overnight before adding the underglaze decoration.

7-underglaze-decoration

And here’s what I got! This was fired at cone 06. I surmise that the Majolica and the underglaze shifted because the Ice Blue glaze beneath it moved. I am not sure what I expected. Not everyone will like this, but for me it was a pleasant surprise.

Pericles, A Prince in Clark Park

By: ornamento.blog August 5, 2021August 6, 2021

ArtPericles A Prince in Clark Park, Shakespeare in Clark ParkLeave a Comment

I’ve read most of Shakespeare’s plays, but I wasn’t familiar with Pericles, Prince of Tyre, categorized as a “romance,” until I was treated to a wonderful production in West Philadelphia by the Shakespeare in Clark Park Theater Company. From what I understand, Shakespeare probably didn’t write Pericles, Prince of Tyre in its entirety. (There are those who claim that Shakespeare didn’t write any of his plays. But there will always be people like that who think they need to argue about something. Like those people who claim the Monkees of didn’t play their own instruments.) But he wrote enough of it that it has that imitable Shakespearean flavor: shipwrecks, tragically missed opportunities, secret identities, separated lovers, evil kings, cruel twists of fate and a smattering of comedy that keeps the action from devolving into melodrama.

The plot goes something like this: Evil King Antiochus of Antioch wants to keep his comely, marriageable daughter for himself. To this end, the nefarious king gives all her would-be suitors a riddle to solve that insures she will never marry any of them. Our hero, Prince Pericles, wants to marry the daughter, so he’s eager to try solving the riddle. King Antiochus tries to dissuade him, because there’s a law that whoever fails to solve the riddle, will be killed. What our hero doesn’t know is that if he solves the riddle, his goose is also cooked because the solution will reveal a sordid family secret. As Pericles guesses the meaning of the riddle, he realizes that he’s in a major pickle. He wisely resists blurting out the answer. King Antiochus realizes, however, that Pericles knows the ugly truth. He suspends the sentence, however and gives Pericles forty days before he is killed. Our hero takes this opportunity to get out of Dodge. King Antiochus hires an assassin to follow and dispatch him before he spills the beans. The play goes on from there. It’s a bit disjointed, and not all the loose ends are tied up neatly, but it was the perfect vehicle for a summer’s evening outdoors in Clark Park.