Pottery is my first love. It comes before polymer, before metal smithing, before lamp working, before everything. From the time I was a little kid, I knew that as soon as I tried it I would love it.
I didn’t have pottery classes of any kind in school. Well, I did get to go to a paint your own pottery shop with my Girl Scout troop and paint a candle holder for my mother and a fish dish that could be an ash tray or hold change for my father. Except my mother didn’t burn candles and my father kept his coins in a change purse. But I had fun. I still have the candle holder somewhere.
In fact, I didn’t get to take a pottery class until I had graduated from college. I was working for the summer in Atlantic City managing some rooming houses who had a rather exotic clientele. I found out that there was a class at the local Community College. I convinced a friend that “he really wanted to take a pottery class.” I didn’t have wheels and needed a way to get there. Surprisingly, he acquiesced.
The first time I sat down at a wheel, I smacked a ball of clay on the wheel head, turned the wheel on and watched in horror as the ball of clay shot across the room and bounced off a table. Everyone froze. After that, I was more careful. Much more careful.
And you would think that now that I am retired and have all the time in the world to write blog posts, that I would not leave them until the last minute. “But no,” she said. Because I am spending most of my time in the pottery studio. I have not made any pottery in 25 years and I have a whole new group of victims friends upon whom to bestow my clay creations.
I am trying some new things; I have never made glazed beads before or used a bead tree and I am having fun with that.
I am throwing pots and then altering the forms. And I am trying different surface treatments including screen printing using underglazes.
Making a decent print and transferring it to the clay is challenging and there are several methods of doing it. If I get interesting results, I will post them.
And I do tend to get grimy in the studio. Not as grimy as the guy in the scraps bucket, but pretty close!
Ornamento 