Paul Gauguin: Paris 1889

We're heading out of town for a few days to see an exhibit at The Cleveland Museum of Art showcasing the work of Paul Gauguin. This is the museum's pitch for the show:

This landmark exhibition gathers about 75 paintings, works on paper, woodcarvings, and ceramics by Paul Gauguin and his contemporaries to explore how the artist created his signature style during the year 1889. Co-organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Paul Gauguin: Paris, 1889 re-creates on a smaller scale the radical independent exhibition that Gauguin organized with his artistic disciples on the grounds of the 1889 Exposition Universelle—a display of about 100 paintings now recognized as the first Symbolist exhibition in Paris.

We'll give you all a review when we return.

Musikfest

It's Musikfest here in Bethlehem. This is actually my first time experiencing the week long shindig and I must say that it is pretty damn awesome. In attendance at the festival they have some pretty big names playing at their larger venues, but the real gems are the not so big names with incredible talent who sometimes don't get a stage at all. The video below is a guy who's shtick is called Cast in Bronze. He made this four-ton contraption and I believe it's the only one of it's kind. Needles to say, I was impressed.



The real surprise of the performance came at the end of his gig and unfortunately we didn't get it on video. So this guy has this whole quite medieval thing going, like he's a monk or from Cirque du Soleil, but then he dropped the bomb and spoke. I kid you not, the cat sounds just like Comic Book Guy. The contradiction was so intense I almost started to drool from laughter.

Country Mouse

Last week I heard a clip on NPR about drawbacks some newer museums have been experiencing with the design of their buildings. Apparently the problem they're having is that the celebrity architects brought on to draw up the buildings are using the space to showcase their abilities rather than showcase art. The example they used to explain what they meant by "celebrity architects" were the Guggenheim Museums. To be quite honest I didn't know there was more than one.


The Guggenheim in New York City is just another example of why I think Frank Lloyd Wright is the shit. I've been to Falling Water an number of times, so I know how well he works with space, but damn did he do a fantastic job on this museum. Simply put, it encourages exploration. We constantly found ourselves peeking around corners and leaning over edges. Each space felt private, but aware of the whole. It was like we swam through the seven floors without ever leaving the first.


And then there was the art. Never have I been to a museum with a series of collections like this. I think the only permanent exhibit is the Thannhauser collection, which is an impressive mix of Picasso, Manet, a Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and many others.

The show we were really interested to see was the Catherine Opie collection. Her exhibit is political, tender, violent, and by far the most beautiful collection of photography I've ever had the joy to see in person.


We did do some other things. Mainly we avoided midtown Manhattan; that place was a mad house.

Arts and Crafts 4

Last night I picked up the results of the wood firing and these four are my favorites.

I was also pleased to see the results of my postcard pot, but as you can see, there is still a lot of work to be done.

There will be another wood firing in February, so I have a good chunk of time to practice and produce.

On a reflective note, I know that I am not the most talented potter; I make pots to relax and share ideas with people. For some reason I feel that I need to make this disclaimer, because I don't want to come off like I'm the bee's knees or some other shit like that.

Arts and Crafts 3

The kiln gods were in a fine mood yesterday. The weather was perfect, we got to temperature, and we didn't hear any pops or crashes from within. There really isn't much to say, other than that my hands are a little achy. I noticed that there is a lot of gripping and holding on to things. Granted, I don't wear gloves for the most part, but even still I don't think that would help. One of the women I fired with said I was trying to be macho, but I like to think that I am not a slave to gender stereotypes.
-Oh yeah, we were mentioned in someone's blog the other day and again were referenced as "two ladies." I really don't mind (hell, I've been living with it all my life), but I do feel kind of bad that some lesbian garden fantasies may be shattered when they discover I pee standing up. Oh well.

Back to the kiln.

The first visual signs of heat.

The first blast of body reduction.

What's happening here is that the air is being choked from the kiln, which creates a high-carbon atmosphere. The carbon richness is what will get the clay body brown and toasty.

As we gained higher temperatures, the flames would lick out of the peep hole for oxygen. You can also see how the bricked door is sealed with newspaper covered in slip.

Red heat

The flames reach through the chimney.

The flames from the fire box don't simply fill the kiln with a giant ball of fire; what they do is snake through the pots. I could try to explain how this is done, but it would take a while and I'm sure that I would butcher it. However, the flame that is spurting from the chimney is probably well over 60 feet long. At this point someone will call stokes when the flame pulls into the kiln and that signals to whomever is at the firebox to add more wood.

The stokes are called until temperature is reached.

I think it was around this time that we started drinking. We had a damn good crew.

I'll be heading back to the studio on Friday and I will give you an update then on how the pots turned out.

Arts and Crafts 2.5

The firing went well today. The fireboxes were lit at 7:00 in the morning and made it to cone ten around 6:00 this evening. I'll try to post more about it tomorrow, but right now I am wore out and I haven't seen Meg all weekend.

Wish list:
A portable tripod

Arts and Crafts 2

Wood firings at the studio take three days to load and fire. It then takes another three days for things to cool before we can unload. Unfortunately we had to work in the rain, which is not swell when the object of the whole process is to get things real hot and bone dry. Oh well, we'll make do.


These are the pots I built for the occasion. Everything this time around is hand built.


This is about half the pots we will stack in our 40 cubic foot kiln.


This is the first layer of shelves. As you can see, this kiln is in pretty bad shape. The studio is currently trying to raise the $50,000 it will take to build a new one. They should have started saving when it was originally built, but I guess you live and learn.


This is what it looks like packed with the bag walls up. I like to put my pieces where they will receive the most amount of fire and ash.


We bricked the door to end the day. We will seal the cracks tomorrow morning and get the fires going by 7:00.

Arts and Crafts

This weekend I will be participating in another wood firing. In my class we were asked to replicate a pot of our choosing found in a stack of postcards. I chose the flask pictured above.

As you can see, my go at it is a bit off. (When I say a bit, I mean way.) However, she did say that we had to make it our own and that we weren't supposed to simply copy it exactly. Phew. After I took this photo, I applied some black iron oxide and a green cone ten glaze. I'll take a photo of it before we load it to be fired.

If you happen to run into a clay god this weekend, please ask it to be kind to my pots.

Pots

As promised, here are a few of the pots from the wood firing two weeks ago. This summer I desperately tried to learn some semblance of concinstency on the wheel, but it came to no avail. Granted, some potters will spend years crafting their form on the wheel, so I wasn't expecting miracles, but my relationship with the clay was far from what I was looking for. I think what it was is that the process of pot building on the wheel is a little too fast for me. It's not the spinning that's too fast, but the actual beginning to end stages that seem, well, without kinship.

I shared this concern with my ceramics instructor and she recommended that I look into a treadle wheel. While looking for it on the internet I discovered that the treadle wheel was actually designed by Bernard Leach, and his grandson Simon has some fantastic Youtube videos on pots, pots building, and the Leach wheel.



In the near future I will begin to pester my brother to help me build one of these things. He's pretty handy with a torch and hot metal. In the mean time I'm going to stick with hand building.

Wood Firing

I spent this past weekend at a local art studio for a wood firing. I just got back into ceramics last year after an especially long hiatus. Back when I made pots and such kind of regular, I never had the opportunity to participate in this kind of firing. It is tremendously labor intensive, but the results are fantastic.

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the loading (forgot my camera) but I was able to get in some clicks on the second day before things got real busy. On day two I got there around seven in the morning and by noon we had a crew of about ten or twelve.

The fires were started around 6:30 in the morning and they reached cone ten around 5:00. The gentleman in charge of the firing said that when we reached cone ten, the flame from the fire would be around 60 feet in length and it would snake all through the pots before it sparked out of the chimney.

The pots will be cool enough to unload in about three days. If all went well I'll be sure to share some shots.