Time for more pottery pix and talk

I've been immersing myself in pottery activities this week. Just a disclaimer about the content of this post. I'll be talking about cones and reduction and carbon trapping and stuff that won't make sense. It may not even make sense to my fellow potters because I don't know enough about it yet to talk intelligently. (Some may argue that talking intelligently is a past-time I've never engaged in!!)

Hold on, need a coffee refill......Ah! That's better! I'm going to have to find a coffee shop that roasts their beans daily when we get up to Indiana. I dunno if Hoosiers allow such high-falutin' behavior, I'll have to ask my son-in-law.

I've made a couple friends at the Odyssey Center. They're 2 ladies about my age (when you're my age, that can mean a decade in either direction, so I apologize if either of them is a lot younger than me!!) Anyways, 2 ladies who work as studio assistants at the center have befriended me. They know that I'm interested in learning all I can about kilns and firing so they offered to let me help them load the gas kiln on Monday and hang out while they fired it Tues. The center has them keep pretty meticulous firing logs, and they're making me copies of several of their logs so I'll have them to refer to when I start learning to fire my own gas kiln. Even tho it's a completely different type of kiln, any experience I can get should be beneficial.

It also offered me the opportunity to hang out at the center all day Tuesday when it's normally not open for students to work independently because there are classes going on. (It's not what you know, but who you know!!) So I finished up some pieces that have been taking forever!

I went in at 6 am to get the ball rolling and didn't get home until 10 pm; it was a long day and I was pretty pooped yesterday! Today we're unloading once it's cool enough.

Since it was still firing Tues. evening I got to sit in on a class that was being taught by a very talented potter from the area, Leah Leitson. She does beautiful work in porcelain and besides being a skilled potter, she's also an excellent instructor (as I've discovered, that doesn't always go hand in hand.) She was also not afraid to demonstrate her methods. Happily, this is the case with most potters, but I've come across a few who seem to be worried that a student will "steal" their methods. I think that the potters who worry about that have a pretty low self-esteem. I agree that there is a fine line between being "inspired" by other potters and actually "stealing" their methods, but most of the potters I know who are still learning (which some would say is all of us) incorporate methods and styles of many other potters into their work.

Let me digress for one moment about taking inspiration from others. Several well-known potters actually encourage others to "steal" ideas. Dick Lehman explains it this way, "If you are going to take someone else's idea or be influenced by another's inspiration, steal it - make it your own. If you take inspiration from another, have the integrity, courage and courtesy to develop the idea, to invest in it, to reinvent it, to make it more than it was." I think he's absolutely right! And ironically, he admits to "stealing" this idea from another potter, Marvin Bartel, who stole the concept from a poet, Nick Linsey!!! Who said, "There's nothing new under the sun?" (I suppose we could argue the source of that quote!!)

Getting back to the Leah Leitson demo, I can't wait to try incorporating some of her methods into my pieces!! And I'll happily give her credit for being my inspiration. She attributed some of her methods to other potters. That's the beauty of it! I wish I had been able to take more pictures while she was working, but I didn't think about it until too late. Here's a fabulous little teapot, I love the pouty spout and the feet on it!!

So to add even more exciting pottery activity going on all around me, we unloaded the salt-kiln Tuesday!! We got some really juicy pots (that's a good thing!) Here's a link to pictures of my work from this firing. As I look closer at some of the pieces, I see some problems, but over all I was pleased with the firing. It's the first time I can remember opening the kiln and actually liking what I saw right off the bat.

Many times potters have pre-conceived ideas about what a piece should look like when it comes out of the kiln, but after you judge it for its own merits, not what you think its merits should be, you learn to at least live with it, if not like it better than you would've if it came out the way you had envisioned it. (I'm sensing that this could be some sort of deep analogy for a life experience, something to do with relationships, but I'm still too tired from my busy week to explore it further and this blog's already too long!)

So I will end this blog with a few pictures from the salt-kiln..............

This is the kiln-opening...if you want to see it larger, click on it.

This is one of my favorite tumblers. I'm doing lotsa leaves, influeced by Suze Lindsay, among others!!

And now I had better sign off so I can go help unload the gas kiln!!! I guess I never did get to cones, reduction, and carb0n trapping. We'll save that for a future post!!