Serious and Silly

When I'm inspired to make something in clay it's really serious to me. By serious I mean I've had an artistic feeling or vision or inspiration I am working out in the clay. Perhaps you recall the moon craters I am trying to recreate in this pinched bowl. I changed the design for the slip and glaze application for this pinch bowl and I applied the slip today.

The photo is taken facing down, but the bowl opens out like a large trumpet, so when it is sitting on a table the inside can be seen easily from a sitting position. When I fire the piece in the final firing I will apply the glaze in either four triangles or four bands in the same direction as the slip. It's hard to picture what it will look like in my mind's eye because my sketches are on white paper and the background color of the clay is dark and will fire black. I'll leave plain clay between the glazed sections as contrast. I really hope the glaze will bubble up again and make the same raised dots. If this works out I'll be really happy.


This is a flat coiled bowl, front and reverse, I applied slip to today. I'm not sure I like the way the slip looks. It's supposed to be mountains and in my mind I wanted the slip to be solid white and contrast with the black clay. I've set the piece aside to think about it for a while. I can always paint more slip and make it more solid or scrape it all off and start over again.


These are the two hump mold bowls I made last week. They finally dried enough to apply the slip. Originally I was going to fill the inside of the bowl with leaves and have a cat peaking through the leaves like the photo I took of Bones from my RV. I could only find my blue, green and black mason stains, so I was limited to those colors and decided to wait on the cat peaking from behind the leaves.

The previous pieces are what I call my serious pieces and these two are the silly ones. I have another couple of sketches I was going to use for these two plates, but again the color of slip I wanted to use I couldn't find. Also for some reason I wasn't in the mood to draw something serious on these plates. I have lots of these cat drawings in my sketch book. The cats are doodles I draw all the time. I decided to try a couple of my cat sketches on these plates with black colored slip.

My ink and pencil sketches are much better than my slip sketches. I wish the lines were thinner and more like my sketch book drawings. I need a thinner paint brush or thinner slip or perhaps just stain and water. I also need a lot more practice. For some reason I thought it would be fun to make something silly with clay. I think I need to push myself to let more silly into my life to balance out the serious. What do you think? Do you make things in clay just for the humor or fun of it? Gary said he liked my bowls much better than the plates. I guess that's his polite way of saying he doesn't like my cats. He hasn't seen the moon crater bowl or the mountain bowl I'll see what he says when he gets back this evening.