PALO ALTO SHOW

The Palo Alto Clay and Glass Festival was this past weekend. Thank you to all who stopped by to buy and to talk art. It's a lot of work and I sometimes (while stuffing my pedestals into my vehicle) question whether it's worth the exertion. The answer is yes because it is one of the few times I get to show exactly the pieces I choose (not what some judge in some show chooses) and I get to talk about what I do and how I do it with people who are genuinely interested. So thank you all...you make it worthwhile.

SURGURY

I love the front of this piece, I love the back of this piece I even love the disembodied leg. But, I do not love them together. Fortunately, because I use paper clay, I can literally take a hammer to it and break the 2 halves apart. I think the leg will become part of a front-facing wall-hung piece and the back side will have a life of it's own as well. My new building method (more about this later) has brought me as many question as it has answers.

SHIPPING

After you make the art, show the art, sell the art....now you gotta ship it. I recently have been learning a great deal about how to protect and ship my work. For my money nothing protects the surface of the piece like memory foam. I wrap strategic areas before boxing it with bubble wrap. Then this goes inside a second box. Ideally this outer box is just large enough to allow for 2 inch thick pieces of styrofoam all around.  Fed X with 3rd party insurance is a good idea. I have used www.shippinginsured.com

NEW WHEELS

This is one of my favorite "older" pieces. The surface lacks what I have been able to give my more recent work. So she's getting a face-lift. A new base to add stability and a complete re-firing to improve the surface. Hello, beautiful!

ASSEMBLING

I have been building skyward with the the body parts I created in my first torrent of activity. It's much slower now as I consider how each piece fits into the whole. It must balance and work from all sides. I work on a turn-table so I can keep it flowing. 

CLEAN STUDIO/FULL STUDIO

I have been feeling the need to make something big. Maybe several somethings big. I felt I was lacking in studio space, but by cleaning off the cluttered work surfaces and putting a new top on 2 of them, I have made space for myself to work to the scale I had imagined. What I didn't imagine is just how exhausted I would become moving that much clay (about 50 lbs.) in the space of a few hours. Tomorrow I can start putting pieces together and see if I'm as clever as I think I am.

VOICES

I am always amazed how things pop up for me in my sketchbook. I have a chorus from my early teens that tells me how worthless I am. My best efforts to quiet them has met with limited success over the years. Now, here they are in my sketchbook. Bwa-ha-ha! Your in my world now! I am making a representative piece and guess what....nobody gets to speak. A discrete little piece of tape over their mouths should do it.