New Celadon Hareware

This summer I threw some cups, pitchers  and vases. 

I incised drawings into them.

Here are a few of the pieces from 2 months of work.

I have posted both sides of the Hareware vase with a postcard size drawing on Masonite with a bit of watercolor. The summer drawings on the clay  are a continuation of my watercolor drawings from the winter.

Below the  Bunny Vase is a vase with nudes based on the classic antiquity of "Lotus Eater" laziness. I include a couple of acrylic paintings that were done after the  drawing on the vessel with 2 sides of the bowl form.

 

Here are a few of the watercolor drawings from this past winter.

I used the same drawing style on both.

Here is a bunny lid on a floral bowl.

And the bevy of beauties with my new tiled fountain.

My Fountain

Voila! Here is my fountain in it's completed state.

Last year I created a new set of tiles.

I thought I would simply put them on a wall like the tiles I created for this wall in 2015. 

Then it occurred to me to make  them into a fountain.

 I made a simple unfired clay maquette of my thought.

I didn't know how to make this happen. 

A friend gave me his used pump. yay!

Another friend suggested I build it out with a planter box 

and line it with backer board.

 My husband and I found a shapely half of a table in the street and took it home to use as the main tiled back.

 I made a paper pattern of the shape to make the tiles to fit last December for the back of the fountain.

Our neighbor, who is magnificent with tools said he could build the planter type box in the front of the half table and seal it with backer board.

It started to rain in Los Angeles for months and the project went on hold.

Then last month, July 2017, he did the construction. It was great. 

I was in the midst of two months of joy throwing pots with a (borrowed for the summer) potters wheel. I had to make several more batches of tiles to fit the entire project.

These tiles are the interior front wall of the basin batch, the last batch.

These tiles are one of 4 bunny end tile groups in their beginning clay state. 

I roll out the clay into slabs and cut the tiles, line them up together and then I draw with a chopstick to get the incised lines. I letter and number them in their grid on the back so I don't get confused because they go through  two firings and get mixed.

You can see the interior glazed and installed end bunny in the photo above this one.

 There are bunnies on both ends, inside and out.

For the bottom tiles and the bunny tiles, I used Cone 6 instead of Cone 06 Lowfire because I was making HAREWARE, my functional Celadon Summer Pottery and it was on my mind and something I was working with.

I toyed with the idea of irregular tiles for the bottom, even bisque fired a few but instead I used their curvilinear shapes as drawing templates onto the regular square format tiles I started with.

The last bits of tiles are for the edges. 

This is the small Cress kiln I have been working with.

We got it all together, yay! But then it leaked, Argh! 

 A few more sealing steps later, We are overjoyed that it works. 

And another shot with my Summer Celadon HAREWARE and my Fountain project. Did I mention that we have a bunny? She's a great studio bunny, loves to nibble on cardboard and grass and run around.

My Collaborations with Staci Sipe were energetic and had a life of their own.

Staci Sipe visited today. 

In 1982, '83 and '84, Staci and I created "Summer Dreams of Bathing Beauties", "The Engagement Picnic" and "Mexican Honeymoon". We met in Graduate #Art School at UT, Austin and began our collaboration with #Women & Their Work when they got an NEA Grant for Art in Public Places. We built the first piece, a group of 8 cut outs to be placed in space to appear as a painting by me from one side and a painting by Staci from the other side. We collaborated on the cutout plywood drawing and cutting completely. Our first debut with the piece was at a park in downtown Austin,Texas with the other Women & Their Work projects. It took off from there. We showed "Summer Dreams of Bathing Beauties" in a gravel filled swimming pool at the Waco Museum of Art and at the Texas #Sculpture Symposium on Town Lake in Austin. 

The critic Dave Hickey liked our work.

Next we applied for an NEA and Texas State Grant through Trinity Kitchens, which was a part of the coop Gallery I was in called Trinity Gallery. It was on Trinity Street off 6th street in downtown #Austin.
We were funded to create "The Engagement Picnic", again a group of 8 cut outs. These depicted #family members meeting, which was a ficticious event.
Among other places, we showed that piece at the Corsicanna Warehouse Art #Gallery when I was up there doing an Artist in Residence teaching every 5th grader in the county through a Texas Art in the Schools Program.

After that I moved to California.

We were accepted to do an Artist in Residence to build our 3rd piece, "Mexican Honeymoon" at the Louisiana World's Fair in New Orleans, #summer of 1984. We showed the "Engagement Picnic" there in the Women's Art Pavilion and created "Mexican Honeymoon" while people came by to visit us. We showed the piece in Atlanta at the Peidmont Sculpture Festival with help from our friend Dave White.
So here we are in front of my side of 2 of the smaller original "Summer Dreams of Bathing Beauties" reuniting, albeit briefly in 2017, 35 years later.

The first image is a picture of the pieces from my Joyce Lieberman side and the second are the same pieces from the Staci Sipe side.