I got my hands on some nifty epoxy putty called Apoxie that has simplified pot repair for me. It behaves like clay, has along working time, and doesn’t shrink. After the hole or crack is filled and sanded down, I go over the crack with Cashew Lacquer and sprinkle gold powder, or just mix the powder in to the lacquer and thin, then paint on. The hardest part for me is getting a nice thin even line. Here are pictures of two pieces, a bowl and a small sculptural piece.
I’ll make a wooden base for the sculpture, along the lines of what you might expect from a suiseki piece.
I traveled to the port at Nagasaki this morning to pick up my new studio helper, a Peter Pugger VPM-20. Once I got it home, it was a breeze to assemble and mount on the stand, and it was up and running in no time.
plugged in and ready to go
Excited to get it working, I grabbed a bucket of dry scraps and some softer clay, and started mixing. It took some time to figure out how to get what I wanted out of the machine, but I think I’ve figured things out for the most part. It really seems to need to be full to do its best work. Once I added enough material to the hopper, things really started moving along. The first pugged clay was too soft, so it got put in again with a lot of dry crushed sandstone and mixed. I just kept adding more dry sandstone until I got what I wanted.
the first time through was too soft and got run through again
I turned out still to be quite a light batch. After turning on the vacuum, pugging out the contents, then digging out the remainders from the hopper, I had a batch of almost 12kg. The beautiful thing was that because the whole batch had been de-aired, even the unpugged remainders were very easy to wedge by hand. In the past when I have mixed as much sandstone in as I did today, the clay has been largely unwedgeable by hand, being just too short and falling apart.
vacuum pump is working…
pugged clay next to what remained in the hopper
All clay bagged and ready to go
I think this machine and I are going to be great friends. It allows me to mix and process clays and other materials that were previously impossible to process just by hand. Oh, and it is very quiet, both the main motor and the vacuum pump are much quieter than I had been expecting.
Adam very generously gave me this large faceted yunomi/cup during our visit this last week. He said it had been through more than one firing, I don’t recall how many exactly, but it really has a surface that reflects the various firing environments. Really heavy ash runs, fluxed heavily on one side by soda, making a dark brown glaze full of light crystals where it breaks thin.
The inside is a clear crackle, with a small pool of light green in the very bottom. It is a large cup, heavy but not too heavy, and has nice balance in either one or two hands.
This is one of those cups that gets more interesting every time you examine it, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it ‘grows up’ over time.
I had a chance to visit the studio of Adam Field today. While we have known each other for a couple of years via blogs and Facebook, this was our first time to meet face to face. Adam has a nice house and studio tucked into the center of Durango, across from the fairgrounds. It’s easy to find, and if you’re in the area you should give all of his beautiful pots a look. (it’s probably best to call ahead for an appointment).
Here is Adam in his studio next to his onggi style kickwheel:
And here are a few of his onggi covered fermenting jars:
Took a walk out this morning with the dogs, and left around 8am in order to beat the heat. Turns out 8am doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s summer now kids, and the heat hits you like a wall when you step out the door. The 90+% humidity doesn’t help much.
The dogs, however, don’t really seem to care, they just pant harder and enjoy the walk all the same. The biggest change besides the heat, is the deafening buzz of all the cicadas which have emerged. Spring time brings the frogs and their chirping and croaking, but the summer cicadas are easily louder than the frogs. On the walk this morning one of them swept down off of a tree and landed on the towel draped over my shoulders. Once he figured out I wasn’t a tree he was off again to do his thing somewhere else.
Path is quickly disappearing under the weeds. In some places it is completely covered.
Everyone is walking side by side. You can tell this is the beginning of the walk because Raz’s tail is still up. By the end of the walk it’s hanging low…
One of the cedar groves. These stay cooler and less overgrown in the summer.
Looking back down through the grove.
Water bubbling up from a hole in the ground at a brisk pace. All of the water from the recent rains making its way down the mountain one way or another. A treat for the dogs. This is the first time I’ve ever seen one of these temporary springs.
This last wood kiln firing was a real disaster. All of my large pieces cracked or collapsed completely, and all of the smaller work ended up under-fired badly. The upside to this is that they can all be refired, and I just finished the 2nd of 3 refire loads in the gas kiln this morning.
From the first refire load, my favorite pot is a porcelain teabowl glazed with rice straw ash glaze. I don’t normally work in porcelain, but in my search for bodies that vitrify a little better than the local clays, I’ve started using partly or mostly porcelain in some of my work. This particular bowl is porcelain with as much feldspar sandstone mixed in as I could manage, and still have it wedge-able.
In the wood firing it was in a spot that got a lot of fly ash, and in fact a lot of flaky ash collected inside the bowl. Making sure not to dump this, I saved it for the gas kiln and fired it to cone 11 flat. All of that ash melted really nicely, mixing with the rice straw ash glaze for some nice color.
There are several bloats on the interior, but none really fragile or severe. These bloats and the blues and greens on the interior really remind me of some the old Karatsu bowls with their warty bloated surfaces and subtle coloring of fly ash on rice straw ash glaze. Another nice thing about this pot: the fire color from the wood kiln was not lost in the gas firing. There is a nice gold luster on the melted surface of the bare porcelain body.
