I'm "just" a part-time potter... I have a job and in my spare time I love to work with clay hoping that one day I can to more of it... and when I quit my job in order to go back to school in September this will not change although I hope I will get a more arty/cultural job afterwards..; and who knows I might decided to do more with my pottery
For the moment how ever I’m trying to find my own style. I did a lot of workshop figuring out which aspects/techniques I like and slowly I notice where my heart lies:
- I love to decorate using sgrafitto and in tarsia techniques.
- I prefer decorating on wet clay opposed to working on biscuit fired stuff.
- I also love coloring clay and am intrigued by neriage/millefiori patterns but am still at a loss how to make them, especially ones that are stylized… I mean I can make nice patterns by just letting things happen but I don’t know what things will look like yet.
- I like working with porcelain and westerwald clay
- I can’t decide between throwing and hand forming
- I fire in an electric kiln mostly because have to (I live in the city in the Netherlands where regulations are tight) but might try to venture more towards salt glazing in the future…. This being the far future coz I want to concentrate on improving my technique and artistic insight first
I also realized that:
- I rather work slow and neat than fast and sloppy but I tend to get sloppy when I stress out
- I keep going over things in my head but I should write them down and even more important just give them a go
- I need to write down what I do coz I will get stuck later if I forgot
Right now I’m making test tiles with colored porcelain…. I did workshop on this in spring and made a vase that looks promising even though it cracked during biscuit firing (people from where the workshop was held didn’t really take care of it when it was drying) so now I’ve taken all the stains I have, and bought some new ones as well and I’m trying them out. I’m looking for a nice green and blue-ish grey to start with because I want to capture the Dutch autumn/spring landscape. I made testtiles where I put slips on the colored parts and did some inlaying as well. Then I also made small tests with glazes on the colors. I’ll fire them later this week….
Also I’m looking for inspiration and artists that I related to. There just is so much out there… it just makes my head spin also I’ve noticed that because you like (or dislike) something you see on the net that doesn’t mean you will feel the same when you see it in real life. For instance I thought I would really like these but guess what I didn’t :-D … more on inspiration and such in a later post .
the second week i practised double walled objects and i loved it we ended with a raku and becoz i had the most experience Frank thought it was a nice idea that i would ire the woodfired raku kiln... this seemed to have cured me from my fear of fire... i'm loving it now :-D
