Luscious Lichen

As some of you may know, I love lichen! So here is some eye candy from Monday's hike.  I especially love the chartreuse green contrasted with the orange that's going on here.  I don't make work that calls for the use of lichen glazes but I am tempted to with inspiration like this.  And if I had any idea what to do with felting or textile media I would somehow incorporate this.  Hmmm, maybe I should go back to Penland for a textiles class.  Just sayin'.

All the textures here are just so incredible!

I was feeling quite nostalgic for all the flowers that are planted around the Penland campus, especially outside Lily Loom.  Then I took a morning walk and found all of these beauties right in my own neighborhood.  Too bad pictures can't convey the smell of all the flowers that are in bloom right now!

Ah, but lest you think that the last few days have been all fun and games, I have been knee deep in the shipping and receiving department, otherwise known as the spare room.  Today I got eight of the nine boxes I shipped from Penland.  I'm going to have to research that ninth one.  Now I have about 50 items to ship out that are rewards for my Kickstarter project.  Let the fun commence:)

Goodbye Penland

Well, it finally happened.  Two months flew by in a whirlwind of clay activity.  This is the last sunrise I saw on Saturday morning from my bedroom window in the Craft House at Penland School of Crafts.  On Sunday I woke up at 2:30 am and was in the car by 3:30 headed for the Asheville airport.  I left with many mixed emotions.  There was sadness to be leaving such a beautiful place where I had many wonderful experiences and met tons of great people.  But there was also relief.  Being away from home for two months is quite an experience and I was feeling ready to get back.  Of course now that I am home, I miss Penland!

I wasn't quite ready for the flat landscape of home.  It seemed rather foreign after all the verdant rolling hills of North Carolina.  It is also drier than I remember and I think we are in for an early, hot, long summer.  After traveling all day yesterday I felt pretty cramped up and sore.  This first morning home I decided I should go for a hike in the park where there are actually some hills to keep my muscles active on and work out some kinks.

And here are some of the last photos I took of work I made with Helios porcelain.  Right after this pic they were bubble wrapped and packed for shipping.  I shipped home nine boxes of work and could have shipped home twelve if I hadn't run out of time.  I did all the packing on the last Friday and most of the work had just come out of the kilns a day or two before.  I did pack some stuff in my backpack and carry-on and dragged them through the airport and on and off the planes with no breakage, yay!

I had a lot of fun with these.  I was working on refining this tumbler form and incorporated three different techniques for the surface decoration.  I have silk screened slip transfers, ez-screen print transfers (which are essentially unmounted silkscreens with wider mesh) and sgraffito.  The botanical imagery was created from my own drawings and the water tower image is from a photo that I took here in Chico of one of the downtown water towers.  These are probably my favorite pieces from the concentration and I am looking forward to exploring this some more now that I am home.

I really enjoy the simplicity of these bowls.  I didn't have time to do anything decorative before they went into the bisque.  Then when they came out we were all in a rush to get everything glazed and into the final firings.  I quickly drew some lines and circles with black underglaze in a slip trailer and filled them in with tinted glazes.  Then I waxed them out and dipped into a fantastic clear glaze.  Viola, I love how they came out!

I wish I had more time to test glazes while I was there.  I am a total glazeaholic!  These dots were created by layering Steven Hill's cone 6 Strontium Crystal Magic (from the March 2012 Issue of Ceramics Monthly) with a copper tinted transparent glaze.  From tests that I had done, I figured the combo would run a bit and pull some of the black underglaze and it did not disappoint. 

It is only 9pm, but my body thinks it is midnight so I will get some shut eye soon.  Sleep well everyone:)

Wednesday was such a great day that the fun was bound to end somehow and how did it.  By evening there was emotional wreckage.  No one was upset at me personally but it is still hard not to react emotionally when someone else is very upset.  So that kind of threw me in a bad mood even though I tried my darnest  to go through my affirmations, positive self talk and deep breathing.  I thought I would wake up Thursday and feel a whole lot better but not so much so.  Today I decided all I would try to get done was get out in the sun.  So I went to upper park and took a short hike, relaxed on the benches in the sun and watched all the different kinds of birds.  There were lots of pretty woodpeckers in the dead trees and these other tiny birds I think that are called titmouse.  I might have saw a warbler with a pretty yellow chest of feathers and then a small bird of prey.  I better get a bird id book so I can figure them out next time.  I didn't feel like taking the camera and then, of course, I wished I had.

I also worked on uploading rewards and information for my Kickstarter Project.  I still need to make the video and put together some images also. I should have it ready to launch next week.  Tomorrow I am making my flight reservations for North Carolina. I'd be more excited right now but I am falling asleep while I am typing.

Here's a funny cup experiment idea I was working on.  Trying to make a non-funtional mug.  I like the way the green glaze breaks over the red clay. That's all she wrote.  I'm planning on making tomorrow a better day.

Kickin' Back

We've been quite spoiled here in Northern California lately.  I'm not complaining!  I went up to the park today in capris and a short sleeve t-shirt to soak up some rays.  I can feel the days starting to get a teensy, weeny bit longer already and every little bit of light helps.  I do fear with all this gorgeous weather that if I doesn't rain sometime soon we may be in for a bit of a draught.  But knock on wood, winter has only just begin.  I think I need some more sun, though.  Check out those lily white winter legs!

I really, really wanted to hike down to the creek and sit on that little beach there.  Except for there being no leaves on the trees it looked deceptively like a beautiful summer day.  I could just imaging jumping into that refreshing water in late August.

But the path goes almost straight down and it was over wet, slippery rocks and I could just see myself falling and breaking a leg.  Maybe not the best way to start out the new year.  No, I think not.

So, instead I basked in front of this big basalt rock.  The sun was so bright it made my eyes tear up just trying to keep them open a split second to take this pic.  Love the shadow of me on the rock.

I'm lichen this rock. He he he!

This one looks like a mini mountain.  I love the cleft.

May you have a clear view in 2012.  Happy New Year!

Magic in the Park

I've been pretty busy lately.  I would like to say that I have been super, crazy busy but I don't think that I am being that efficient with my time.  Either that or I have unrealistic notions of just how much I can fit into each day.  Or it might be that I spend too much time surfing the internet.  Hmmm...   Anyway my grad school applications are coming along nicely and I have gotten the worst part of it out of the way.  I have been making work to add to my portfolio and I have been editing images so that I can update my website. Since I have been spending a lot of time in either a dark room in front of the computer or in my basement studio I decided that I absolutely HAD TO get out of the house and out from under the trees and get into some the wide open space with sunlight.  Of course I had to grab my camera just in case.

I headed up to Upper Bidwell Park which is one of my most favorite places to go.  It always holds some kind of magic for me no matter when I go.  But this time was a special treat.  I'm not sure that I have been there before when the leaves are changing.  It was absolutely gorgeous there this afternoon.  Everything had that special glow about it.  I really felt like I had entered into some kind of fantasy realm.  Everything was entrancing. I was only going for a short drive through the park but it ended being a three hour walking photo shoot.  It was very relaxing and inspiring and now I feel like I need to go back everyday, all day.  Sigh, too bad other things have to get done.  Maybe I'll bring some of these colors into my work?  I have to justify more research, you see.

Oh the enchantment of it all.  I'm kind of lazy when it comes to writing creatively although I do have my aspirations.  This makes me want to sit down and write poetry.  I love the images but they don't recreate the smells and sounds like the hawk talking or the owl hooting or the silent, delicate flight of the bats skimming over the lake.  I didn't want to leave but the sun was going down and it was getting dark and colder by the creek so I decided I would end my adventure and try to get back home and back to work.  But this is what I found when I got back to my car...  And that meant I had to stay for another hour.  Smile.

 

 Yes, a truly delightful day!