In the Studio: New direction

4 December 2008 by pcNielsen 1 Comment

The cold dark days are here. I like Fall and Winter, especially if there is snow, but unheated garage studios are problematic this time of year. Clay is unpleasant to work with when it’s 40 degrees, or less.

I’ve moved some of my clay inside to keep it at a tolerable temperature. I’ve also begun a new series, working with the figure.

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Storms are less inspiration during the colder months, and I’ve always wanted to work with the figure. This will be my first serious attempt to incorporate it into my work.

The process at this point is pretty much the same. Starting with a block of clay, hollowing it out some, carving. The intent will be to mount it in and on a sculpted piece of wood like the storms on their prairies. In this case the wood will be more dynamic. I hope to finish these clay pieces with a combination of smoke, inlaid stones and gold leaf. The golf leaf is something I’ve wanted to try for a while now as well.

In my mind, this series will speak of how humans are related to the earth and show how beautiful natural materials can be (hopefully!).

Filed under Art, Ceramics, Gemstone, In the studio, Mixed media, Sculpture

In the Studio: The workbench

16 October 2008 by pcNielsen Leave a Comment

It’s been a busy week at work and a slow week in any art or architecture related news, at least via my sources, so I thought I’d share a photo of the workbench today, scrapped together with cameraphone images:

Click on the image for a little more detail.

The cloud forms are actually from a successful firing last weekend. The low swoopy form has a hairline crack in the narrow edge, but I think I can live with that at this stage in my aspiring artist game. Another cloud, not in the photo, cracked badly enough that I won’t use it for a finished product (I didn’t like that one anyway), but will probably experiment with finishes upon its surface. I didn’t apply terra sig to these, unfortunately, so I’m not sure they’ll take smoke very well.

The wood laying around on the bench — scraps from around the studio being laminated together — will turn into the prairies under the storms. I did some sketching from the plane on my recent flight to California as inspiration for these flatter surfaces. The intersections and geometry of fields and pivot irrigation with rivers and forests bears a lot of visual interest.

Oh, and if you saw some off the wall entry from TAE in your feed reader last night just ignore it. I was playing around with something and hit publish when I shouldn’t have.

Filed under Art, Ceramics, In the studio

Part I of II: Are apprenticeships realistic in 2008?

15 September 2008 by pcNielsen 5 Comments

Yesterday I rendered into reality a triple firing failure. I had three storms that were ready to be bisqued, and wanted to take care of that before some upcoming show deadlines and a trip to California that’s going to cut into my studio time. So I ramped up the heat in my old electric kiln very slowly — hoping to drive all of the moisture out of the larger pieces in a very humid post Tropical Storm Ike atmosphere — and hoped for the best. The kiln was at ~ 200 degrees for roughly four hours.

And still I got the worst.

All three pieces self-destructed like a mission impossible mission. That kiln full of shards represents about 30 hours of sculpting. I normally don’t cry over things like this. I’m the kind of person that fully understands that we learn more from our mistakes than our successes. However, my lament goes back to the very limited time I have to be in my studio as an artist with a day job.

After doing a little research online I realized I’ve been overlooking something. I thought, in my reentry ignorance, that as long as I warmed the kiln up slowly enough I’d be able to drive all of the water out of the work before everything hit 220 degrees. Apparently some air bubbles, however, are too deep (when clay is as thick as this was) to find an escape route without help. I hadn’t provided the necessary avenues to release the water vapor in any of these pieces.

In a flurry to add said avenues to already drying pieces, I began stabbing and drilling (if the clay was too hard to stab) into the greenware laying about the studio. I pray my morning strafing allows these other pieces to survive a firing.

I’m also wondering if my methodology needs tweaking. I start with a large block of clay from which I rough out a shape and then get into details. I do hollow them out, although apparently not well enough. Could I coil these things into being? Would slabs work? I’m not really a fan of either of these processes for this kind of sculpture though, and in fact am very much in tune with the process I’ve been using.

At this point, I’m going to stick with my carving method and be much more careful about hollowing the pieces out and stabbing them to give the steam a way out during firing. I think I can make this work. Further, I’m becoming faster at the process and even if I lose one or two (a year?) in the future it won’t be quite as much of a time investment lost.

Filed under Art, Ceramics, Craft, In the studio, Sculpture

In the Studio: More improvisational realism

14 August 2008 by pcNielsen 3 Comments

I little more on the improvisational realism I referred to a couple weeks ago. That post talked about imagining the parts of a storm not visible in the process of making a three-dimensional sculpture.

With this next work — really only the third in this particular vein — I’ve realized that I must make other imaginative decisions even with parts of the thunderstorm depicted in a photograph. In the example above, for instance, the picture shows a bank of wispy clouds trailing off the right side of the anvil, out of the frame. Visually, this isn’t part of the storm structure, so I chose to leave it off.

Similar decisions are being made as a carve along, decisions which at first I regret having to make; the storm is so incredible that I want to render it with equal glory. However, once I get into the piece a little further I’m comfortable with the adjustments that my static medium requires. The dynamic nature of the real-life storm is also reassuring; changes that I make possess the possibility to at least partially reflect what might actually go on in that particular squall.

I’ve thought that other media might serve to better represent clouds, sculpted or cast paper, for instance. Some day I hope to get to those other ideas, but I’m a long way from accomplishing what I hope to in clay right now. Further, the colors and variations of atmospheric firings, such as those in a soda kiln, seem to beautifully mimic the color play on a thunderstorm at dusk.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a soda kiln right now. Anyone have one they want to give away?

Filed under Art, Ceramics, In the studio, Sculpture

Playing around with lead

11 August 2008 by pcNielsen 4 Comments

Glazes that are more or less useless in functional ceramics can do wonderful things for sculptural clay pieces. With this in mind, I’m game for trying some pretty strange things. This isn’t uncommon in the clay world anyway, where my college professors encouraged us with stories of their own experimentation. The one I remember in particular was a pizza being used to glaze a work. Of course, they warned us not to try these things in the university’s kilns.

I fired some glazed works this weekend with a few odds and ends as tests. One of these tests was simply a fishing sinker on a bisqued tile. Such sinkers, as I recall from my fishing days, are made of lead.

The one I used wasn’t as new as the picture above. It had been used and was slightly corroded.

The red in the lower left is iron oxide, as a label on the tile. Some of it leached into the lead on that edge, but I don’t think it changed the color or consistency of the glaze — though I could be wrong. It ran like crazy, which makes sense for a flux material. What was more surprising is how much of it there is on the tile, and subsequently the kiln shelf. The length of the sinker was about 5/8 of an inch long. The tile is roughly 3 1/2 inches square.

I don’t know if or how this would ever make it into my work, but it’s good to know anyway.

Filed under Art, Ceramics, In the studio

A store is reborn

12 July 2008 by pcNielsen 1 Comment

The banner needs some work, but The Aesthetic Elevator Etsy store has reopened, again. Visit it via this link, or click on the screenshot below.

Pricing, as Tim Jones pointed out a week ago, isn’t much fun. I noted in the comments of that post my ceramics professor’s own philosophy. He said he’d rather price one of his platters at $10,000 and have nine to give away as opposed to selling all ten for $1,000. I like that philosophy, but it might not flush itself out in every circumstance. I haven’t used it in my Etsy shop at this point in time, to be sure. However, marking things too low shows a lack of confidence and personal valuation. Pricing too high comes across as pretentious. All things considered, the small sculptures I listed today are probably a good deal, in my opinion anyway, for starting out in earnest.

Tell your friends, or purchase a piece or to as a small meditative addition to your desk or bookshelf. You can find a few different works of mine at MissionaryArts as well, via this link.

Here’s a piece I started this afternoon from the sketch in the background. The banding wheel is new, a very nice tool.

This approach is something I’ve been wanting to attempt for a while now, larger in scale and with more realism than a lot of my recent works. I’m eager to see where it goes. I recently came across a glaze I’d like to try out for this work, after a cloud formation I observed and photographed a month or so ago.

Filed under Art, Business of art, Ceramics, Etsy, In the studio

In the Studio: 8 July smoke firing

8 July 2008 by pcNielsen 8 Comments

I mentioned a couple months ago the struggle I have with posting my personal studio fare on a blog I hope to be a place for some discussion beyond technical issues related to my craft. Like I said, I’m comfortable at this point with mingling the deeper thoughts and my personal work. This may change in the future, however, especially depending on what The Aesthetic Elevator looks like with it’s additional contributors.

Then again, I hope this will be a place for future contributors to share their own work as well. So we may just roll with it.

The following images are from a smoke firing in my electric kiln.

A few small funnels, designed to hang.
One of the tornadic forms I’ve been exploring,
smoke over a very dry titanium glaze.
Smoke over a commercial lead-based glaze.

I’m still perfecting this technique, but it’s coming along. Some of the time I don’t use enough newsprint to get enough color and variation. I’ve begun using other organic matter as well for the smoke, including sawdust, leaves and last night a large dead beetle that seemed to give a nice sheen to one of the funnels.

Adding: Julie asked for more about the technique in the comments below, and I thought I’d elaborate on what I know here in the post instead of in the comments.

I don’t actually know much about the smoking process. I learned of it last year some time on a website, but can’t find that same site again for the life of me. It described the technique well. Other internet references to smoking in an electric kiln are cursory at best.

Surfaces finished with a terra sig seem to take the smoke better than those without. So, in my mind, the first step is to apply a sig to your greenware. After bisqued, apply any glaze that will be on the finished piece and glaze fire. The once I tried firing glaze over the smoke, the smoke disappeared entirely. As you can see above, how glazes react to the smoking process can be very different.

I then place individual pieces on a sheet of foil and wrap them in one or two layers of very moderately crinkled paper, preferably newsprint. Other papers seem to simply gray the surface of the clay. Don’t use too much or too little paper. Leaves and sawdust work as well. Pretty much anything dry and ready to burn can be used with some success. I then wrap the foil around the paper and object. Saggars can be used instead of foil.

I usually only fill the bottom of my old electric kiln with pots or sculptures for smoke firings. I run the bottom element on high for 45 minutes to an hour (an hour is probably longer than necessary), let it cool and remove the works. Some of the smoke will discolor the bottom of the kiln, but this goes away during the next higher temperature firing.

Filed under Art, Ceramics, In the studio

First Glazes: Line blends

4 July 2008 by pcNielsen 2 Comments

Here are my first attempts at getting back into creating my own glazes since getting back into ceramics in the last 18 months. They are a series of cone 04 line blends based on two very simple glazes I had written down in my notes from college, one gloss and one matte.

I like some of the things happening on either end of the spectrums represented here. 2% iron and 2% rutile worked quite beautifully in the matte glaze. For the gloss, the manganese and the combination of cobalt and rutile in higher percentages are quite nice. The photographs don’t convey the subtleties very well. I want to keep pushing these glazes with some different combinations, but probably need to acquire a few more colorants before going at it again.

My electric kiln supposedly has the ability to fire to cone 10, although I haven’t fired it this high yet and probably won’t until I buy new elements. High fire glazes generally have more depth, more complicated surfaces, desired by many ceramic artists. For the time being, I’m looking forward to the challenge of creating subtle and beautiful glazes in a simple electric kiln.

I hope to be able to, some day, do some soda firing again. Design-Realized did an ‘expose’ of sorts on her blog of the inside of a soda kiln in a post called Up Close and Personal: Soda kiln. It’s worth looking at her pictures. A friend who is building a house just outside of town is also interested in building a wood kiln on his property. Apparently a new technology, something called Kaowool, can be used in place of bricks. It’s a lot less expensive than spending $3-4 on single firebricks to piece together a kiln according to my local ceramic supplier.

Filed under Art, Ceramics, In the studio

In the Studio: Funnels and frustration

29 June 2008 by pcNielsen Leave a Comment

I fired the kiln yesterday, a very full load and a combination of functional and sculptural wares. I’m not sure how much I’ll end up liking by the time finishes are applied. I had some problems with the terra sig flaking off of a number of the pieces. I’m guessing this was on account of the very tight surface of the clay, Steve’s White, I’ve been using. This occurred on all of the 10 cups in the firing which I had high hopes for. I’ll redo them in a few weeks, after which time I hope to have built my very own kickwheel.

I’ve been thinking about building a wheel for a while now, but couldn’t figure out how to make the flywheel. For some reason I assumed these were fabricated out of stone. I finally found some instructions online, from 1970, saying to cast it out of concrete. Why I didn’t think of this earlier is beyond me; just last month I cast a small base of concrete for a future wood sculpture.

I also retain high hopes for these little guys:

They will be glazed on the bottom (not in the photo) and smoked on their sides. I don’t yet know exactly how they will be displayed, but they are intended to hang from something, somewhere. I call them funnels only because I followed them up with some tornadic forms — although neither of the forms were consciously meant to represent tornadoes when I began them, curiously enough.

Starting up with the line blends.

Some mild frustration beset me this afternoon as I unloaded the kiln and commenced work on some line blends. This relates back to the very limited time I have to be pursuing ceramics, although I have more hours now than six months ago. When I graduated with my BFA in studio art, I figured I’d make a living as a graphic artist. Actually pursuing sculpture or pottery as a career wasn’t on my radar. Over the last couple of years I’ve warmed, perhaps I’ve been divinely wooed into considering this more.

But it’s a tricky step of faith, living off of proceeds from your artwork — when you’ve never really sold any of it up to now. My ideal life at this point in time would be to work half-time for the mission mobilizing ministry I’ve been with for almost five years now (I’m really enjoying the new project we’re working on), and be half-time in pursuing ceramics. I don’t know how this can happen financially though.

One idea that’s worth looking into a little further attempts to combine and monetize both my and my wife’s creative interests. This notion involves some kind of storefront, will probably require start-up capital we don’t have and would only work financially in the long-term if we were able to live and work out of the same space.

We’ll see where that goes, if anywhere.

Filed under Art, Business of art, Ceramics, In the studio, Sculpture

In the Studio: Memorial Day weekend

27 May 2008 by pcNielsen Leave a Comment

I finished up a number of small works this weekend. Here’s a gallery of the works; as before, click on the thumbnails for larger images.

I’m satisfied with the way most of these turned out. I’ve been waffling on how to mount and present these small ceramic works since firing them. Part of me wants them to stand alone — and some of them will — but at the same time a number of them just don’t seem comfortable or finished to me by themselves. This may also be a subconscious desire to mix media. Contrast is a significant interest of mine and I do this in part through the mixing of media.

The one small piece, it’s about 5-6 inches tall, that I’m not sure of is the orange one mounted on a rock that I found in an alley. On the two darkest wall-hung works the thickly applied acrylic paint on the board bubbled as it dried. I usually do this with oils and have no problem. I used acrylic from my small box of paints because it dries so much more quickly and the colors were more like what I was after.

To reiterate, these forms are inspired by my years of observing storm clouds on the prairie. I’m also working with an idea of creating a modern icon, an idea that’s been simmering in my mind in some form or fashion for nearly a decade now but has yet to put down roots. Thirdly, as always, I’m aiming for what seems to me beautiful forms and surfaces. I don’t feel the need to infuse meaning, symbolism, irony — although these are all good things — into every sculpture.

I’m jonesing to actually go photographing storms. There have been a few decent ones nearby in the last week, but I was without a car and there are just so few good places in these hills and trees to observe them. I’d like to do some ink and brush drawings en plein air as well if I can catch a good thunderstorm this summer, and being able to sculpt while watching one would be even better.

We’ll see if I can make that happen.

Filed under Abstract art, Art, Ceramics, In the studio, Mixed media, Sculpture

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