Expulsion by Construction

The Waddell sculptures have been moved while the new pavilion is under construction. The Expulsion has been placed right outside of the ceramics studios in the F Building, courtesy Ron. (Thank you, Ron!)

One of the life-sized bronzes, on generous loan from John Henry Waddell:

 

John Henry Waddell - The Expulsion from the Garden

The Verde Campus has started construction. The new infrastructure is well under way, and the central pavilion should be ready in September:

View from the kiln yard, past the pavilion construction, towards Mingus Mountain.

Unfortunately, this means we won't have a Raku firing patio for a while. Never fear, though! Our Raku kiln is on wheels, and you will be seeing us pop up around the Verde Valley after dark with our fireproof aprons and gloves, our big tongs, our propane tank and our little kiln on wheels.

No more access to the Raku patio!

Next the college will be gutting the F and H buildings, and Ceramics will switch with administration. This will put the Dean and the Student Union into the center of campus, and Ceramics out on the edge. Ceramics will have a big, new kiln yard, and our current kiln yard will be the "Kiln Yard Cafe"! The time line is still a bit sketchy right now, but we should begin serious destruction in the New Year.

Goodbye F Building

I have a pot, Playa Negra in Salt, in the All Arizona Clay exhibition on at the Chandler Art Center in Chandler, Arizona, through April 16. I won an award! A Merit Award for this pot. Congratulations, me!
I do love this particular pot. It is wheel-thrown and altered, experimental cone 6 porcelain with a banded inclusion of black sand from the beach known as the Playa Negra, behind the beach bar in Santa Rosalia, Baja California Sur, Mexico, which you can see behind me and my beer back in 2003:

This was one of my first big collecting trips, though accidentally, as I was traveling around and had nothing better to do. My other half was completing a series of landscape paintings, en plein air, so we lived in a tent on a remote beach for a couple of months:

 

While Clive painted:

But I digress...

This pot was originally fired to cone 6 oxidation, and it looked like this:

Playa Negra, 2009

It was even exhibited in the Northern Arizona University Ceramics Biennial in 2009 as cone 6 oxidation. Then I guess I just wanted to see what would happen, so I put it into a cone 4 salt firing in 2010, and this was the result:

Playa Negra in Salt, 2010

James G. and Turner Davis Opening at Prescott College

James G. Davis - Mary Anne in a Blue Dress

Clive and I had never been to the art gallery at Prescott College, and we got lost at first. I eventually appreciated having to ford Granite Greek to get to the gallery, as it felt like being in the Cotswolds. The gallery was very nice, including a strange, German conversation, but we couldn't indulge in the hotel as we had to get back over the mountain to Jerome.

(Jim and Clive)

We will come back with students and give a review of more than the wine.

James G. Davis - Personal, Particular Pursuits

Happy Valentine's Day

In Class, but Off Topic

Following on from our Drawing class discussion last Tuesday, follow the link below for a free, down-loadable copy of a 93 page guide to peacefully toppling an autocrat. (Only subversive to autocrats.)
Shy U. S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution

Some Thoughts for My Drawing Students

Charles Hawthorne, 11 am

Some wisdom from Charles Hawthorne, Hawthorne on Painting:

(Hawthorne was an extremely influential painting instructor at the Cape Cod School of Art from 1900's-1930's, and these quotes are from notes that students took during critiques with him. Just substitute "tone" or "value" for "color" and "drawing" for "painting" and it will all begin to make sense.)

"Pictures are more legible than the printed page, more credible than oratory - there's one thing you can't fool me on - I can read oil painting. I can tell you more what you were thinking about than you yourself knew at the time. Keep your mind clean - what you put on your canvas is an index to your thoughts and I can tell your character by the way you paint. Have an inquiring mind, don't get into a way of doing things. If you do, something stops; you don't grow, you get a fixed habit of mind." (p. 30)

"Be more interested in the workmanlike viewpoint, it is so much more healthy. Be interested in the shadow under a white hat. There are no two white hats alike and each day is different - get into the attitude where you are thrilled by two shadows coming together.
That point of view is so beautiful, so sane that it is worth while in itself. By working with the abstract point of view, that of the workman, one spot against another, we achieve the concrete. This is the only logical way to get at it. Seems simple. It is simple, but one in ten thousand ever achieves it." (p. 35)

"You know too much - an illustrator, aren't you? I thought so. You think you know a great deal about the structure of the face - the bones underneath. Forget all that! Don't try to show me how much you know. Be humble about it. Paint the color tones as they come against each other, and make them sing, vibrate. Don't ask me to look at these self-satisfied, pretty things. That fellow there knows far less about this business than you, yet I'd far rather see his sort of thing, crude though it is. Oh, how refreshing it is to come upon a bit of truth in an exhibition of smug, sophisticated things! That crude sketch would stop you short in any show. It's real, it's flesh in sunlight - there's truth in it." (p. 36)

"That as line composition would probably smash all the canons; everything in it is bad; but how delightful it is in painting! I've often asked people who are in favor of teaching composition, if they can remember a piece of a beautiful painting which is bad composition, and they never can. It comes to this, that if you plotted out a beautiful composition and a master and a dub painted it, the master's would be fine and the dub's very hard to look at. All I can say is, cultivate yourself and your tastes. Grow!" (p. 36)

"Remember that all painting is seeing, not doing. A painter spends his life in despair trying to paint the beauty he sees - in so doing he approaches more beauty. Knowledge will come to you unknowingly. Think of what beauty is revealed to you; try to put that down." (p. 89)

"Don't be the one who knows how to do it, but be the one who recognizes beauty when it comes - then stops. Add to your work that quality of looking accidental. You may not know what you want, but you should know what you don't want. When you get it, be intelligent enough to stop." (p. 91)

American Museum of Ceramic Art: Interesting New Exhibition

  

Ceramics for the New Millennium

The American Museum Of Ceramic Art presents Ceramics for the New Millennium, on exhibit from January 22nd through April 9th, 2011. AMOCA offers an extraordinary scientific exploration of the many interactive uses for clay. See how your every-day life is improved by the multitude of innovations and inventions that use ceramic technology. The exhibition, Ceramics for the New Millennium is an unfamiliar departure from the museum’s usual art themed shows, providing a behind-the-scenes look at the complex role that ceramics plays in manufacturing and alternative processes used in today’s industry.

Want to know what these images are? Have a look at this Complete Exhibition Announcement

(All Images from the AMOCA website.) 

 

More Pictures at the Reitz Ranch

Click here for some more photos from last Sunday at Don's, courtesy Jon Peletier, Verde Independent photojournalist, as well as art faculty on our Verde Valley Campus.

And here is another link to Arizona State University's own article about the gift.

An Afternoon at the Reitz Ranch

The view from my house, looking from Jerome out over the Verde Valley. I can see the red rocks of Sedona to the right, and the San Francisco peaks above Flagstaff and Sycamore Canyon to the left. Don Reitz's place is on the Verde River on the way to Sycamore Canyon. (The red-tiled complex of buildings on the hill to the right is the Old Jerome High School where I have my studio.)

This afternoon we went to Don's to see him give his complex of kilns and his studio as a legacy to Arizona State University.  It was a fantastically beautiful, Arizona, January day. Here's Don and Larry posing for the cameras.

Don thanks his support staff, including local ceramic artists Larry and Brandi. Larry also works at the Verde Campus with me, and that's a pretty accurate halo over his head. Brandi has been at La Meridiana recently, and she is going back to work there in the Autumn. Everyone should go to La Meridiana. In fact, I think we should all take a field trip to Italy!

Clive keeping Giulietta out of the kilns. (Though I heard there was some discussion that she could be used to reach the far corners.)

Behind the kilns, on the cliff over the Verde River. A lovely afternoon.

New Year's Day 2011

Start something as you intend to finish it. Spent the morning sleeping and eating and the afternoon putting together a load for a soda firing.
Clive literally slid the jeep down Holly Street to the state park road, and it won't be coming back up again until the temperature finally gets above freezing for a little while. Everything from the park road down to the valley is fine.

In the spirit of the New Year, I loaded up everything from my studio that just isn't there yet to put into a soda firing. I'll fire pots repeatedly in different atmospheres until they either work or fall apart. After all, if it isn't working, then I have nothing to lose but an ugly piece of fired clay.

I had a lot of help loading pots and throwing snowballs.

 

View below from the Old Jerome High School Artists' Studios (where I have a studio) past one of Robin Anderson's sculptures and towards the former mining metropolis, then ghost town, now former ghost town of Jerome, Arizona, on Cleopatra Hill.

And disgruntled pots awaiting satisfaction in the soda kiln.

The top of the soda kiln, which has the highly unusual condition down in the valley in Clarkdale, Arizona, of a sprinkling of snow.