Buried Treasure

Seth has the annual Buried Treasure online collaboration going on. Go here to see what I'm talking about. The guy is a Creative Maniac! I am in awe of the work he produces, not to mention he's a nice guy. Enjoy his blog, it's a treat. 

Here's the text of the original post. Notice the mention of the weather, not that we can possibly even remember what it's like to be anything under 100 degrees in Texas.

**************************************************
More Baby Pots and Pancakes
January 21, 2011
 

Baby Pots because Baby, it's cold outside!

I am an oatmeal fan and a pancake fan so I really enjoy cold weather as an excuse to have those for breakfast. Not both at the same time until now because Susan has found a recipe for oatmeal pancakes that are even lighter and puffier than the Bisquick Melt-In-Your Mouth ones (recipe on the box) we've been making. Up until now she only tolerated oatmeal in cookies but these pancakes have won her over.

Oatmeal Pancakes
--------------------
Mix in a bowl:
1/4 c. flour
1 c. quick-cooking oats (the 1-minute kind)
1 T. sugar
1/2 t. baking powder
1/2 t. baking soda
a dash of salt
optional: 1/4 t. cinnamon (we don't opt)

Mix in another bowl:
1 c. nonfat buttermilk
1 large egg
2 T. melted butter

Add the wet stuff to the dry and stir just until mixed.
Cook on your lightly oiled (or not, if teflon) pancake griddle or in a pan, turning when tops are covered with bubbles. These might looked browner when done than normal pancakes.

If you are of the decadent type you can do what we do: Fry up Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage. Crumble it into little pieces. Sprinkle them on the pancakes before you flip them over to finish cooking. When you serve them, serve them sausage-side up because then there are all the little spots to trap the syrup.

If you have extra pancakes left over they will reheat (about 10-20 seconds) in the microwave the next morning. If you are like us, there won't be any left over and after breakfast you'll just go lie on the floor for an hour or so.

For the record, I can cook and I can make these all by myself.

Jessica Dupuis and My Jessica Book

Thousands and thousands and thousands of tiny ceramic shards, all carefully adhered to a backing. When we go to Houston we always stop by the Center for Contemporary Craft. Resident artists work in studios there and part of their "job" is to have open studio hours. This lets us go in and talk to the artists, to ask them what they are working on, the processes they use to make their art, the inspirations they have.

On my last visit I was lucky enough to visit with Jessica Dupuis, the artist of the piece above (detail at top)   and the creator of the in-process work shown (below).  Jessica shared ideas with me and encouraged me to try what I was thinking about:  A ceramic book.  Susan is always making books of one sort or another so I thought I'd surprise her with a book I made. 

It hasn't been glazed yet because I'm not sure what to do about that. In the meantime, it's a really fragile piece, although Jessica swears her pieces hold up well enough to be shipped to gallery and museum shows. Take a look at more of her work here.  Thanks again, Jessica, for all your advice. Susan loved the book.



Black and White

He has black underglaze on parts of him and graphite pencil marks. I'm not sure what will happen with the white unglazed areas. If I don't do anything to them with this particular clay they have a tendency to look chalky.

I'm back to making more heads again, which was originally a starting point for me. Sometimes art just pushes you around in a big circle.

Guys and Dolls

Last summer I took a class from Lisa Renner (here and here) and was not, for a change, the only guy in the class. Gary Smith was also in the class and he is the artist who created the piece above. Below is a detail showing how meticulous his work is and further down is the picture I took of his piece at the end of the class. Lisa provides more information and assistance than you can possibly absorb in one day so most of us put the finishing touches on our pieces when we got home.

Obviously Gary is a much more skilled artist than I am when it comes to mixed media (my piece, Ricky, is shown below).  I guess I could challenge him to a ceramics smack-down but I'm not sure I could win that!  Although I relish being the only guy in most classes, Gary is an enjoyable classmate and is more than willing to stand back and watch me (unsuccessfully) try to be the Alpha Dog.

Just like I benefit from the atmosphere around Susan, I think Gary benefits from the atmosphere around his wife, Jeanie Thorn. We are both pretty lucky guys. And we make Dolls!

Summer Colors

I'm working again with heads (about 4" high) but this time I'm focusing on color. Right now I'm liking purple, chartreuse, cinnamon and black.  We'll see how far I can go with those colors. This head needs a little more work, maybe just a clear matte glaze but then again I might just accidentally screw him up. Oh well.

Our friend, Maria, has a knack for growing anything, regardless of the weather. She brought us the okra and yellow cherry/pear tomatoes. I cooked them with some onion, and red cherry tomatos and then tossed them with chili butter and capellini. And bacon. Of course.

Dancing As Fast As I Can

These pieces all need to have a glaze picked out, then the glaze applied and then they need to be fired. The stack on the right contains test tiles. I hate test tiles. I also hate it when my glaze choice doesn't even look like it was in the same planet than what I planned. Or even in the same universe. I hate it when Susan tells me a glaze looks really cool and then I can't ever duplicate it again because I was just winging it. Hence, test tiles.

I've done test tiles before, carefully and methodically. And never was able to recreate the test tile glaze again, regardless of what I wrote down. Maybe the Kiln Goddess doesn't like me.

Nahhh. No way. Which reminds me, my high school reunion is this fall  -- don't ask me which one. Susan has absolutely no interest in going with me because 1) she didn't got to my high school and 2) she went to 3 different high schools in 4 years and thinks reunions are dumb. She's made me promise to be on my best behavior. Best Behavior means that when a woman comes up to me and starts chatting about our high school days I do not say to her "Did we date?"

All the raku pieces have to wait until our burn ban is lifted which will be after it rains a lot which, based on the way our summer weather is going, might not be in my lifetime.



(small symbol in center of bottom bar will let you eliminate any screen notations)

Pointing Out

Remember those antlers I got from my barber, Kervin? Here is where they might be going. The head is just bisque fired so far and the antler piece will be glued on after final glazing. What will the final glazing look like? Beats me.

Julie Guyot and Me

No, I didn't make the cup shown above, Julie Guyot did and I bought it from her. We went to the Renegade Craft Fair here in Austin earlier in May because Susan thought I would see some examples of jewelry that I might like to try making. Instead, I found Julie. 

First of all, the Renegade Craft Fair was WAY better than I thought it would be and we're looking forward to going again. Check their website to see if one is coming to your area. And as far as it being "craft", take a look at what Julie thinks about that. Second, I rarely buy anyone else's art art because our house is getting full of S-T-U-F-F, both other artists and Susan and mine. We are trying to de-acquisition, not acquisition -- face it people, none of our stuff is going to fit in our coffins.

I made a deal with Julie: If she would tell me how she shaped the cup, I would buy one. It was an easy offer for me because both Susan and I really were attracted to her work. She just laughed and told me she'd tell me how even if I didn't buy one and she'd even draw me a template. I know there is a lot of website/blog talk about copying and stealing ideas but so far I've been fortunate enough to find people who are more than willing to talk to me about their work and the techniques they use and how they create their specific "trademark" pieces. Maybe it's because ceramic artists know that no matter how much you tell someone, it's still up to the Kiln God/Goddess to decide what the final result will be.

I drew off a lot of her templates on paper and tried to determine how the shapes would go. I redrew her template in the size I wanted and then tried making some of cups using her shaping techniques. [Note to Julie - Not fair! You made it sound easy.] Two results are shown below. I like the wonky-ness of the cups but I'm not sure about the glaze. It is a soda firing technique I did for the first time.

Thanks Julie, for taking the time to give me advice and making me feel like a "real" artist.

Happy Birthday, Gigi!

I grew up with two brothers but was lucky enough to marry a woman who had a brother and a sister. That meant I acquired a sister-in-law, Gigi. She's really smart and has all sorts of degrees to confirm that and best of all, she thinks everything I make is terrific.

Gigi works in a cubicle and we all know that those cubicle workers seem to find the best sorts of funny stuff to mail around - on their break, of course. Here are some items she passed along to us. If you want to see more in the series just google the title.

What Artists Do If Given Wire and Household Objects

(and too much time on their hands)

Susan speaks: Her real name is Linda Jean but at age 3 when she came along I wasn't up to saying all that. "Gigi" was what I could say and that became her family name. Only family calls her that and it still seems odd when other people, including her husband!, call her Linda. The picture above was from 1960, Disneyland. The first picture below is from Arlington, Virginia, and includes my brother and Mom. Dad was always the photographer and Gigi has inherited his photographic eye.  The bottom picture is from Ann Arbor, Michigan, back in the dark ages when I had no grey hair. I have no idea what we were doing dressed alike but it must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

Remembering on the 4th of July

Re-enlistment ceremony, Kabul, Afghanistan

The 4th of July is our Independence Day, when we celebrate our 1776 Declaration of Independence, which includes this statement:

We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal,

that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable Rights,

that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Make sure you mentally do a little editing to get this phrase correct:

 that all men and women are created equal,

Our military armed forces serve to protect our independence, and women serve in our armed forces, in both support and combat positions. So far, while serving in our armed forces, 111 women have died in Iraq and 28 have died in Afghanistan. We like to have lots of parades on the Fourth of July and I hope your parade includes a section for military veterans, especially the women.

Please remember also those who served and are no longer with us, among them Captain James Clifford McKittrick and Captain Barry L. Brown.

Captain Barry Lynn Brown, Killed in Action, Vietnam, May 5, 1968

Bottoms Up

I was digging around in the back of some shelves and found this mug I made a long time ago, back when I was just starting in ceramics and thought making mugs was a cool thing to do. The shape isn't bad and the blue glaze is interesting. However, gripping a handle that looks like an alligator's tail is not exactly what I want to do with my morning cup of coffee. Not to mention the fact that the glaze job is pretty pathetic on the inside. And I had to ego-trip my intitial on the bottom, prompting Susan to say it would be my job to wash it anytime I used it. It has become a give-away to my green-thumb friend, Maria, who will plant something little in it.

We did get a blast of rain last week but it wasn't enough to keep us from having our drought alert and burn-bans extended through all of July. That means no more raku firings for me unless we get a heavy-duty load of rain and the burn-ban is lifted. I don't know what this bush is, but every summer it comes back to our front courtyard-- it seems to like the heat.

Nichos Again

I'm back to making nichos but I'm not sure why. Maybe I need to feel enclosed? Maybe I'm in a box? Maybe I just need to ponder my bellybutton some more.

The nicho above is After cleaning up from raku firing, this picture below is Before cleaning up from the firing. All the nichos shown here were raku fired which involves lots of smoke and hot fire. Unfortunately, we still have a burn ban in effect due to the drought we are having so there won't be any more raku firing done until we get some rain.

Susan speaks:
Robyn thinks our oven is clean. Ha! The myth is greater than the reality. The oven is pretty bad (see picture) but is easy to clean because it has a self-cleaning feature. You just set that option and a few hours later you wipe out the ash reside and your oven looks like Martha Stewart cleaned it with her q-tips. One problem however -- the odd odors from the self-cleaning cycle set off our smoke detectors! The alarm blares, the alarm company calls us to tell us the fire department is on the way, and we run around like idiots trying to shut the alarm off. Note to Self: Ripping the back-up battery out of the control box is not a good thing to do. The only way to do the cleaning without having cardiac arrest is to open all the windows, have several fans blowing and alert the alarm company before you start. As a result of all that hassle, I just let the oven get really, really, really ugly before I clean it. After all, it's not like I'm eating food off its surface.

All About Me. And Food

Nothing much happening here but we did get a little rain the other night. To alleviate my boredom Susan told me to make some bread while she was out running an errand. She promised it would be easy and it was. One hour, self-rising flour, sugar, some melted butter and Yes! A bottle of beer. We had a few chunks warm from the oven and smeared with butter. She had also promised it wouldn't taste so great. She was right. But the birds and raccoons aren't as picky as we are. Next week she promised to upgrade me to a fancier recipe.

I took the video on the bottom with my iPhone. Can you tell I've been listening to FoodTV? Rachel Ray would be proud of me. Susan spent about an hour trying to figure out how to make it look better (other than my cheesy narration) on YouTube and determined that:
1) I should have filmed it sideways,
2) she wasn't going to mess with it anymore and
3) she had no idea how to fix it. (Any ideas?)
What you see is what you get.

To sum it all up, I can serge and I can bake bread and I am the Champion of Napping!

To atone for the crummy video we'll give you a recipe for a pie that's like the one pictured. Promise yourself you'll only make it once a month. (OK, once a week.) Promise yourself you won't eat the whole damned thing in one day (OK, it was the two of us). Totally ignore the aversion you might have to buttermilk because you won't taste it. I promise. Totally ignore the fact that Cool Whip is fake stuff because once you taste the pie you won't care. Totally ignore the fact that this pie is just a highway to junk-food hell because once you taste it you'll be asking for the express lane.

Velvet Pie
------------
Dump a package of Jello French Vanilla Instant Pudding mix in a bowl.
Pour 1 cup of buttermilk over it.
Whisk it together quickly until it looks smooth.
Fold in 1 8oz container of Cool Whip.
Plop it into a graham cracker pie crust.
Chill for a couple of hours.

Sounds too bland? Not!
Consider doing the same thing with White Chocolate Pudding mix and a chocolate cookie crust. Or try a different pudding like lemon or butterscotch or chocolate.
Too decadent for you? Wimp! OK, use the fat-free pudding and fat-free Cool Whip and low-fat pie crust.

One last tip: For us, the treat part is the crunch of the pie crust. So we buy 2 crusts. The first crust is the pie bottom and gets half of the mix plopped in, then topped off with some broken pieces of the 2nd crust (about half of them). Plop in the rest of the mix and top it off with the remaining chunks.

You aren't getting a picture of our pie because we were too busy eating to stop for a photo op.

How Hot Is It?

It's hot. I don't obsessively check the thermometer anymore but I can tell you yesterday was Day 16 in a row of days where we've gone over 100 degrees. For the record, today is the first day of Summer. It's gonna be fun...

How hot is it?

I now know that a seat belt makes a pretty good branding iron.

How hot is it?

I can drive with only 2 fingers on the steering wheel.

How hot is it?
The best parking place is determined by shade instead of distance.
(always my best move)
How hot is it?
I'm doing minimal yard work at dawn and I start sweating before the sun actually comes up.
See photo above for my suffering plants that I have been watering, but we are also in drought conditions so I can only water twice a week.
How hot is it?
My biggest fear while riding my bike is "What if I fall and get knocked out and end up lying on the pavement and cook to death?"
How hot is it?
I now know that asphalt has a liquid state.

It's A Guy Thing

Feats of Clay here in Austin is a great place to shop for ceramics -- and some of my metal sculptures. Judy, the owner, has a great garden area on the side of her shop where she manages to grow stuff despite our drought and heat (102 today). She generously lets me display some of my metal yard art Guys there (all about 3 - 4 feet high) and I am hoping someone will decide to take one home with them.

Some of the sculptures are anatomically correct - Happy Father's Day.

Winter's Bone and The Hunger Games

We are reading The Hunger Games trilogy (now into the third book). In this case it is actually Listening, not reading, because they are from Audible.  A book that is read to you gives you an entirely different connection to the story and a good reader will help you stretch your imagination as you visualize the characters and the scene.  These books are considered "Young Adult" but it confuses me as to why they aren't considered Adult books. Yes, the main character is a teenage girl but so what? The theme of the books is heavy-duty morality, the future, death, violence, manipulation, deceit and so on. The movie (of course) is being shot now and Jennifer Lawrence is the main character, Katniss.

So how does this tie in with the movie Winter's Bone? Jennifer Lawrence (shown above) was the lead actor in this movie and her performance was achingly, hauntingly perfect. A good movie is one that has you thinking about it the next day, mulling over the scenes and wondering about the characters. In this movie it was very interesting to realize at the end that the strongest characters, in terms of how they faced life and dealt with hardship, were the women, not the men. Recently we watched The King's Speech and gave that a five-star rating. Winter's Bone gets six stars.

How does that all tie in with the picture of the antler pieces at the top? They came from Kervin, my barber. He hunts a lot and does a lot of gardening, too.  In The Hunger Games they hunt game for food, in Winter's Bone they hunt game for food.  You may think hunting animals is a bad thing but consider the fact that in Austin our local Caritas organization accepts venison donations from hunters and uses it to provide food to families in need.

The antler pieces are in the process of being worked into some ceramic sculptures - or at least that's the plan.

Man With A Mission

I wanted to have some definitive texture on the clay slabs I rolled out so Susan begged some spare canvas from an artist friend and we bought some other pieces of canvas and burlap at HobbyLobby. I cut them into pieces a little bigger than some plywood boards I had and I'll wrap the boards and staple-gun the cloth into place on the back.  I need several boards covered because I use both red and white clays and sometimes they get pretty wet from the clay.

The pieces I cut were all raggedy and had lots of loose threads on them so I asked Susan if she could fix the edges for me. "No problem! Let me get out my serger and we'll see what we can do." Notice the word "we" in her response to me.

Ten minutes later I was a serging fool! I like the serger -- it's has a sharp edge that can whack your fingers, it goes really fast and is loud. It's just like guy power tools!

For Everyone You Love

I have a lot a scars on my body. Too many. I've been blessed by having a wife who nags me and over twenty years ago an alert doctor caught my first basal cell carcinoma before I even knew what it was. I now see my dermatologist, Dr. Colby Evans, every 3-4 months but basal cell carcinomas and squamous cell carcinomas still continue make their way to the surface. The frightening part is not how small the spot can be, but how large the area is that the doctors cut out.  I have a scar on my back that looks like a knife stab that I like to joke is where Susan stabbed me. If only it was that simple. Watch this video, please.



If you aren't sure why that small funny spot won't go away, go see a dermatologist. The longer you wait, the larger the scar will be.  That picture at the top shows you how much might get cut away - the inside circle is what goes out along with the bad spot. The outside circle shows you the cut lines the doctor makes so as to close the skin over the hole you just had whacked in your skin. There will be stitches. Gruesome, yes. So use sunscreen and forget about having a "good tan". There's no such thing.

Today is our wedding anniversary -- 44 years. Dr Evans is helping me make sure there are more to come.

Note: Go here or here to see what I usually post on our anniversary.