Chaos

 

Been wondering where I am?

 

Eventually I'll be back.

 

And it isn't even me doing the work. My Blog Wrangler is coordinating the contractors on this.

She has announced she has no life.

We eat sawdust. Our neighbors (we live in an apartment building) hate us.

WHAT????

Because of a chicken foot? A chicken foot?!?

 

 

The looming demise of print newspapers will definitely put an abrupt end to world-shattering news items like this one.

 

And an end to valuable information! My potato head men and I had no clue that chicken feet were even edible. Sort of like crunchy potato chips?

Happy Valentine's Day, 2014

“We'll be Friends Forever, won't we, Pooh?' asked Piglet.
Even longer,' Pooh answered.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

 

 

 

Hedgehog whistles, about 4 inches long.

 

Trivia: Susan is 50% pure Polish, complete with a maiden name that has z and w and s and all sorts of odd letters in it and is not easily pronounced. Her grandfather was born in February in Poland and was named Valentine. He came to the United States in 1907 when he was 16 because he heard the streets were "paved in gold".

 

 

The Egg Came First

I'm a pretty decent cook and hard-boiled eggs are a snap to make. We like to always have some in the refrigerator for last minute egg-salad sandwiches or when we are hungry but in a hurry to go somewhere. Can't say no to protein!  We've learned the hard way to not only keep them in a separate bowl in the refrigerator but to also mark on them. Otherwise, it makes for an interest episode when two people are working in the kitchen and one will be using hard-boiled eggs to make egg-salad but the other is going to make scrambled eggs with the regular eggs and they both have put their eggs on the counter and the one using the hard-boiled eggs always cracks the egg by slapping it on the counter.... you get the picture.

Susan just grabs a pencil and scribbles a mark on the egg. This question will be on the final exam:

In the picture above, identify which eggs have been marked by Susan

 and which eggs have been marked by Don. 

 

 

These aren't eggs, these are giant acorns, about the size of a tennis ball. Their stems could have been a little thinner and maybe their caps a little shorter but I'm liking them. They are going to get some color added with a paint wash. For a long time I've fought using paint on my ceramic pieces -- they are supposed to be glazed! But I'm beginning to realize that I can do anything I want -- My art, My rules.  Robert Rauschenberg can put quilts on his paintings, I can put paint on my ceramic sculptures.



Weather Alert

More little birdies. I've been trying out different glazes and techniques.  The top two are raku, the bottom two are high-fire. The only one of the four I really like is the green one and even the glaze on that is spotty. But I like the wing pattern on him.

Today is the Super Bowl, the Puppy Bowl (on the Animal Planet channel) and the Kitten Bowl (on the Hallmark channel). I plan on trying to nap/doze through most of them. Everyone says the commercials are the main reason to watch the game but they are usually on the internet the next day so I can catch up then.

Just in case you are tired of our ugly winter weather - anyone talking about global warming lately? - I provide you with an all-purpose weather report. WARNING: Video contains offensive language. Don't watch it if you don't like offensive language.

Ceramic Abuse!

Whoa! I'm really worried about the ceramic squirrel. I can't find any more data than this.

Should I get nervous about my birds? Susan wouldn't fuss about beer but she sure likes to be sure there is cream for her coffee in the morning.

Frank and Susan Collaborate

Above is their final result.  Susan told Frank, our next-door neighbor, that doodling was really an art form called Zentangle and if he would just start giving his doodling (could that word be any weirder?) an art form name it would mean he actually was an artist.

So Frank produced this doodle, I mean Zentangle, while he was on a phone call one day and gave it to Susan.

Susan scanned it in her computer and started playing with it with Photoshop Elements 2.0, which she refuses to upgrade*.  The beginning is below and the final result is at the top of this post.

Susan speaks: Upgrading just gives me grief. I made the fatal mistake of upgrading Microsoft's Street & Trips 2009 to the 2013 version. How is it possible for a company like Microsoft to totally ruin a decent product? How can they take a road that was in use in 2009 and still exists today and runs for nearly 300 miles and is heavily traveled and completely remove it from the program? How can it be that IE 10 is slower than IE 9? Why is the sky blue?

I Have No Idea

I have no idea what creature this skull came from. Nan G guessed a "teeny owl" but he'd have to be really teeny because that's just a big soup spoon he's in.

Susan took these pictures for me and said I need to dust. As if.

When we were at the MOMA we saw a large installation of these hanging bottles and found the knotting to be really interesting. The artist is Nari Ward. I'm thinking I could do something like that with some ceramic pods I could make but then I'd have to make a whole bunch of them and that sounds like work....

Odd Ends

Sometimes I make really tiny birds. The bigger ones in the back were made by Debra Fritts, one of my very early instructors. She makes really interesting sculptures and she taught me a lot about letting your hands "listen" to the clay.

These guys are really interesting. They were a Christmas present from Susan -- a new pillowcase. How cool is that!??! Bet nobody else got a zombie pillowcase from their Bed Buddy.

Really Flummoxed

We were at The Metropolitan Museum at Thanksgiving. Everytime we go there we spend time wandering around into different areas that we don't plan on. This time it was the Hall of Armor that was a surprise. What the heck were they thinking when they put that doodad on his guy-parts? How in the heck is he going to get on a horse with that? OK, I definitely understand protecting the guy-parts but what the....?

These guys (from Germany, in 1525) look like they could be coming from the future instead of the past. Way cool.

We saw a Balthus exhibit - the guy was a little weird with the girls and cats so I wonder if he got all his fame from his subject matter rather than his painting skills. We also wandered through a textile exhibit where we learned enough history to make our heads explode.

As for my art, here is a rerun of what I was previously starting to paint (very small canvases):

 And here is what I wound up with, all sold at our Student Art sale:

Happy New Year!

From all of us:  Have a very Happy New Year!

 

 

Peep, Peep, Peep

These little birds were made with a different type of clay and have a different type of surface design and a different type of glaze on them.

Susan really liked them. So naturally I sold them at the Student Art Sale. I may not be getting lucky for another decade.

Or at least until I make some more for her.

We had a quiet Christmas and contributed to Amazon's profit for the year. How could you ever go wrong with books? The latest Netflix have been The Way Way Back - an A for the movie but an A+ for Toni Collette's acting, and Looper - an A+ for an incredibly imaginative movie that still has us confused.

Happy Whatever-You-Want-It-To-Be Holiday

Have a happy holiday season. After all, as doofus as I look, I'm happy.

It would be nice to think that this is the last Christmas any troops have to be at the Kabul, Afghanistan, airport for their dinner. It would be nice to think that these troops will be eating next year's Christmas dinner at home, with real silverware and dishes.

Yes, I'm Still Here

Here's the deal: We went to New York City and Washington DC for Thanksgiving (actually, we came home on Thanksgiving Day). It was a short 3 days in NYC (including travel), one day on Amtrak to DC (with a long nap when we arrived) and 4 days in DC. When we got home we took a lot more naps. The good news is we got to see a lot of good museum shows, the bad news is that we moved so fast we didn't take any time to visit with our good friends (you know who you are!) in NYC or DC.

But, as you can see from the picture above, I did visit with one of my favorites. Susan likes to catch photos of me pondering art (below is by Al Held, above by Modigliani).

So where has the blog been in the meantime? We came home to Susan having a sudden, earlier than planned, deadline of December 18 to have eight (8!) previously promised Toddler quilts made - all pieced, quilted, edges bound and finally photo-ed.  A Toddler quilt is one that is about 36-40 wide and about 45-50 inches long -- big enough to be a cover but not so big they trip on it when they drag it around. Sewing and nothing else, definitely not the blog, consumed her days while I did dishes and kept thread and pins picked up off the floor.

Below are the fronts and then the backs (you can  match them up because she scrambled the order!).  Sometimes when she is finished she likes the back better than the front. 

Street Art and Yarn Bombing

This wall is near Whole foods and is topped off by railroad tracks. It has been a canvas for graffiti artists many times, giving it a nice varied background. These stay in place about a week or two before the city paints them over.

 

Susan told me (and I believe her because her authority comes from her grandmother who taught her how to knit, crochet, quilt, sew and play canasta) that these were crocheted into place. Way cool. The barrier (ha!) is supposed to keep people away from the graffiti wall.  As if. I missed seeing the previous display but from the amount of paint below the wall it must have had a lot of pink in it.

Sad Guys, Happy Guys

Two new happy Mousies, right? Wrong -- look harder.

When little Mousies are being raku fired in a hot kiln and fall onto each other they will pull the glaze off each other where they touched. Sad mousies. I'd be a lot sadder if I was trying to make a living doing this stuff. As it is, the only damage, other than the mousies, is to my ego.  I was quite sure I had the Kiln Goddess on my side. How could I have forgotten how fickle some women (No, not you, Susan) are?

 

My little hedgehogs are actually whistles, a feat I have been working on for weeks. I read several articles about how to make ceramic whistles and watched some YouTube videos on it and finally can get it right. These guys still need to be fired.

 

 

Thanksgiving, 2013

Our military in Afghanistan takes a timeout for a Happy Thanksgiving Day dinner. But they stay armed. Regardless of your political leanings, be thankful that they have volunteered to serve their country, regardless of their own political leanings.  [Photo: Omar Sobhani]

Visit with family and friends, eat too much, pretend to watch football on TV while you take a long nap and ignore the urge to buy things you don't really need, no matter how cheap they are, on a day when you don't need to be shopping.

From your mostly-vegetarian Blog Wrangler: Happy Squash Day.