Graffiti Guy Again

The sharp eye of a Magpie spotted these Graffiti Guys.
Go here to see some others.

Just Another Day

A railroad trestle I pass by on my Sunday bike ride, downtown Austin high-rises in the background.

Yarn Bombing on the recycling box at ACC's Rio Grande campus.

My current class site is at Laguna Gloria, where they also have a lot of after-school classes for kids. This tile tacked up on one of the office walls brought me right back to being 8 years old.

When The Moment Is Right

Susan and I laugh a lot at the current Cialis commercial that features the line "When the moment is right....". Now, whenever I do something definitely unromantic (I specialize in those moves) she says "When the moment is right.... kill it."

This video I took made us both crack up.



Susan supplied the final play-by-play:

"She's not paying attention to him.
Not paying any attention.
She's not looking.
She could not possibly care any less.
She's not ready.
Definitely not ready.
Not interested.
Not.  At.  All.

And....
He doesn't even notice!!!!"

Perfection on a Pumpkin: Meredith

At the end of my Sunday bike ride I stop by Whole Foods for coffee and a snack. Today I started taking a lot of pictures of the huge piles of pumpkins and squashes...squashi? .....squashs? ... anyway, those round lumpy things.

All of the sudden, as if by magic, this little girl wandered over and sat down on one of the pumpkins. There is no way I could have ever found a more beautiful model. Or planned a more perfect picture. Thank you, Meredith (and Meredith's Mom), for letting me take and post this picture.

More Pots

More pots where the texture became irrelevant as my glazing techinque was too heavy-handed. I've also changed how I'm doing the feet on the pots.

I thought about putting these into my Etsy shop but they've already been claimed by fellow students. As Susan puts it, my "Phantom Etsy Shop." Since she'd be the Etsy Wrangler, just like she's the Blog Wrangler, she's not pushing me toward it. Also, the Student Art Sale, which benefits a scholarship fund, will be coming up in early December so I need to get some work going for that.

Below, the pots before glazing:

Hot Pot

A new little pot, just about 5" high. The image below is of the piece before it was fired, with a lot of nice texture showing. Here is The Teaching Moment:

Do you want your texture to show?
Then don't cover it up with a thick glaze.

I like the pot anyway and am working on other pieces that are similar.

Both the glaze and the clay for this pot were High-Fire. This means the piece has to be fired at a high temperature, Cone 10, which means "Very Hot".

Obedience School

Above are two unfired pots I've made recently, both are made with Raku clay.  Just so you know I have been working.

My classes are taught through Austin Community College and this semester the class I'm in is scheduled out at Laguna Gloria. This is a great location and, aside from being able to find a parking space, it's a heavily wooded area right on the lake where peacocks have free-range permission to roam the campus and audit any class they like. In the videos below you'll see just a few of the many I see every time I'm out there. This guy was probably waiting for someone to open the door for him and let him in the classroom.



I don't see that he has any ears or he would have obeyed me because I definitely have an authoritative and commanding voice.



Did you know peacocks came in brown and white as well as the typical blue-green? The coloring could easily be a gender thing but I'm not checking under their feathers to tell you who is what.

Oh, My Aching Back

Susan speaks:
This Blog Wrangler isn't doing much wrangling lately. I'm fine except for my back which got painfully wrenched when I bent down to pick up the newspaper. This same kind of back pull had also happened few months ago (and many times before that) but this time it seemed really bad. So I decided it was time to see an orthopedic surgeon to make sure I hadn't really messed up some sort of bone or disc.

I'm doing minimal Blog Wrangling (or even looking at other people's blogs) because the most painful position is sitting. I can manage about 5-10 minutes at a time. Careful walking is ok, I'm swimming my laps, but I'm also getting a lot of couch time and a lot of books read.

Don wasn't too sure how bad I really felt until I came home from the doctor and said I'd be getting some x-rays and an MRI on my lower back to be sure it wasn't a bad bone thing. An MRI? The big "Happy Box" they slide you into? Yep. Then he knew I was really hurting because I am VERY claustrophobic.

How claustrophobic am I? VERY, VERY.

We used to scuba dive in Hawaii and dive in and out of lava tubes, which are long underwater caves that thread along the coast line. For years we dove with some really great Dive Masters, Tom and Lisa of Dive Makai. They taught us a lot about underwater life, how to dive carefully, and how to manage your air supply. They loved to take us in the lava tubes to see creatures visible only with dive lights deep in the back of the tube.

We would slide in to the tubes slowly and carefully, tubes so small our tanks would bang on the top and our bellies would be scraping on lava rubble, single file, until we got near the end where we could shine our lights on some incredible little creature. Then we would carefully slide on past, out the back opening of the tube into open water. This would take about  20 minutes total. I did this one time. Just once.

On future dives my choice was go into the lava tubes with everyone else or to follow along the outer edge of the lava flow area, around to the other side, to wait at the back opening of the lava tube for everyone to come through. Unfortunately, the outer edge took you into an area where sharks often cruised. Here were my choices: in a small dark lava tube or out in the open, by myself, with sharks. Three guesses which one I took.

How did I manage the MRI? Since only a small part of my back had to be imaged it was not more than 20 minutes in the machine. And I survived it all thanks to the miracles of modern medicine: A lot, a whole lot, of Valium. I kept my eyes closed. I made them put me in feet first. They played a CD I brought. I was zonked out. I might have even fallen asleep except that MRI scanners are unbelievably noisy, even with the sound-muffling headphones they put on me, and the bed rattled and shook at times. I thought it would be soundless. Thank you, Valium, I love you.

Lucky, lucky me. Not bad bone or disc things, just degenerative disc disease and osteoarthritis which I put in the category of "Growing Old is Not For Sissies". A lot of Advil and physical therapy are on the horizon.

Eventually you'll get more of Don back on his blog. He has pictures for you.
Later.

The Acla Family

The Acla Family has gone over to Austin Art Garage. Go here if you are interested. (If their website isn't updated yet, email them to nudge them along.) I am very, very happy that my blog readers appreciate and value the work I do and I am very, very happy to read all the positive coments.  Thank you.  To answer the questions some people have asked me:

• No, I don't have an Etsy shop. Yet.
• No, I don't sell these ceramic sculpture pieces myself.
• Yes, they are for sale at Austin Art Garage.
• Yes, you can buy them even though you don't live in Austin. 
• As long as I have a gallery that accepts these pieces I won't sell them on Etsy. There have been some pieces that are of a different style that the gallery hasn't been interested in so far. Those might go to Etsy in the future. You'll be the first to know.

The next answer is for the people who have asked me why I keep selling through a gallery that, by the nature of gallery business, keeps a large percentage of the sale money:

• Joel Ganucheau and Jake Bryer, owners of the gallery, have been supportive of me and my work from the very first time I showed it to them. 
• Their gallery is devoted to presenting the work of emerging artists at reasonable prices.  I'm an emerging artist. I don't have a long art resume, I don't have an entourage, I don't have an art ego, and I'm willing to make my art affordable. 
• I wanted a gallery to handle my sales because I did not want to have to deal with the sales aspect and all the miscellaneous details like shipping, storage, tax records, receipts, etc.   

The Acla Family is actually named for A-ustin C-ity L-imits A-gain. Yes, it's that time of year, when music lovers head to Austin and we try to figure out different ways to get around town and avoid the traffic jams and road closures.

The four close-up shots are all of Acla4 and he is the only Dude I have photos of from all four sides.  I thought you'd be interested it what he really looks like. I don't have photos of the other Dudes, except for what's on the Austin Art Garage website, because I was in a hurry to get them over there. And I'm moving on to other work. But don't worry, eventually more Dudes will show up.

Dudes, Phase Two

Remember those Dudes from a few days back? The ones with pale blue? No more pale blue - that glaze has been fired to clear gloss, best seen on the chest of the 2nd Dude from the left on the bottom row. But this is only Phase Two of a Three stage firing. They will change appearance again with their 3rd firing. I can only hope that the Kiln Gods and Goddess are happy with me and that The Dudes will survive their firing looking like I want them to.

First Responders

Susan's sister works in our city's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and they sponsored a public Open House this weekend. Who are our First Responders? Police, Fire, EMS, City Employees, trained Volunteers, and many other individuals and groups who spent a Saturday morning putting on a great display of their efforts to protect us from anything and everything, including ourselves. Shown above is a very proud little girl with her father. The event included many activities for children so many of the First Responders had their families out there, in fact we got a chance to visit with our Police Chief and his family.   

When you dial 9-1-1 in Austin the call might be routed here. This photo shows only about a third of the room.

Austin has helicopters, motorcycles, horses, boats, dogs, and bicycle patrols, along with the usual police cruisers.  This pretty much covers our hills, roads, parks, lakes, and city streets. I did learn that we have three separate kinds of K9 dogs - the kind that does rescue and recovery, the kind that searches for drugs and the kind that searches and chases down criminals. Each group is trained separately for their specific skills and they don't mix. 

One activity they sponsored was an opportunity to use "Fatal Vision" goggles. These are used to blur your vision and distort your  perception to give you an idea of how alcohol and drugs can affect your actions. In the videos below I have the goggles on, am driving a "car", and then trying to pass a sobriety test. We laughed and the very vocal spectators were amused but drunk drivers are not funny. Not. At. All.

At Ease, Dudes

These little Dudes are not going to look pale blue and grey when they are done. This is just what the initial glaze treatment looks like and the clay will get a different color also. Glazing on ceramics can be deceptive in the early stages because the color of the unfired glaze can be totally different from what the fired glaze turns out to be.

I'm experimenting with a different shaping technique for some containers. This is my first try (unfired). We'll see.

One Weekend

This is Austin, my city. Early, very early on Sunday mornings I head out on my bike, riding north toward the Turtle Pond on the University campus. 

We have a pedestrian/bike bridge over Town Lake which has been renamed "Lady Bird Lake" but anyone who's been here for a while often has a hard time remembering to say that and besides, since we already have a Lake LBJ, why didn't we name this one "Lake Lady Bird"?  The city is belatedly adding on an extension (seen in the background) so that anyone crossing the bridge can continue on to north side of the city, especially on to Whole Foods where coffee waits for me on the way back. 

The people in this house must have been watching too much HGTV and think this thing is will give the house curb appeal in spite of the burglar bars on the windows.

At the pond the pods are still there and so are my turtles. This guy definitely remembered me, because he disappeared under water as soon as possible.

Proud Papa Tie

We are just now getting around to looking at the very few pictures we took in Washington DC this spring. If you've been keeping up with the blog you know that Susan will talk to anyone about anything, especially strangers. She also has a very sharp eye and notices a lot of things I totally miss. 

 Like this man we passed on The Mall. All of the sudden Susan isn't next to me (we used to watch a TV show called Without A Trace, it is sort of like that with her).  I turn and see her talking to this man and the next thing I know she's taking his picture.  She told him he wouldn't show up on my blog but his daughter would and he just beamed! She gave him my Moo card so he could look for it.  Sorry, Papa, that it took so long to get the picture up.

P.S. We have no idea what his name is or anything about him, other than that he was wearing a black suit, a yarmulke, and this beautiful tie.

Seth's StudioScapes

A while back Seth asked me if I would give him some feedback for The Pulse. When Seth asks, I just say "When do you want it?" and don't even worry about the What or the Why.  The photo on his website was taken about 10 months ago so I thought I'd update you with what my studio looks like now.

Actually, my studio is one side of our garage. Susan's car has permanent dings in her door because she has to squeeze her car into that side. If you compare the photo on Seth's blog and these photos you'll see that I've acquired a new bulletin board and added more stuff to my shelves. The other studio area I have is inside and I share it with Susan. That's where I do my jewelry work and where my Bisley is.

 I'm still working on Little Dudes. These are the first two (unfired) I've made in about 5 months -- I'm back!

We Remember

At the 9/11 Pentagon Memorial the benches representing the victims that were inside the Pentagon are arranged so that when you read the engraved names you are facing the Pentagon's south facade, where the plane hit; the benches dedicated to the victims aboard the plane are arranged so that when you read those engraved names you are facing skyward along the path the plane traveled.

Susan's step-brother's bench is here.  We remember.

The Memorial was not paid for by the government or by your tax dollars.  The Pentagon Memorial Fund, Inc. was incorporated in May 2003 as a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization to raise the private funds necessary to design, build and maintain the Pentagon Memorial.