I, Curtis

Category: Art

  • Now I can fly, but…

    Now I can fly, but I can’t figure out how to land.
    I am finding that now that my pot-throwing technique is improving, I am still having difficulty in the area of removing a finished piece from the wheel head. I have considered going back to bat-throwing, but at this time I feel like I can’t do that, because my wheel head and I have become so familar. When my Artista wheel first arrived, I was so scared of the bare wheel-head, it looked so cold and stiff, like it wasn’t meant for clay. I guess the whole shiney-metal thing threw off my feelings about it at first. Now that I have used it for a while, it is getting that very nice, well used, look.
    Lately I have been trying so many different ways to gracefully remove a piece from the wheel head, but it isn’t easy. One technique I have eliminated is the water-as-lubrication method. None of my pots seem to respond well to that, especially not the terra cotta. The wire seems to be about the best, it releases the seal between the clay and the head, but yet still doesn’t really get it going that well. After about 5 or 10 strikes with the wire the piece will begin to move, but it still won’t slide gracefully off the wheel and onto a bat. Thats another thing I am having issues with, no one has made anything like a curved bat that will fit evenly against the wheel head for recieving finished pieces. I know I can’t be the only potter with this particular issue. I was majorly pissed the other day when one of my round pieces became oval as it was moved from wheel head to a bat with a gap of the thickness of the wheel head between head and bat.
    I have a lot of work to do before being as competent at the wheel as a professional potter. There are so many different techniques to learn and so many situations that could occur while I am working with the clay. At the moment my focus is on diversifying the types of clay I use, so that I can become more familiar with the medium of my art.

  • Pot

    Nothing too fancy, but I like it.


    Straight across from the wheel, typical observer point of view

    This is more from the point of view as I see a piece when it is on the wheel. The splash pan is visible in this shot, I am a little messy, but I have seen worse.

    This is what my typical work area looks like. Just me, my wheel, my stool and my tool(s).
    This particular evening I was in the mood to stray from my norm, so I went with a slightly different clay, this is some yellow clay that I keep on hand. This is the first time ive really tried it. It is fairly grainy, but not bad overall, and seems to recover well from potter’s errors.

  • Nearly Perfect

    This piece almost didn’t happen. It started off as an overly moist ball of white stoneware that was sliding on the wheel. By the right combination of forces the piece stablized and snapped into PERFECT CENTER. That means that a hand pressed against the roating side wasn’t moving and neither was the one placed on top… no wobble, no flinch, not even the slightlest rub.
    I thought my luck with the piece was going to be limited to that event, but by some miracle the piece remained centered for the entire event of its creation. The sides are all even with the base, no excess weight is on the base. What I personally enjoyed most about the event was the ridges that formed in the base after I removed the moisture from the clay with a spounge.



    In this image you can see the details of the ridges that were formed, also, observe how circular the piece is. The piece is almost void of any personality, but yet, look closely, you can see little hints of the fact that I worked on this piece with my own two hands.


    From this view, the shape is a little more clear and the sides are visible from a slightly areial perspective.


    This is my favorite image of the piece, because it shows the imperfections in it, although, even the imperfections are uniform. The large version of this image is of poor quality because I had flash off to allow the shadows to cast properly over the piece. The piece has several rise positions where it is obvious that i worked the piece upward from a ball of clay and into this bowl shape that stands several inches high.

  • Wet Bat, Dry Bat






    Here are some of my most recent creations, they are still quite wet and haven’t finished drying/shrinking yet. They should be ready in a few days.




    These are dry, they came off the wheel a few days ago and have been almost completed. I think I would still like to dip some of them in glaze to make them really smooth, but they truely look better in person than they do in these images, the flash catches every defect, got to love technology right?

  • C’est Bon



    Here it is! The 3rd throw on the wheel, and it came out decently. It isn’t perfect, but im happy with it.

  • Perfectionistic Murder

    My perfectionistic nature finally caused me problems tonight. In an attempt to create a ceramic piece on the wheel tonight I managed to make an almost complete piece collapse into absolute ruin. The piece was taking the shape of a bowl, and getting to be almost completely symetrical and smooth, except for a small defect on the inside, one of the interior walls was a little lumpy near the base. As a result of smoothing that wall down to match the others, the adjacent wall collapsed. This occuring nearly brought me to tears immediately, but I toughened up and started looking for positive things in the failure. I can say one thing for sure about the piece, I had it PERFECTLY centered on the wheel head (the remains of the collapsed piece served to prove this). In addition, the piece had a nearly perfect base (roughly half an inch), which was holding to the wheel unquestionably. For the night I have given up on the wheel, but I plan to work on it some more during the weekend, if I can get that close to having a piece I am happy with then it is definately worth trying again. I have only recently (in the past year or so) become a perfectionist, but it is having a horrible impact on my life. I need to find the right balanace between perfectionist and slacker. It is a tough internal conflict.
    After the collapse I questioned why I actually enjoy working with the wheel and clay in general and I couldn’t find any answer that followed a logical path of any type, but I did find an answer that was more of an emotional path. My grandmother and I used to work with my old pottery wheel a lot every summer and we had several nice creations, so there is a link there, but there is more to it than just those memories. I love working with my hands, even though recently I have become very “clean natured”. I used to maintain a decent small garden every year, but haven’t done it seriously since 1993, when my grandfather sold his store. I have had gardens since then and done some stuff with my parents’s garden, but nothing like what I used to do. I have intentions of having a garden this year, I am focusing on herbs and stuff though, so I can have some stuff that I don’t have to worry about preparing garden soil for too much (Herbs for me are a dish-garden event). Sticking my hands into wet clay is a very good feeling for me. It gives me a sense of control as I direct the clay in how it is to act, however, the clay gives a constant reminder that too much force cant be used, or collapse will occur. Balance, interaction and focus are all required during the ceramic creation proccess, or collapse will occur (Notice a reoccuring theme here). I am realizeing at this point that because tonight’s creation wasn’t a total failure I am regretting disposing of it. The piece had a failed wall, but the wall was still intact and the other half of the piece was still standing, and was nearly perfect. The only reason I could even call tonight’s end result a failure is because nothing physically exists as evidence to what went RIGHT tonight. My first instinct with an errored piece seems to be to lift the walls of it and impload the piece back into a ball (even though the clay needs to be reworked before its next project). I made many advancements in my abilities with the new wheel tonight, and with that fact I am happy. Maybe at some point I can train myself to not be so perfectionistic. In addition, I need to get to the point where when something happens that takes the piece off course, I can just stop the wheel and accept whatever final output occurs.
    Overall tonight, nothing physically lost, nothing physically gained, but a lot learned.

  • First Throw on New Wheel

    I just completed my first thow on the new wheel, it went fairly well. I had minor issues getting started on the new wheel during the centering phase. The bat came off of its mount (I guess I didn’t have it secured well). I considered removing the bat all together (as is reccomended when getting adjusted to the wheel), but the bat was already coverd in clay debris, and the bat mounts would have to be removed, so I reattached the bat and continued from there. Next time I think I will start bat-less. The base wheel-head itself is quite nice and I don’t see any problem with using it without a bat, except for the clean-up thing. I like being able to remove a bat to clean it.
    The end piece wasn’t exactly the greatest thing on earth, but perfection wasn’t my goal on this first throw. The goal on this throw was to become familar with this new wheel. All of the things I encountered with the wheel tonight I can adapt to and adjust for, with the immediate exception of the wheel making my table wobble. I need to seek a more stable structure to put the wheel on. The wheel itself only weighs 27lbs, but yet has a centering capacity of over 25 lbs, so it really relies on the structure it is seated on for stability. There are some legs availible for the wheel that I have given thought to, only problem there is that I would have to sit while working with the wheel, which would require me getting a potter’s stool (because none of my furniture sits at the right height), so there is a whole mess of things required to go that route.
    In addition to the wobble, there was a slight defect in the clay, which had I been more thorough in the preperation of the clay, would not have existed (or would have been detected). The defect was in the form of a patch of slightly course clay. There was also a defect in the final piece because I moved to quickly to bring the piece to its final height. This resulted in a slightly fat base.
    Even though the piece didn’t turn out that well I will post some pics of the finished piece once I do the completion prep and it is fully dry. I will also at that time post some pics of my previous works, both wheel and hand-built. It should be no suprise to anyone who knows me well that the most round and most uniform piece was created as a hand-built piece from a square block of clay (as opposed to the standard ball).
    I should be ready to post in about 2 or 3 days, depending on whether or not I decide to glaze. I have no intentions of attempting to get this piece fired.

    For anyone who doesn’t know, these are bats: