It's Life Drawing Wednesday! I finally got to play around with my new clay, and boy was it awesome! The texture was so smooth and easy to work with, and I just love the colour. And then there's the anticipation of how it will look fired. So exciting!
I was really in the zone tonight, and even though I haven't done any sculptures since November, I noticed that I'd improved on a couple things. One was time-management, but the other was technical. I was paying really close attention to the heads. If you remember last semester, I thought they were looking too cartoony, so I mostly steered clear. This time though, I was trying to be conscious of proportion, and features, and all that. I kept remembering a video clip I watched on Ceramic Arts Dailyabout the proportions of the head. The video I watched was here, but here's a nice condensed version that's pretty similar. Pretty much just the first minute or so.
Here's a photo I got around the halfway point of the evening...
ONLY TWO PHOTOS?!? you ask... well, I swear I'm not being coy. My camera died! There will be more to come very soon, I promise!
In the meantime, moment of the night, while getting a brief shoulder massage from Courtenay:
Me: "Do you feel the knots?"
Courtenay: "I don't know... what I'm touching."
Picture this: it's Monday night. I'm sitting on my bed, my back propped up with pillows against the wall, and my computer warming my lap. Under the laptop, a fleecy blanket covers my lower half. Under the blanket, I wear leggings, and big woolly socks pulled up to my knees. I'm wearing a floral dress of one pattern, and my warmest knit sweater of a completely different (un-matching) floral pattern overtop. On my head, I wear a stripy winter headband.
My house is cold.
But it's within these conditions that I start to do some research. I need to take the next step with my life sculpting, but I'm not quite sure where to start. I know I want to go to life drawing classes, and I know I want to focus on producing a lot of figures quickly. Beyond that, I don't have much of a style or concept figured out to push it any further.
Time to hunt for ideas.
I start by looking through a couple ceramics/sculpture books from the library. Since I'd already bookmarked a couple things of interest, I look at them again. But I find ideas aren't springing up from that, so I decide to look up a couple of the artists online.
From there, I move on to looking at some videos on Ceramic Arts Daily. I come across this one of artist Gerit Grimm.
Her style is very fun and whimsical, which is very much unlike my own, but something I admire. It gets me thinking about Sara and Stephanie and all those lovely Gabriola girls, who are wonderful artists with very cool styles that I love. Stephanie takes ceramics classes with Mariko on Gabriola and raves about her work, so I take a look at her website.
http://www.feedlotstudios.ca/
It's the colour and the whimsy and the detailing that draws me in, again things I don't use much in my own work. I drink it in. Mariko then directs me to Black Bird Studios, and artist Paige Kearns-Coull, who has a similar style.
http://blackbirdstudios.squarespace.com/
And then I'm wanting to use these things somehow to inspire my own work. But how can I interpret these things to make them my own? What exactly about them would fulfill what I'm looking for? How would I add different elements to my life sculpting?
Earlier, I came across these Linda Ganstrom pieces, which seem to answer that last question to an extent.
Her nudes sit atop structures or objects, the two elements working together beautifully. They're a little darker than the previous fanciful photos I was looking at, but in a way I can relate to them more. They still incorporate lovely colouring and detail through the texture of the clay itself as well as the glazing methods. They intrigue me.
So I brainstorm some more, and one thing that I remember includes the very inspiration for the title of my blog: a poem I wrote in second year (2009) about the process of working with clay.
My brain is now stewing with many more ideas about what I might like to pursue, but I won't spill the beans about them all tonight.
For now, I'll leave you with the poem, "Creation." It is meant to be read in three ways: the left column alone, the right column alone, and the two columns combined, line by line. This was based on the structure of a poem we read in class, and very difficult to achieve. It's not perfect, but I really enjoyed working with it, and was happy with the final product. Enjoy!
Creation
Bring up the lie with
layers of damp dirt grass at your back while
in your agile hands you hold the sky
the soft grays falling slowly
under your spell with no interruptions
time aligns like birds on a wire
the spiral you invent
like a deck of cards to form
locking molecules stars of constellations in your mind
with strength to reinforce something that isn’t there
