I had a good chat with my pal Jen Mecca yesterday about the surface of my pots and how to keep improving that surface, with more depth and interest. You can see there on that baker more of the latex resist technique that I talked about before. I am really anxious to get some of these fired.Jen and I brainstormed about having two different slip colors for this type of application also. So I will test that out on some of the cups that are waiting under plastic. Another idea was to use wax over the bone dry pot, draw/incise through the wax and introduce stain into the lines so the drawing sits on top of the surface as opposed to being incised into the surface (as I'm doing now). This technique was used by my hero Michael Simon and I recently saw some good examples of it being used on Monica's blog. Michael also used a technique of resisting around an image. Monica is also doing some of that. These techniques would happen over my latexed slip layers. Lots of work huh? Which leads me to another topic Jen and I have been talking about....
Making fewer pots but really making them like we want them. I feel like I am moving towards a distinct look in my pots. I can sort of see it in my mind, but I don't really know how to get there or really even what it is yet. I do know that I am slowly moving though. So what does this mean? For now, it means experimening and asking questions and trying new ideas. Taking risks. I have to make pots to do that, but I think many of these pots will fail and will go into the waster pile. Others will be stepping stones and hopefully some will be worth selling.
This is a leap for me because over the years my main concern has been to make many pots and get them in peoples homes. I sort of latched on to the Warren Mackenzie philosophy early on. Warren makes loads of pots, some great, some poor, with the majority being quite good. His method is to work towards a standard and the way he does that is by making lots of pots, in doing that occasionally the excellent pot will unconsciously arise. (At least that's what I think he's doing).
More in Part 2.