The hard thing about imaginary landscapes on clay (see my first post on these) is that it’s so difficult to know when they are “done.” The interaction of translucent paint over the texture of the clay slabs can look so good in the early stages that it’s hard to know if any more is needed. I showed two paintings in the ESU Faculty show this fall that were minimally worked, but I’ve decided to add more to both of them because while I liked them from close up, from a distance they weren’t reading very well. And, as I had worked more and more into other paintings while those two were out of the studio in the faculty show, I decided I liked more layering. My fear had been that the more layers of paint, the less the clay would play an integral role in the painting. But after adding a lot of layers on some of the paintings I realized that the “clay-ness” of the pieces was still playing a big role in the work. 

I need to take more photos, but, here are a few paintings as they are at the moment-the paintings’ progress. 

I was so busy telling the story of firing the old wood kiln in part 1, I didn't include all the photos I had picked to go along with it! For more information of what these are about, ready part 1 from December 2, 2022.

Why would anyone want to go to the trouble of firing a wood kiln-the firing can take days of constant attention and fire-stoking when they could just use an electric kiln that you can program to do all the work? Wood kilns are not common, many ceramic students and artists never get the opportunity to find out. In October, I had the amazing opportunity to help fire a wood kiln. I even got the honor of lighting the right side of the kiln. I knew something about the process before I had he actual experience; the fire surrounds the clay and deposits ash on what is being fired, creating serendipitous effects that simply can’t be achieved in any other way. But there is also a community aspect, and yeah, it’s somehow embarrassingly satisfying to play with more than two thousand degrees of fire. ​

Between Covid and a groundhog undermining the kiln, the old woodfire kiln hadn’t been fired in years. Luckily the groundhog had vacated the premises when Andrew Storck and I took on the task of rebuilding the firebox. This is not something I would have attempted on my own, but I was keen to help because that’s the best way to learn about the kiln construction-to literally rip it open and see how it works. Unlike store-bought kilns, wood kilns are built as one-offs, and whoever built it has many choices to make. We had no idea what we were getting into, or how long it would take. Ellie Wirthiem joined in and we got the firebox of the kiln taken apart and put back together again faster than any of us anticipated. It was such a great feeling-glad I took a selfie to capture that burst of joy. 
However excited we were at getting the old kiln back together again, we had no idea if our modifications would work, or not, or if there were other problems with the kiln from sitting for years unused, so it was decided not to make the changes too permanent and to do a test firing. Another factor was that in the past, that kiln had never been fired hotter than cone 6, which is about 2,200 F. A new wood kiln is under construction that is designed to go hotter, to cone 10 which is 2,385 F. That might not seem like a lot, but once you get to a certain temperature, it’s really a struggle to get a wood kiln hotter. Also, a clay “body” (recipe, if you will) that works at cone 6 could warp or even melt into a puddle on the kiln shelf at cone 10. In fact, testing clay for the cone 10 wood kiln environment was a compelling reason to fire up the old kiln. That way, once the new kiln is completed we have a reliable clay recipe to use in it.