More cat stuff

Since I've visited my blog here, I've been continuing to make ceramics and GUESS WHAT MORE CATS.

I was jokingly/cynically trying to make a fast/cheap thing to sell, and as it turns out, that's impossible.  Even a form I can make relatively quickly is a canvas for a drawing that I can get overly involved in.  

This was one of the first ones:

Kitten vase
stoneware, glaze, underglaze

 Simple, yes.  But even a line drawing needs to be done to a certain standard, so these took a little more time than my original goal.  (A big part of the time factor is that underglaze really looks best when it's applied in three layers, so I had to go over lines multiple times.) Then I got addicted and decided to make a few dozen, because that is how I do everything.  Some of these are available in my online store, and some I'm holding back for the KC Clay Guild Holiday sale happening Dec. 3rd - 5th.  I'll be set up at the Mother Ship (the Guild itself, 200 W 74th St, KCMO), as opposed to cleaning my own space at home and hosting there.

The pieces are still affordable, but not, like $15--you want stuff like that, go to a big box store and buy junk made by a robot or underpaid labor.

Cat vases
porcelain, underglaze, glaze

mugs!
porcelain, underglaze, glaze

I started out just making drawings from my memory of what a cat looks like (I'm pretty familiar), but then I started looking at cats I know and using their markings as inspiration.  Prepare for cuteness:

Zevon

Clover

Tilly (foster)

Bruce (foster)

Pauline

It's been a while, hope you come around my many digital neighborhoods and reach out if you ever feel like it.

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Drawing on Ceramics I

 Around the time I started to relearn to draw (500 years ago?  no...a year ago but still In The Beforetimes), I made a few test pieces with underglaze and sgraffito techniques based on saved dried flowers and seeds from summer 2019. They didn't trip my trigger at the time, but I kept running across them, so I'm going to share.  That also means I can throw them out!

Aliens?

That one is based on my first round of abstract Queen Anne's Lace drawings and paintings.

Pretty sex-organ-y.

Based on river oats

These were only about three or four inches tall, so the nuance I could get from larger drawings, as well as from ink flow, just weren't there.  They're called sketches for a reason.  I let these ideas marinate for my time away from the Clay Guild and during my summer of collecting flower images and drawing on traditional surfaces...

Learning to Draw II

 By April I was already feeling better about my abilities and coming to terms with my handwriting.  Age and not comparing myself to others drawing the same thing goes a long way!  I was getting used to the tools and materials and finding what I liked best.  Turns out, it was ink and detail brush.  Thank you, Rapidograph Black India and the leftovers from my Design I class at KU.

Since everything shut down in mid March, I had a lot of time to draw and listen to books while trying to keep my existential dread at bay...

pencil on painted newsprint

daffodil with ink on painted newsprint
36 x 22 inches

I think this daf looks like it just sneezed...I was playing around making my own colored ink out of acrylic paint and spray gun medium, and spending more time on each drawing. On a walk after a rain, I took pictures of a daffodil patch, and immediately came home and drew it.

field clover head; ink on painted newsprint

A little too stylized but this one got me excited regardless as I was playing with washes and layering of ink.

Rattlesnake Master
ink and paint on painted newsprint
22 x 18"

If I have a color around, I will throw it on something in lieu of washing it down the drain.  The messy background and simple drawing make me happy here.

detail

striped squill found on a hike
36 x 22"

Really going after blown up small stuff and adding color here.

surprise lily greens that look like fries
22 x 18"

I think this is birch???
ink on painted newsprint

I began making more complicated drawings, letting my maximalism show through, and thinking of these are collages of drawn pictures...this is the first step.

Inspired by Queen Anne's Lace

This field is now an ugly apartment building on Troost and I'm pretty sore about it.

 Queen Anne's Lace is one of my favorite things on Planet Earth.  It's beautiful in the breeze, it feeds pollinators and caterpillars, and every part of it is edible (it's wild carrot, after all).  Every stage of its life cycle is appealing to me, even the dried seed heads.

Playing with a little macro lens I got right up in that inspiration.

Is it going to eat me?

Sketched a little.  Actually, probably a lot, but I painted over most of them.

This one got me excited.

another sketch that has been painted over

So I decided to lay the groundwork on the canvas...these images were pulled from my Instagram, and were taken in my makeshift basement painting studio, so they're not great but I like to show process shots.

There were several more layers of paint than this, but the point is that I put a lot of color in this then washed it out and added papers and whatnot.

This stranger lives inside the painting forever.

I scratched into the surface like I was doing to my ceramics at the time.

Last step before adding ink and paint.

Aliens? What is this?

Weird I'd reference O'Keefe...not vaginal at all.

In summation--I made a few more, but using this single type of design didn't bring me joy like the repeated use of orzos does--although this is quite a similar shape when you get down to it.  I'm glad I went through this exercise, as it got me to start drawing, which led to a lot of very good things, but for now I'm going to be keeping this idea on the back burner.  Summer 2019 I got a wild hair to buy hundreds of feet of canvas, so I think the spark was that I was trying to figure out how to use it and make bigger work in general.

See current works in progress on my Instagram.

It's 2021 I guess

 So, okay, I basically skipped 2020.  As I'm sure most of us can say, having a lot of time in a new way does not always give us the motivation to do all those things you've always wanted to do.  So, I'm going to share what happened in my creative life over the last year here in the new year.

Mostly I rediscovered drawing, took six months off ceramics, biked, and looked at flowers.  I also ate a lot of ice cream and frozen custard.  Oh, and I opened an online ceramics (for now) store in December.

We're all playing catch up and looking back at a weird time...and looking forward to a new, better normal.

I had a few pieces in a show at Inter Urban Art House.

Worked on some orzo pieces early in the year.

Started incising and adding flowers to ceramics.

Grew many flowers, like this cosmo, in my yard.

Collected flowers on my bike

Arranged Bathroom Flowers TM

Drew flowers on ceramics.

Drew some very big flowers on paper.

I'm going to try to have a new post up every Tuesday, because that's when the internet said people are most likely to read and share...Looks like I have myself a New Year's Resolution.