A Well Practiced Awkward Dumb Effort

Ahhhh, time to once again ring out the another year gone by with one of my personal favorite activities that the kids and I have turned into an end of year tradition... "Smash Pot Day".

Gotta love it. Here's a quick thought from this years swing...

“Celebrate today’s success… because there’s always a very good chance that tomorrow you’ll wake-up and realize it all just amounts to a well practiced, awkward dumb effort.”

Nothing puts a period at the end of a sentence like the swing of a big’ol hammer.

Dammit

RJ’s Flashing Slip

50% Grolleg Kaolin
20% Calcinated EPK
30% Neph
add
.50% Yellow Iron Oxide
2% Kentucky White Glaze Clay

Use on bisque.... dude... it's the bomb.

Secret Studio Sale Part 2

I made mention of this last week... If you've been eyeing a something special in my FetishGhostEtsy, this is a good opportunity to pick it up 20% off the posted cost. Either pick out what you want and don't pay until I re-invoice you, or click on through and I'll refund you the difference through PayPal.
This sale includes the silver! What's in sale is limited to what's in the storefront, so grab what you have your eye on fast and early.
This sale will be running the 27th through the 31st and it's all first come first serve.

Cheers!

Home Sweet Home

Well the frenzy of the season is past. It went by like a freight train this year and, like most years, I was reluctant to go anywhere near the tracks. My kids made darn sure I at least leaned into the wind and waved though.
The picture above is part of a new project that was started this week. It was originally just meant to be an exercise, an excuse to stretch my fingers out over in wordpress with. Along the way it turned into portfolio of sorts for my BoneOrchard line of teaware.
It's an invisible store front kind of thing.
It's still under construction and feels a bit clunky. Click around if you have some time and let me know what you think. There's a tab on the sidebar for suggestions or comments.

It's at http://fetishghost.wordpress.com

Blu & David Ellis

Here's something off the beaten track...



My kids and I have a favorite subject in our discussions about art and how it fits into the context of our daily living. Here in Stockton California, the public visual expression is basically limited to Tagging. A quickly scrawled name in paint pen. Lame.
While I am not an advocate for graffiti, I am an advocate for style and grace and I miss the days of listening to people bitch about, what was in hindsight, actually an amazing act of self expression. Luckily we live close to San Fransisco where mural art and old school graffiti are still going strong. Blah blah blah... I've getting off track. I went nuts when I first saw the work of these 2. If you haven't seen it before, it'll blow your mind.
Here is an amazing look at the cooperative play of David Ellis
and Blu

Souper Supper Bowls

Had a bit of a set-back this week… I opened up the basement door Monday morning to find 2” of water in my kiln room. I run an old electric Paragon so this kind of gave me a bit of pause. But that’s another story…

This post is just a few shots of some of the bowls that are in process for the TideWater’s Souper Supper in February. 3 of the galleries artists provided me with a taste of their art work that I could sample. I used the samples to create decals for firing onto the glazed surfaces of a bunch of this year’s bowls.

I'd like to take the oppertunity to give a special thanks to contributing TideWater artists, Sarah Lippincott, Denny Ah-Tye, and Gay Lynn Saunders. Thanks for your help! I really hope you like how they come out.

These are prefiring shots, they should be out of the kiln Monday afternoon.

Secret Sale

Well… part 1 of my “Secret Studio Sale” is officially over and I really want to thank everyone for such a wonderful reception for RedGateStudio’s first secret studio sale. We managed to raise enough funds to rent a local gas kiln for a special firing of reduction work this February. Thank you everyone! This is going to be a lot of fun!

Stay tuned this week for part 2 of my “Secret Studio Sale”. This will be for my bone inspired silver and spooky clay works...

Licks, Love, & Luck…

Burn’n For Joe

It’s been months since someone last let me fondle the valves on a gas kiln. Except for last spring’s excursion into soda firing with Matt from MossBeachCeramics, I’ve been exiled exclusively to electric firings for the last 4 years. Since then I’ve learned to enjoy worshipping the coil, but hey, I love the flame…

This week, the local community college ceramics professor, Joe Mariscal let me burn one with his new studio tech in their old Alpine updraft. I had forgotten what pandemonium an

undergraduate classroom could be like at the end of a semester and I was given the opportunity to find out that a community college classroom is quite a bit crazier. As nutty as it was, it was totally worth it. They were looking for someone to help push through a reduction firing and viola, I’m still a burner at heart.

God I love that old kiln smell…

Secret Studio Sale Part 1

I've been waiting to run a small sale to offer up a few loose thoughts at a fairly steep discount. These are odds and ends that went unlisted, got buried and forgotten on a studio shelf, or were taken out of the storefront for an event and not returned to the line-up.
I'm not much of a believer in seconds sales, but I'm not keen on smashing the odds and ends just to create space for new works either. (I'm still working on how to manage a reasonable storage system for finished works. Coping with a real inventory of a thousand pieces or more ain't happening while I'm still a city rat.)
So with the 2 year anniversary of opening both of my Etsy storefronts quickly coming up on the 20th of this month, I'm running 2 secret studio sales. RedGate's sale started last night and FetishGhost's... well we'll see.

Bathroom Fantasy

Ok, it’s time to come out and just say this… it’s about one of the magazines that’s hidden in the pile of reading material in my bathroom…

I enjoy reading Elle Décor …

So there it is, I’ve said it.
I don’t know how or why we started getting this magazine, it just started showing up… we are unmonied, fairly dirty behind the ears, and our vacuum cleaner hasn’t worked for over a year and my wife still hasn’t noticed.

I have to say, I’m not thumbing through these to read the articles. I enjoy leafing through the pages, fantasizing about the unobtainable in life. In this case, it’s about having a one of my pieces setting on a well dusted shelf or table top pictured in its gleaming pages or on a shelf sitting next to a book that no one has looked at.

Sigh…. Pure fantasy.
But I also know that if I actually achieved the unattainable and accidently found myself on these pages, I’d have to live up to the expectations that come along with that responsibility… consistent, steady, reliable, PRODUCTION.
Woof! It’s a good thing this is just a fantasy. I think I prefer the reality that I’m living. I thoroughly enjoy the studio life I have, but there’s a lot to be said for a good daydream…I think I'll just keep gluing my work onto it's front page.

A Minor Fall From Grace

That's not good...


I'm not sure of the title that the Bruce originally gave this teapot, but "A Minor Fall From Grace" is the title that I surreptitiously handed this work this week. Local artist Bruce Cadman had brought in a few works for photographing. Usually this is a painless exercise...but this time I broke his newest work as I was taking it off the light table. Doh!

The "up-side" is that Bruce is a really nice guy, (a little strange, yes, but hey who am I to point?) and we had just gotten the piece fully photographed. His only request was to have a picture of it while it was still in one piece.

No problem...

Sorry Bruce...

P.S. Your wife paid me $5 to smash the peice, but now she won't pay... so I'm making this into postcards to hand-out at this weekends event...

Just kidding.