Colorado Art Studio

I’ve finished embellishing 9 out of 20 boxes

I’ve been slowly plugging away, finishing the 20 boxes that I decided to make for the Summer Art Market taking place on June 14th and 15th here in Denver. I’m happy to report that all 20 have been assembled and that I’ve added all the feet and special themed knobs. After making these, the possibilities seem endless - I have quite a long list in the works. I hope to finish the other 11 in the next 2 days so that I can dry these, bisque fire them and then of course glaze them before Friday, the 13th. Oh me-o-my, Friday the 13th! With that in mind, I definitely plan to have the glaze firing finished on Thursday, the 12th. So far, I’m on track.

A few of the most recent

Rabbit porcelain box

Goldfish

Poppy Box

The knob generally dictates the painted elements that I ultimately add to the box. In this case, I was inspired by the poppies that just finished blooming in my garden. As a departure from my earlier boxes, I added some pink underglaze to the cherry blossom box (see the top photo). I’m not sure what will happen to the color at cone 6 - even so I’m toying with the idea of adding a bit of red underglaze to the poppy box. I realize that I need to make some test tiles for all the underglazes I’ve collected over the past year while teaching my kid’s clay classes.

What’s next on the horizon? I’m making some new lino-cuts so that I can expand my printed boxes and other forms. I have found that I really enjoy hand building with clay. When I was first learning to throw, hand building afforded me some success when the frustration of working on the wheel got to be too great.

I’m almost finished listening to Oprah and Eckhart discuss A New Earth and have had varying degrees of responsiveness from their discussions from “Oh my God - this stuff is terrific” to “this is a bunch of hooey!” Ultimately he does not offer an easy fix to our woes - it takes work on our part and a willingness and awareness to make small changes in our own personal lives. I really get that the premise of the book is to be aware of our own actions, thoughts etc. - to be present in every part of our life. We can’t change anyone but ourselves, but if enough people came to realize this, the world will slowly begin to evolve to a higher consciousness. Food for thought.

Meanwhile, I was deluged by some really heinous splog recently. But funny thing is that it was only on one particular and apparently vulnerable post. I finally had to close comments to that post and the splog has stopped. Some of it even squeaked by Akisment, my spam blocker. Overall, I’m very glad I switched my blog on over to Wordpress and can’t say enough good things about it.

Happy Wednesday,

~Cynthia