Sumi wrestling
Oct. 11th, 2016 05:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
offcntrI did brush drawings long before I made pots, india ink on paper, high-contrast still-lifes and figures. I loved the speed and fluidity of the process, so different than the interminable gradations of shade and value from pencil or charcoal, or the endless cross-hatching of pen.
I started painting on pots in 1984, at Tuscarora Pottery School, using an iron oxide wash derived from a Michael Cardew recipe. I still have two of the first painted plates I ever made, one a grouping of California poppies, the other a landscape, featuring the Ruby Mountains and a tumbled-down dynamite shack.
I did a lot more brush decorating in the year following, but quickly got bored with the brushes. I could only afford the cheapest sumi-e brushes back then, $5 being about my limit, and using them was like drawing with a Sharpie, or a technical pen (I was also cartooning with Rapido-graphs at the time). Each brush gave one thickness of line. If I wanted the line thinner or fatter, I'd have to change brushes. And remember what I'd dipped it in last, so as not to contaminate the rutile with cobalt, or the cobalt with iron.
So I decided to experiment. I talked my sister out of a couple of squirrel tails from her hunting days, and made a couple of brushes. Tied off a bunch of hair with thread, cut it loose, and wedged it into the split end of a dowel, wrapped it with string and paraffin wax to hold it all together. They were the very definition of crude, but the long, flexible tips let me draw with a line that would vary from very thin to very broad in the same stroke, as the brush flexed, deformed, sprang back.
I stopped painting in graduate school, concentrated on unglazed sculptures, but went back to it afterwards while teaching at the Craft Center. I'd picked up experience with new materials, primarily bamboo and two-part epoxy, and had inherited a bunch of tools from another pottery student that included some fine cake decorating tips. So my new brushes were a good deal more sophisticated than the originals.
I still use the hair from the side of a squirrel tail (either recycled from roadkill or purchased at a fly-tying store), but I tap it down into a cake-decorating tip to graduate and taper the hairs, before tying off the bundle and setting it with epoxy in a bamboo handle. The resulting brushes are far from high-end sumi-grade, but they're kinda elegant, and moderately unpredictable, which is what I want from them, after all.
Which brings me to this last Saturday morning, up on the Clay Fest demonstration stage. I've got a dozen bisqued Empty Bowls, my brush station, a basin of glaze. I've also got squirrel tails, thread, bamboo and epoxy. So I spend my two-hour demo alternately taking decoration requests from the kids (and adults) in the audience (parrot, heron, hedgehog) and making paintbrushes for the potters in the crowd. Around the 1:45 mark I glaze the last bowl and test the last brush, so have 15 minutes for clean-up before the next demo goes on.
I started painting on pots in 1984, at Tuscarora Pottery School, using an iron oxide wash derived from a Michael Cardew recipe. I still have two of the first painted plates I ever made, one a grouping of California poppies, the other a landscape, featuring the Ruby Mountains and a tumbled-down dynamite shack.
I did a lot more brush decorating in the year following, but quickly got bored with the brushes. I could only afford the cheapest sumi-e brushes back then, $5 being about my limit, and using them was like drawing with a Sharpie, or a technical pen (I was also cartooning with Rapido-graphs at the time). Each brush gave one thickness of line. If I wanted the line thinner or fatter, I'd have to change brushes. And remember what I'd dipped it in last, so as not to contaminate the rutile with cobalt, or the cobalt with iron.
So I decided to experiment. I talked my sister out of a couple of squirrel tails from her hunting days, and made a couple of brushes. Tied off a bunch of hair with thread, cut it loose, and wedged it into the split end of a dowel, wrapped it with string and paraffin wax to hold it all together. They were the very definition of crude, but the long, flexible tips let me draw with a line that would vary from very thin to very broad in the same stroke, as the brush flexed, deformed, sprang back.
I stopped painting in graduate school, concentrated on unglazed sculptures, but went back to it afterwards while teaching at the Craft Center. I'd picked up experience with new materials, primarily bamboo and two-part epoxy, and had inherited a bunch of tools from another pottery student that included some fine cake decorating tips. So my new brushes were a good deal more sophisticated than the originals.
I still use the hair from the side of a squirrel tail (either recycled from roadkill or purchased at a fly-tying store), but I tap it down into a cake-decorating tip to graduate and taper the hairs, before tying off the bundle and setting it with epoxy in a bamboo handle. The resulting brushes are far from high-end sumi-grade, but they're kinda elegant, and moderately unpredictable, which is what I want from them, after all.
Which brings me to this last Saturday morning, up on the Clay Fest demonstration stage. I've got a dozen bisqued Empty Bowls, my brush station, a basin of glaze. I've also got squirrel tails, thread, bamboo and epoxy. So I spend my two-hour demo alternately taking decoration requests from the kids (and adults) in the audience (parrot, heron, hedgehog) and making paintbrushes for the potters in the crowd. Around the 1:45 mark I glaze the last bowl and test the last brush, so have 15 minutes for clean-up before the next demo goes on.