Time travel
Oct. 14th, 2016 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
offcntrIt's kinda like visiting the Grand Canyon. Going down the trail, watching the strata in the walls, moving deeper and deeper in time. I feel like I should be hitting the river any minute now.
We're back in Wisconsin, helping clear decades of stuff from Denise's mother's house: old clothing, magazines from the 1940's to present, Denise's school clothes and children's books. The last time we were here, I got to be on a first-name basis with the Goodwill guy and the fellow at the Recycling Center. We're back for another pass.
But that's not the time-traveling I'm talking about.
Every time we sit down to eat, I see about 25 years of pottery arrayed on top of the china hutch. Christmas presents from Denise and myself from the year we married onward. Dinner plates, bowls, a pie plate (currently half-filled with apple pie), pasta bowl, jam pot. Lots of mugs in lots of different sizes and colors. It's like an archaeological cross-section of my pottery career, extending back even before Off Center Ceramics.
The dinner plates, for instance, a set of four in temmoku and Woo's rutile blue, standard glaze colors at the Craft Center where I taught when we were married. The two-tone blue coffee mug, likewise.
The tiny jam pot with painted Pooh came from the year we found a chain-link fence covered in untended grapeviness by a vacant parking lot. We brought home grocery bags of grapes, cooked juice and made jelly, wax-sealed in little pots that we sent everyone for Christmas that year.
The pie plate and pasta are next oldest. I know this because they're painted, but with irises. At some point around the fifth or sixth year of Off Center Ceramics, I stopped painting flowers. Since then, it's been animals, birds, insects, fish.
There's a whole series of early painted coffee mugs, tiny ones, scaled to fit in the mini-microwave of their RV. Soup bowls of the oxidized-but-still-pretty-nice variety, a toddler bowl in the loon-and-chick pattern that I haven't made in years. Dinner salad bowls, a form I really liked but which never caught on with my customers.
Newer work, like the stew mugs, cream pitcher and painted dinner plate are much more similar to my current work, and the small oval baker could have come out of the kiln yesterday.
I've written in the past about how unsettling it can be, abruptly coming across your early pottery. (Skeletons in the Cupboard, anyone?)
This isn't like that. It's not embarrassing, because there's context. Instead of one amateurish piece, there's a dozen. Each a little less amateur, each a little more polished. Showing a progression, an improvement, till we arrive at the latest piece, and the last one I'll give my father-in-law, Del.
The urn that's holding his ashes.
We're back in Wisconsin, helping clear decades of stuff from Denise's mother's house: old clothing, magazines from the 1940's to present, Denise's school clothes and children's books. The last time we were here, I got to be on a first-name basis with the Goodwill guy and the fellow at the Recycling Center. We're back for another pass.
But that's not the time-traveling I'm talking about.
Every time we sit down to eat, I see about 25 years of pottery arrayed on top of the china hutch. Christmas presents from Denise and myself from the year we married onward. Dinner plates, bowls, a pie plate (currently half-filled with apple pie), pasta bowl, jam pot. Lots of mugs in lots of different sizes and colors. It's like an archaeological cross-section of my pottery career, extending back even before Off Center Ceramics.
The dinner plates, for instance, a set of four in temmoku and Woo's rutile blue, standard glaze colors at the Craft Center where I taught when we were married. The two-tone blue coffee mug, likewise.
The tiny jam pot with painted Pooh came from the year we found a chain-link fence covered in untended grapeviness by a vacant parking lot. We brought home grocery bags of grapes, cooked juice and made jelly, wax-sealed in little pots that we sent everyone for Christmas that year.
The pie plate and pasta are next oldest. I know this because they're painted, but with irises. At some point around the fifth or sixth year of Off Center Ceramics, I stopped painting flowers. Since then, it's been animals, birds, insects, fish.
There's a whole series of early painted coffee mugs, tiny ones, scaled to fit in the mini-microwave of their RV. Soup bowls of the oxidized-but-still-pretty-nice variety, a toddler bowl in the loon-and-chick pattern that I haven't made in years. Dinner salad bowls, a form I really liked but which never caught on with my customers.
Newer work, like the stew mugs, cream pitcher and painted dinner plate are much more similar to my current work, and the small oval baker could have come out of the kiln yesterday.
I've written in the past about how unsettling it can be, abruptly coming across your early pottery. (Skeletons in the Cupboard, anyone?)
This isn't like that. It's not embarrassing, because there's context. Instead of one amateurish piece, there's a dozen. Each a little less amateur, each a little more polished. Showing a progression, an improvement, till we arrive at the latest piece, and the last one I'll give my father-in-law, Del.
The urn that's holding his ashes.