Joyce Lee on tue 28 apr 98
Just reread Bacia's post on appreciating shinos, and her two-year old
granddaughter adoring olives which usually is an acquired taste, as is
the taste for shinos. Reminded me: The young woman who now and then
helps me shovel out the house and thus evade the Dept. of Health and
Sanitation, recently asked me to show her the studio and the pottery I
have out there. She expressed surprise that "one person" could produce
"all this" (It actually wasn't that many pieces, but this is from her
perspective.) Later she said that she'd like to buy a few of my pots for
some gift-giving that loomed in her future. She specifically requested
the "pink" pots. After pondering, I had to tell her that I didn't have
any pink pots...not even a pink glaze. "Yes, you do," she said, "they're
all over every shelf out there." Well, of course, turned out she meant
the bisque and I had to tell her why bisque wouldn't be a good idea for
a gift. But...the wonderful part...we then returned to the studio and
she searched and searched, examining every single pot that had somehow
managed to elude the hammer. The two pots she chose were two about which
I had forgotten...made them over a year ago...bowl warped so I squared
it...way too thick and I'd waited too long to trim it properly so I just
sliced huge chunks out (looked like faceting...wasn't...just sliced and
gouged)...smacked it around to give it a "rough" look...succeeded, very
rough. The other pot was so conventional in form that I've forgotten
what it looked like (a lesson in itself). Anyway, I had glazed them
both with shino (sorry, forgot I'd ever tried shino before this week)
and shoved them to the back of a shelf when they came out of the kiln
looking disappointingly gloppy, with "an ash-laden" look and pinholes
and craters, color grayish to creamy white and little spots of a
woodfired peachy apricoty look, with streaks of warm light rust to kind
of amber. I DID NOT like them, but Leticia DID. With no exposure or
instruction whatsoever on her part to the possible wonders of such
pottery, she could not be dissuaded from these two pots. I felt I'd be
cheating to charge her, so I just gave them to her. Later when I asked
her how her friends liked their pots, she looked embarrassed and said
that they were much too good for her friends and were presently residing
on her coffee table. She also wanted to know once again if she couldn't
buy some of those "pink" pots for the gift-giving coming up... (Now I
wish I had the shinoed ones back; I'll never be able to reproduce them.
Warren MacKenzie's right. When you don't like a pot, wait awhile and
look again. It may not be what you expected, but you may find it has
value in its own right. You might be looking at what's missing instead
of what is there.)
Joyce
Long-winded in the Mojave
lpskeen on wed 29 apr 98
Well, it's time for a question here. At the studio where I started, we
had a ^6 shino glaze that was pretty popular. Of course, _I_ forgot to
get the recipe before I left....:{
Does anyone have a ^6 shino recipe they're willing to share?
TIA
--
Lisa Skeen
Living Tree Pottery & Soaps
"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful
words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of
the good people." -- Dr. M. L. King, Jr. 4/16/63
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