Lili Krakowski on tue 6 mar 01
Throughout my giving my workshop GLAZE WITHOUT FEAR I have tried to
simplify the analogies and images so that indeed people see that glazes
are fun.
Just now I came up with two things I think might help others:
1. I brought in a number of cans of food, the students unexpectedly
"supplemented" with snacks they had brought.
I pointed out that just as a glaze maker has to deal with what Andrew
Holden simply called "melters" "the sticker" "glass-formers" so the
dietician deals with carbohydrates, fat, and protein.
By reading the labels we "learned" most beans have carbos and some
protein, tuna was "pure" protein, and soup-- a mixture of all three.
Then we "made up" a few acknowledgably inedible "menus" combining these
foods into a "desired" nutritional plan.
As example of the problems of temperature, clay body and type of fire
we spoke of the different nutritional needs and digestive abilities of
babies, growing children teenagers, pregrant women, etc.
Once the class seemed fearless and relaxed with that..
I moved onto salad.
Fluxes= greens I said. Vinegar = alumina oil= silica.
I edxplained this was not a perfect analogy ut would do.
Greens come in great variety and impart very different flavors. Bib
lettuce is not arugula; chicory is not cress etc. Each
imparts a diferent flavor and look.
So do the different fluxes.
IN the old days vinegar was vinegar and oil was oil. I explained that
while there are different variations IN silica I could not explain that
today and they should read up on it. For our purposes alumina was one
thing (there IS no such thing as balsamic alumina, is there, God forbid?)
and we adjusted the proportion of vinegar and oil to the nature of our
greens, and what we wanted to achieve.
These similes or analogies of whatever worked very well. Colorants and
additives were compared to herbs, spices, etc, and frits to those packets
of premixed salad greens at the store.
I am not suggesting this meets all contingencies but some of you might
find this a helpful teaching tool.
And all you beginners might be less scared...
Lili Krakowski
Paul Lewing on wed 7 mar 01
Lili,
I, too, use a lot of food analogies to explain glazes in my workshops.
I like to say that the glaze recipe is like the recipe for a loaf of
bread, and the Seger formula is like the nutritional information. One
tells you what you put in to make it, the other tells you what's there
after it's baked. Both are essential information, they just tell you
something different. And to carry the analogy further, neither tells
you what it's going to taste like- you still have to bake it. And a
good baker will make that recipe a better loaf of bread than a bad baker
will.
I use food analogies to explain the difference between flux unity, mole
unity and weight percentage, too. I usually use breakfast- eggs,
potatoes and toast. Toast is light and potatoes are heavy so it works
well. And I use eggs to explain how to get all the numbers from
converting from recipe to formula into flux unity. I say it's all a
matter of deciding what's a set, or a unit. In the US, we get eggs by
the dozen, but in Japan, eggs are sold in sets of five.
I hope this made sense without going into too much detail. Amazing how
most potters are so tuned in to food. Bears out my contention that you
can't spend your life designing and making stuff to serve food on
without caring deeply about the food. One of the reasons I switched
from painting to clay many years ago was that the potters were better
cooks and had better parties.
Paul Lewing, Seattle
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