Lily Krakowski on sun 5 jan 03
Both Earl and Ivor brought oats to my favorite hobby horse. Thank you.
There are very few new glazes, and those that claim to be are based on new
or recently-reduced-in-price materials. Back in the 50's and 60s'strontium
was sky-high in price, and wollastonite hard to find. Hence there were not
many recipes that used them...
Glazes belong to large inter-related families. Within each family there
are--relatively small--variations. What people who write books of glaze
recipes give us, is labor saving precision that would take a while of
testing to achieve oneself. Particularly where "special effects" are
wanted, a book of recipes is invaluable.
In other words I can say, as I did the other day, that a high magnesium
glaze with zinc should give a nice straw color if titanium, tin, and iron
are added--but that might mean 30 tests whereas a recipe is a recipe.
But new? New?
Lili Krakowski
P.O. Box #1
Constableville, N.Y.
(315) 942-5916/ 397-2389
Be of good courage....
Lee Love on mon 6 jan 03
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Knowledge, unlike materials, grows exponentially when it is
shared.
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Best way to learn about glazes is through relationships with other potters.
It is where almost all my glazes started from. Here is one story:
A few years back, I think it was around the time John Baymore won an
award from the first International Mashiko competetion. I had visited Mashiko
just before the first competition and even took some of the competetion
applications home and knew I would be back to study here. So I felt I had a
connection with John in Mashiko.
I asked him if he had any luck with blue shino. He gave me an
iron/cobalt slip he uses to get blue under shino type glaze. He also gave me
a recipe for a clay body and a couple shino type recipes. I wasn't too
interested at the time in the shino recipes, because I was satisfied with my
standbys (Including my mainstay: Linda's Pink Shino, because I got it from Linda Sikora at the UofMN and it did salmon pink if you
added pink mason stain. It also does a nice yellow with vandaneum yellow
stain.> Mel used this recipe in his shino article, but didn't include the
stains, where it got part of its name.)
The one recipe was especially uninteresting to me at the
time, because it contained no spodumene. I've always liked the brightness of
the Lithium shinos. It wasn't until I moved to Japan and started making
shinos with Japanese materials, that I became interested in shino type glazes
without spodumene in them.
I tested John's recipe with Japanese materials, just using
the local kaolin, ball clay, feldspar, etc. It worked pretty good. When
John was visiting Mashiko last year, over dinner, I shared several of my shino
tests with him. He was interested, especially because he had Japanese folks
asking him for shino recipes that work with Japanese materials. Now John has
a shino that works with both American and Japanese materials. This is the way
knowledge and creativity grows.
It is also interesting to note, that here in Japan, shino is not
just a glaze or a clay body. The most important aspect of shino is the long,
controlled firing (7 to10 days.) When I talk about American shinos to
Japanese, I almost always refer to "carbon trap" glaze, rather than shino.
Japanese shinos do not carbon trap. I am more ready to call Hank Murrow's
shinos American Shinos, because he has independently discovered a critical
aspect of firing the shinos. He gets the fire color without the week long
firings and no soda ash. Check out his web page if you want to know how.
Because of Hank's experiments, I've put shino tests in the oxidation chamber of
the noborigama and have found nice color results, in oxidation.
--
Lee In Mashiko, Japan Ikiru@hachiko.com
"The first thing we must begin to teach our children (and learn ourselves) is
that we cannot spend and consume endlessly. We have got to learn to save and
conserve."
Quote from: "Thoughts in the Presence of Fear" by Wendell Berry
Full article: http://www1.ocn.ne.jp/~ikiru/sustain.html
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