Dave-o's Ceramics III Gallery
This is a display of some of the artwork created in my ceramics III class at Lewis & Clark College in 1996. It is best viewed on a computer with a high- or true-color display.
Self Portrait
Here we have the (unfired and unpainted) "Self Portrait." I had probably spent about 20 hours on this at the time the picture was taken, and I went on to spend five to ten more. I don't have any current pictures, but it was painted with underglazes in a sort of cartoony manner.
My original idea was to have the surface be made up of small icons and pictures with subtle coloring, to end up approximating from a distance whatever color it is I want to be in that area. Well, I ended up in a time crunch and decided to go the quick route and paint plain flat colors. I'm kinda disapointed that I couldn't do it how I wanted, but these things happen.
After firing the underglaze to a low temperature (cone 020 or so), it now sits in my family's basement. Unfortunately, it's too big for me to fit in my own kiln, so I can't really do anything more with it for the mean time.
Mother and Child
These are two works which sort of go together. The one on the right was a study done in preparation for the one on the left. The image on the left is of the greater portion of the piece "Mother and child." The other part is a small sheep to be placed below the wolf's mouth.
This was actually the final project of my Ceramics II class. It's sculpted with low fire sculpture clay, and is painted with Terra Sigalatta. This sculpture is currently lost somewhere in the recesses of Lewis & Clark. I wasn't able to get it when I left, and then I couldn't find it then next time I came to get it. My old ceramics teacher assures me that it's still there, though.
(Sorry about the quality of the picture on the right: the digital camera I used isn't able to take closeups very well :(
Study of the human form
These are two works from when a nude model came to pose for our class. I actually did about 7 or 8 pieces, but these are the best ones in my opinion. In the piece on the left, I was trying to capture exactly what I saw, and nothing more. If you look at it from any other angle, it looks highly deformed, with only one leg and one breast.
Random schtoff
Here are some other things that I've done. Unlike anything else on this page, these have already been finished.
On the left, we have a bunch of things which I raku fired. In raku, the pieces are heated up really quickly to about 2000 degrees farenheit. They are then pulled out and put in some sort of combustible material in an enclosed space -- in this case, newspaper in small garbage cans. After about 10 minutes of that, they are pulled out and dunked in water. The overall effect of this is to create a smokey, unpredictable, reduction atmosphere which can do some crazy stuff, especially with glazes containing metal oxides. You can't really see very well in this picture, but these pieces came out quite well. None of them have any spectacular effects on them (such as metalic sheen), but that's just goes to show how unpredictable raku is.
This is a bowl I made in Ceramics II. It was one of the pieces that was in my kiuln at home when I fired it for the first time. I was able to achieve a nice effect on this one with the glaze. It's a red clay body underneath, and I put clear glaze on it and then put a cobalt carbonate wash over that. The end result is a sort of mottled dark blue, with a bit of red peeking through here and there. Again, I appologize for the picture quality.
