clay & entertain: a pizza plate and how i set a table

I’ve social obligations this weekend, and so yesterday in the community clay studio I was late in order to add an extension to our dining table, press a tablecloth to cover it and then lay napkins, flatware, my handmade plates, wineglasses (tumblers for water came later) and decide what serving ware to use. Luckily I had brought home more of the dark clay plates in order to have enough matching (more or less, and I had two extra plates)for the dinner party later that evening. I also taped up feet of butcher paper in order for 3-year-old Charlie to draw and paint.

One last glance too at the succulent planters I had made for a pop-up sale two Saturdays from then. 

My table looked great! though there was just enough room for the roasted broccoli and salad.

I was so distracted by things I still had to do before and while cooking Italian sausages, polenta, roasted salmon Milano, peppers & onions & tomatoes that I only made one pizza plate in the studio before coming home.

It's way too small. That clay is gonna shrink to a child-sized portion. And so I'll make a much bigger one next week without a template. I'll just use a ruler to cut out a triangle.

2D & clay: thumbnails for final assignment & more tableware

Sketched a lot yesterday for my art class’s final assignment to compose a “bad” pictogram or the opposite of a clearly understood pictorial symbol that would have the observer puzzling their head. And yeah I’m going to trace the figures.                      

The instructor said consider semiotics and Keith Haring, which I’ll need to research. I do remember liking Haring’s graffiti a lot during the 80’s. Maybe I can compose a subway or bus stop scene where Haring’s figures are pondering graffiti with pictorial symbols of humans. I need to refresh my memory on how to draw graffiti and paint it to suggest spray canned text. I was recalling Patrick telling me the plot to a Twilight Zone episode titled, “To Serve Humans.” I could add a colon and append. To Serve Humans: A Cookbook.

And I couldn’t help but get political about what’s happening now in the culture wars surrounding the issue of abortion. Does Generation Z learn in history class about back alley abortions before Roe v. Wade.

And I was so hung over yesterday all day even into clay club in the afternoon when it was too warm and giving me a headache because I was dehydrated. But I stayed until 5:45, building small tableware with the last of my cone 10 clay.                  

And so I added to my 2 scoops: 2 spoon rests, 2 taper holders(if they shrink to too small for votives) and 3 votive candle bowls. Excited for using the flambé and blue celadon glazes I just mixed. Can I do wax and tape resist on the spoon rests so that a rutile glaze won’t run out? Or maybe just stick to Marshmallow White on them? Rutile for sure on the votive and taper holders. Flambé and blue celadon on the scoops.

clay: spoons

The high school clay classroom is doing another cone 10 firing on May 10th, and I’ve just enough Black Mountain to build a couple little pots. But first I made glaze while Ellie threw a lot of pots.

So all I made were these two little scoops. But at least there are Flambé and Blue Celadon glazes to use on them plus I had never made scoops before.                     

 

I like 'em! I want to use Rutile instead of my usual Marshmallow glaze in them, but Rutile is a very runny glaze. I'll just remember not to apply any glaze outside its interior. And I've got one slab left enough to make another two scoops or perhaps two spoon rests, and I can get some Coleman porcelain from Meral to make little mugs for the glazes I just made. 

And I'm ever so hopeful that my candelabra at the Central Park will succeed. Decoration will be fun as I want to use rice paper decals on its base and maybe Bloopsie on the candleholders. And I so wanted to steal this Scott Jennings mug.  The exterior was so smooth that I'm sure it's black porcelain.

I so love this blue color on the interior of this Scott Jennings mug.

cook: calamari piccata

I've been wanting to clear my freezer out, and though I'd intended to cook the calamari into burritos, that didn't happen. When I was in college and a young married, I used to always purchase calamari steaks in the seafood section of the little grocery store I shopped in Davis, California to re-create my favorite restaurant order of amandine in my own kitchen. I remember lots of butter, lemon and slivered almonds and how routine it was in my cooking rotation. Thirty years later, I was utterly flummoxed on how to deal with this frozen calamari, and so I kept watching one particular YouTube. However, it was tubes and not steaks inside the package. No matter I thought as I slit them open and then pounded them into a thin steak. No egg wash needed according to the YouTube, just bread crumbs. I had some leftover pork chop seasoning from a box, a canister of panko, which I combined with salt and pepper, Old Bay, and a little flour. I had the chopped parsley, chopped capers, lemon juice and zest, butter, chopped garlic, chopped ramps, leftover cooked and chopped rapini, and wine at the ready.  

I made the butter sauce first by sautéing the garlic and then adding the wine and lemon juice and zest and capers as the garlic started to get golden, and then the chunks of butter. And then the parsley and the ramps. On to the calamari...

Oh my gawd, the calamari curled back up and I couldn't get it flat again and so I went with it.

Not the most elegant looking dish though the rice pilaf and the charred lemons looked picture-worthy. More importantly, it was delicious.

For lunch this week, I've been eating leftovers and vegetarian sandwiches.    

And oh, it's Filipino Food Month and I've been wanting to make pancit palabok or pancit lug lug as pictured from Instagram.

You can't see the soy bean threads underneath that mound of ground pork rinds and fried garlic, but it's an ingredient I'd need to get to cook this dish.

clay & cook: test bowl results & vietnamese cold noodle bowls

2-D main assignment done, I turned attention to ceramics and cooking this weekend. My test bowls emerged from the kiln.  

These two glazes are my favorites on Bmix, but either the dark clay has burned out the rutile, or I didn’t mix the glaze enough because the rutile is nonexistent.                    

I was hoping for less olive with this glaze. Meral says I may not have stirred the glaze enough, but I think I did. Again I think it's the dark clay.                                

I was hoping for more of the light speckled blue like I had on a Bmix spoon, and not the muddiness. Maybe it's the clay body?              

I do like the Waterfall Brown, but maybe I'll make more Bmix plates and use this glaze on them. 

The glaze I expected to like the least was the one I liked the most. At Saturday clay, I underglazed lollipop designs on some bisque Bmix (my homage to Wayne Thiebaud). I also scored and slipped candleholders on to a base--construction of the candelabra finally done, I think I can adhere a rice paper decal on to the greenware or paint white underglaze on it. 

Cecilia said she wanted to eat something grilled which meant I grilled. We asked the neighbors to help gather the ingredients for Vietnamese noodle bowls. I volunteered bbq duty. I made a marinade from garden onions (I had no shallots), garlic, corn starch, palm sugar, fish sauce, Maggi, tamari and what was left of lemongrass. I had dissolved a teaspoon of baking soda into a half cup of water and soaked cubes of pork in the mixture for 15 minutes before rinsing and draining.          

 

I ground the onions with the rest of the ingredients in my mortar and pestle and then added to the pork to marinade all day before grilling on a Saturday night. 

A lot of running around and prepping that I forgot to set out the pickled daikon and carrots along with the rice noodles, cilantro, mint, lettuce, cucumbers, ground peanuts, and a fish sauce and lime juice dressing. I then stood at the grill for an hour, turning and letting pork get too blackened and shrimp come out perfectly cooked. Too tired to even post a pic of neighbors eating the final concoction.

 

But the leftovers and with the remembered do chua or pickled daikon and carrot on late Sunday morning along with an icy coke was my very decent brunch. I did a little grocery shopping and bought more lemon grass. I didn't but this chile verde, but it's giving me ideas of what to do with the big can of green chile I had in the fridge. I found rapini or broccoli rabe at Crystal Springs Produce Market for  the roli roti porchetta that had been in my freezer that I finally cooked. Oh gawd, the pork smelled like barnyard and stunk up my house until it finally smelled like roast pork. 

 

Never buying that product at Costco again, and on Cecilia's bread, it should have been an open-faced sandwich.

I also finally transplanted and made some mini succulent gardens in my handmade pots.

I need to remember to pick up some smooth rocks at the craft store to finish these wares for a Mother's Day popup sale at the clay studio. Some of the succulents were dead or a bit worst for wear from the heavy rains that drowned them and gusty winds from the atmosphere river this past month. And then exposure to glaring sun. My hens and chicks are blush now because of too much sun. I should run to Golden Nursery for some variety. But the little pots with 3 different succs  look so cute. I've got to remember to make the scrap clay pots a bit deeper. I am tempted to bring my wooden garden table just for selling my plants, so that I don't dirty up the tablecloths on which all the other pottery will be displayed. I should get rid of the odd one-off pottery at the sale. Maybe I'll even set out my cocktail and whiskey cups that will come with a free zine of cocktail recipes.

2-dimensional design: reflections on a mandala

 

I feel like the process for this assignment was different from previous ones on pondering point and line or rearranging geometric and biomorphic shapes or using all those elements to illuminate a concept. It was challenging to find an interesting way to nest a circle within a square. I initially wanted to make a mandala that integrated Islamic geometric and biomorphic forms and spiraling arabesques, but the requirement for 4 implied textures from nature was incongruent with my wish to design something with only combinations of repeated squares and circles and varied tessellations. I noticed that some of my sketches included ancient Greek motifs of earth, fire, wind, and water (lots of emulation of Hamonshu), which became the center of the medallion. However, being in anthropomorphic god mode kept me thinking about the opening lines of Genesis where earth was formless and empty. The theme turned into fiat lux or let there be light in the void with a sunburst refracting in some way into a rainbow. I'd also been marveling at William Blake's Ancient of Days and Newton, which I reference in the hand and the compass of the composition.

A mandala as a symbol of a spiritual journey and guidance tool for meditation and psychological expression was a good exercise in which to play with forms from nature, abstract shapes, and ideas of transcendence.  I especially admired the Kandinsky example in the lecture notes--it would be fun to pay him homage and further render this assignment into even more abstract forms with some kind of radial asymmetry.

I had the usual difficulties of changing my mind on proportions of images and colors when I'd already started painting. It took me two do-overs before I finally decided that the background of air, fire, water and earth should be gray and that color in the painting be equal amounts of primary yellow to primary black. Painting a consistent line was super difficult--I'd either put too much gouache or not enough on the brush that lines were either too heavy or too indistinct and shapes were not uniform. Not. at. all. I so wanted to resort to a Micron pen to ink the drawing, but resisted and just made peace with my clumsiness. Almighty thanks to the tools of compass and ruler.

composition and clay: mandalas and nesting bowls

This assignment to make a mandala with four textures from nature and four patterns ought to have been easier than previous assignments as I’ve previously enjoyed drawing Zentangles and then coloring them in pencil, but I’ve now discarded 2 almost completed paintings. Here’s my latest attempt.   

I actually painted a previous mandala with the hand and compass, but ripped the paper when I tried to paint the sunburst with painters tape as a resist and lifted paint and paper when removing the tape….and primary black is so jarring in contrast when it’s predominant in the composition.      

Painting is so hard! My composition is completely drawn, but I can see that the paint has bled beyond my drawing lines. I need to use less water as this is gouache and not watercolor. And not stress and embrace the wabi sabi of my drawing and painting.                  

I am liking the concept. I plan next to mix up gouache to make some kind of indigo shade to suggest the cosmos emerging from the void. I'll use my fine brush to paint the lines in the 4 different patterns and will probably use the micron ink pen to draw the lines in the medallion but color the background of fire, water, air and earth in gray.                          

Okay, so I've painted the images in the circle with primary black gouache and my thinnest paintbrush. I fucked up on the spiral pattern, and so the plan is to paint white gouache over that and start over with the spiral SO THAT I DON'T HAVE TO START OVER AGAIN, but we'll see if I don't fuck up the black around the rainbow and between the sunburst's rays. And maybe I'll skip swimming and sketch YET ANOTHER mandala in case I fuck this one up.

 

Yeah of course, I fucked up and started ALL over AGAIN. I decided I didn't like the purple or the blue backgrounds of earth, fire, air, water. I went with gray instead. And yeah back to black outside of the rainbow or ROYBGIV rings.              

I picked up library books on drawing modern florals and geometric patterns in Islamic art and art nouveau patterns. The next mandala I’m drawing and painting will be for me and reference and encompass those design inspirations. Yesterday clay was spent in the glaze room to which I had brought nesting red clay bowls and pondered for the longest I’d ever pondered what glaze to adhere to a clay body.        

These are all the before photos of littler bowls and will post the after photos next week because I’ve yet to glaze two bigger red clay bowls when I see how these smaller bowls turn out. I’m also going to make a bunch more slab cups to be canvases for sgraffito work of modern florals.