A couple weekends ago I took a bas-relief clay carving class with artist Maria Simon. I had watched her work for a few years, always finding her at the Ceramic Showcase and checking out what new things she had come up with. Her work is simple, elegant, and organic, full of movement and sensuality. Each piece is carved from a slab of semi-dried (“leather hard”) clay. She then fires it and “glazes” with a technique called Terra Sigllata. It is a clay slip that achieves mellow, earthy tones rather than the shininess of mainline commercial glazes. She then has her work mounted on black wood backgrounds and framed. Sometimes the background is cut around her piece, (it looks arduous to me), which makes it appear to be moving toward the viewer. In short, this is work for the wall that is jumping off the wall.
Her work is so gorgeous. I find myself standing in front of it, wanting to dance, wanting to touch it, breathless with admiration for her skill and vision.
So I took a class from her.
I had considered taking a class for a couple years, but the timing never quite worked. Finally I saw a weekend course that would fit my schedule, convinced Brad to work from home Friday to cover my responsibilities with the kids, and signed up.
This was a really fantastic opportunity for me. I keep doing my own art work, and I enjoy what I am messing around with, but I have few opportunities to really explore more advanced techniques. My work continues to be pretty unfocused, and I accept that as a necessary part of where I am as an artist and mother. It is okay. All the same, it is such a joy to get away from my duties at home, to get to hang out with other artists and geek out about tools, and to get to stick with a piece for a chunk of time.
The technique that she led us through was pretty cool. First we found objects that were interesting to us. Here was mine:
Then we were encouraged to photograph and look deeply at our image. She had us use digital cameras and then zoom WAY in to just a little piece that we would try to capture in clay.
Then the slabs came out and we roughed out our work.
Brad was asking about the consistency of this slab and as I was grasping for words, he supplied, “like really cold butter?”. That is a perfect description. It is easy to carve leather hard clay, but it also has an integrity to it, so you can use both traditional clay tools and tools more commonly used for stone and wood carving.
I wanted to capture the structure of this rhubarb stalk, but keep away from getting too tree-like. I love tree images, but I tend to go back to that image a lot, so I wanted to focus on more of the ruffliness that made this look like a leaf rather than a large tree branch.
The process involved both carving down and building up. Maria encouraged us to look closely and keep our images from getting flattened out, so I needed to build up as I went, which was interesting to me as it felt so different from the carving that I had done before in stone. This was forgiving! Did you take off too much? Doesn’t matter! Put it back!
Eventually I reached a place where I had to get rid of my image and start working with the spirit of the object. It felt silly to be so nit-picky with where the leaf ruffled, where veins ran across, etc, so I tossed the rhubarb in the compost and just started looking at my carving.
It was so wonderful seeing how Maria worked with her tools. She truly had both amazing sight and intelligent touch. I found myself shocked at how she could make small adjustments to my work that were JUST PERFECT. In that, I mean that she would point out somewhere that needed a slant, a line that needed to suggest where it started, a raised point or a terminating point, and those little touches made that tiny place on my work RIGHT.
This class was tiring because it was three 8 hour days of standing on concrete and carving, but it was just what I needed, and Maria was a very kind, gifted teacher. It is such a joy to get to do art along with other people who are eager to learn and have interesting things to say about their process. It was so nice to make something, rather than just do things that need to be redone tomorrow (i.e, dishes, sweeping, diapers, cooking, and laundry).
I came out with two decent carvings and one piece of crap. I kept the piece of crap to practice glaze techniques in the future. My better work will be dried over the next week or so, then fired, and you can check it out at my house in its finished form (I didn’t seem to remember to photograph anything actually finished!). Here is my second project half way through and upside down because I needed to turn it a lot to get inside each petal. Yay carving clay!
4 Comments | In: Projects That I Do With My Clever Little Fingers, The Arts | | #
