Majolica

So my ceramic work is known to be brown.  It’s not that I don’t like color, but the processes and glazes I have been drawn to in the past have leaned toward an earth-tone aesthetic.  Well, all that’s about to change (at least in one aspect)…

Recently I have been testing out majolica glaze on earthenware.  Here is a small, horribly photographed sample of what it looks like (along with an example I’ll refer to below):

Majolica, or maiolica, is a glazing technique that was started during roughly the 1500s as a cheaper alternative to Chinese porcelain, which Westerners could not produce due to insufficient kiln technology.  In other words, the Europeans of the time couldn’t get the kiln hot enough.  Majolica is tin-glazed earthenware.  Tin is an opacifier which turns the glaze white, and often colorants like cobalt blue were used to paint narratives and figurative scenes on the pieces.

At this point in my testing process I’m trying to get rid of the white spots in the picture above.  Technically they are a defect, though many people actually like how they look.  The colorants are painted on in a similar way to watercolors, though they don’t flow as easily, and you can scratch through the colors to the white glaze for any sort of drawn, linear elements.

My work is increasingly leading me back to the figure, and I’m looking into using narrative as a vehicle to explore contemporary themes.  I’m not quite sure how majolica will come into play, but I’ve been thinking about the more sculptural elements of my work as forms on which to portray the figure and any sort of narrative.  I’ve been looking at the della robbias, a family of Renaissance ceramicists who have used majolica on figurative sculpture.  The sculpture above is an example of their work.

Apparently, you can see sculptures like this all over Italy, and it is made out of tin-glazed earthenware.  Now, my work will of course look very different, but I’m interested in how they employ the figure and narrative as well as their use of the majolica technique.

As soon as I actually have some finished work I’ll get pictures and post them.

Sculpture #1: Lily of the Valley

**BEWARE**  conceptual installation art below…

I’m taking sculpture as an elective this semester, and this past weekend I spent most of my time preparing my first sculpture for our crit day on Tuesday, which is when the whole class views each sculpture and critiques it.  This sculpture was a bit of a struggle for me, but like many artworks that I seem to labor over, I think that it paid off in the end.  The assignment was an exercise in taking three disparate elements and combining them into one cohesive idea.  To choose our three elements we turned to three random pages in a dictionary and were stuck with whatever word was pictured on the page.  We also had to use 7 different materials in constructing the piece.  I turned to staffordshire bull terrier, oriole, and lily of the valley.  Great.  Those go together perfectly…

Now when I say combine the elements, that doesn’t mean sculpt a terrier with a lily sprouting out of its butt and an oriole perched on its forehead, though that might have been funny.  What I needed to do was research everything about each element and find some kind of common ground on which I can make some sort of conceptual statement.

So here is what I did.  The piece is a video installation, so the pictures below can only give a rough idea of how it worked.  I wish I could post the video, but it is 100 mb large.  My idea stemmed from the lily of the valley, which I was pretty excited about getting because of its biblical symbolism.  It is commonly used as a symbol for Christ, and the plant itself is poisonous but it is traditionally used for medicines and healing.  Seeing that, I chose to go with the paradoxical concept of life springing from death, which ties in perfectly with the death and resurrection of Christ.  Each of my three words are represented by three different natural elements:  earth (terrier=”earth dog”), water/liquid (lily), and air (oriole).  The oriole also is a symbol for the coming of positive changes or summer.

The contraption you see in the pictures is a dripping mechanism that drips fake blood (thanks to BN for the recipe) down three tilted pieces of acrylic plastic into a bowl of rocky and infertile soil.  Over all of that is a projected video of time lapsed flowers growing, clouds moving, or the sun rising or setting.  The audio for the video is an altered and layered until unrecognizable version of the hymn “Lily of the Valley” with short clips from a 1970′s sermon about Christ as the lily of the valley.  The clips say “have you ever looked at the lily of the valley?  huh? Oh that changes things.  There stands your answer.  There’s what makes something important…” along with “Once the lily was a dead bulb, but that dead bulb came to life.  And on the end of that stem is a bright, beautiful, blooming, live flower…”  The mirrors  on the outside act as a way to frame the whole composition and redirect the light from the projection toward the bowl, and the water bottles are used to represent a vessel of life-giving sustenance.

So while the lily of the valley is obviously the focus of the sculpture, the oriole is represented by the light of the projection and the journey of the blood down to the soil bringing (positive changes), and the terrier is represented by, of course, the soil, or to be more symbolic, the “earth creature” that represents man.  The blood, a symbol for death, drips down into infertile soil, a symbol for fallen man, and brings forth new life.

I have had somewhat of an overwhelmingly positive response to the sculpture.  Ever since it was shown to the class I have had several people come up to me and say that they really, really liked it, that they were impressed at the way I somewhat boldly yet subtly made a religious statement that even non-Christians could respond to or relate to in many ways.  Even the sculpture professor said “really good sculpture,” and he seemed to really respond to it positively.

The most amazing thing to me about all this is that Monday, as I spent hours trying to engineer and prepare all the little pieces, I had no clue as to whether the piece would work, and I though it might just look like a bunch of crap screwed on the wall with a video over it.  But when I put it on the wall on Tuesday it all seemed to just click.

I’ll tell you what…I spent a lot of time praying for guidance on this piece, so I have no doubt that I had some help from above.  I know some of you reading this may think that I’m not giving enough credit to myself when saying that, but I fully believe that everything good in me comes from God.  So when I make art, to me it is for the glory of God, who I believe created me, and I in turn create artwork with Him and through Him.  The fact that He would send His Son to shed His blood for a wretch like me and give me new life is my motivation for living and creating art, and I hope that a little of that passion is evident in this piece.

Whoa…Where’d the Month Go?

So it seems that as a graduate student when the school year starts it hits you like a freight train and takes you along for the ride stuck in the cowcatcher.  Since my post was almost a month ago it may seem that I’m letting this blog thing go by the wayside, but I’m pretty determined to keep it going.  I have a few posts planned for the coming week or two, so stay tuned, or tune back in…

This week was full of events for me.  I had my first sculpture due, my first open studio of the year, and tonight we had our annual potluck with the whole art department, during which the graduate students give about a two minute presentation to introduce ourselves and show pictures of our work.  My roommate (suitemate?) and I decided to have fun with it, and we switched name tags and actually went up to do each other’s presentation rather than our own.  People seemed to think it was funny, and the best part is that we will have freshman and other art undergrads who don’t know us thinking that I am the photographer and he is the ceramicist.  The first time some unsuspecting undergrad asks me about my animal photos I’m going to probably laugh in his/her face.

What is interesting about this is that I don’t know if I could have done a better job talking about my own work than Brian did, and I was probably more comfortable in front of the group of 100 or so people talking about Brian’s work than if I were talking about mine.  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about that…

Grad School Year Two…Start Your Engines!!

So tomorrow marks the beginning of the school year here at Clemson.  I have a strange mixture of fear and excitement as I look ahead.  I’m excited to see where my work is going to go the coming year, but there is always the fear that my work won’t be good enough, or that I won’t show the growth that is expected of me.

Art grad school is a funny thing though.  Part of me wonders if some of the choices I’ve made in my work so far have been a way of conforming to the expectations of the faculty in some way or another.  It’s not that there’s a specific professor’s ideas to which I’m conforming, but it’s the art world and academia in general.  I wonder whether I’m actually just being taught to prefer and appreciate certain types of art, but who decided what is and isn’t good art?  I don’t by any means think that it’s universal, that the accepted art being made today defines what true art is. How can I know if I truly like and appreciate modern, post-modern, and contemporary art such as Mondrian, Pollock, or Hirst or if I have just been taught to like and appreciate them?  Art can mean so many different things to so many different people around the world.  It’s often labeled as something that is free, so why does it sometimes feel like I’m being corralled into such a narrow confinement?

Don’t get me wrong…I have tremendous respect and admiration for my professors, especially Mike.  I guess all of these questions are going through my head right now because what I do with my work this semester will most likely determine what my thesis will be.  So I have some pretty important decisions to make.  Am I going to go forward with the functional side of my work, not denying concept but tying them together?  Or am I going to focus on the sculptural side?

I have to keep reminding myself that though it seems like my whole life depends on the decisions I make in the next year, it really doesn’t.  I’m here to get a degree, to learn a lot about ceramics, and hopefully to become a better artist prepared to make a living selling my work and teaching.  I know I won’t be defined by what happens here during the next few months; there are more important things in my life than what kind of artist I will be.

Anyways, this semester will be nice in that I don’t have a class with much writing, but I think that makes this blog even more important for my growth.  I’ll be spending a lot of time in the studio as I’m taking 9 hours of studio credits, and they expect me to be in the studio for 4 hours for every one of those credits.  I’m also taking sculpture as an elective, so it will be interesting to actually have directed art assignments again.  Hopefully it will help me to think critically and conceptually about my work.

We’ll just have to see…

Movie of the Month: District 9

Science fiction movies can often be hit or miss.  The problem is that many of them rely on the coolness factor of spaceships, lasers, and explosions to drive the story, and you end up with something pretty and fun to watch but cheesy or lacking in depth.  The best of these movies often have a bit of social criticism in them, but that doesn’t necessarily make the movie worthwhile.  This summer we’ve seen several sci fi movies released, each with a fairly great deal of success.  Transformers 2 was fun to watch but fantastically cheesy, and ultimately unsatisfying.  I’m going to have to assume that GI Joe is similar based on reviews and the trailers.  Harry Potter was good, but to me it had the flow of a tv movie, which is not surprising seeing that the director had previously only directed for the small screen.  Wolverine was also good, but nothing to get too excited about.  The best of these summer blockbusters was probably Star Trek, which won over many star trek scoffers.

Not a bad summer of blockbuster sci fi movies.

HOWEVER…

With a budget of about $30 mil, which is miniscule compared to the ones listed above, District 9 is easily the best of the group.

District 9

Produced by Peter Jackson, District 9 was directed by Neill Blomkamp, who was to direct that Halo movie that was buried under legal mumbo-jumbo.  Not only is this movie fun to watch (it definitely doesn’t lack explosions), but it also has a creative and compelling storyline, with just enough social criticism mixed in.  The acting and CGI are phenomenal, and the characters are dynamic, making it easy to connect and empathize with them.  I can’t wait to see what Blomkamp does next…

Japanese Teabowls!!

This past semester I have become enamored with making traditional Japanese teabowls.  They serve as somewhat of an escape from the push to conceptualize everything I make while in grad school.  I suppose that I find it relaxing to work with such a simple form.  Part of it is that when you throw a teabowl you shouldn’t think about it too much.  They are supposed to be quickly and roughly made, and taking too much care with a single piece usually leads to overworking it.  I usually end up challenging myself to throw each bowl as quickly as possible without taking the time to center perfectly.  What results is that each piece has a lopsided and charming character of its own, with fresh and spontaneous marks that don’t look contrived.  At least that’s the goal…

The ideal aesthetic here is that of the wabi-sabi, which focuses on the unpretentious, the natural, and the beauty of the imperfect.  For example, if you click on the thumbnail below of the inside of the teabowl, you will see that the glaze crawled.  Normally this is seen as a glaze defect, but when imperfections are seen as beautiful, crawling can be desirable.

Here are a some of my favorites from the past few months.  I will have more up on my website at www.artbydavehill.com soon along with other ceramic work.  I’ll let you know on here when that happens.  All of these were fired in our anagama here at Clemson.  Click on the thumbnails to see them large…

teabowl with ash glaze

inside of shino teabowl with crawling

teabowl with shino type glaze

teabowl with nuka glaze

teabowl with oribe glaze

other side of oribe teabowl

teabowl with shino glaze

Movie of the Month: 500 Days of Summer

I didn’t want to get too far off the topic of ceramics and grad school so soon, but after seeing 500 Days of Summer last weekend I couldn’t resist writing a note about it.  As many of you may know, movies are a huge part of my life.  There are few things I enjoy more than watching a great film.  My favorite movies not only provide entertainment and a little escape from stress, but they also inspire me and make me think.  They (generally) have to mean something.  The movie 5oo Days of Summer is one of those movies for me.

500 Days of Summer isn’t necessarily the most creative story out there.  In fact, some of the scenes and characters are a teeny bit cliche, but I found myself caught up and laughing along with the audience anyways.  The thing about this movie is that it is put together and filmed with such freshness and charm that it sort of swept me up along for the ride.  One of the reasons I responded so well is undoubtedly the music, which plays a pretty integral role in the film.  Though my favorite song is Sweet Disposition by The Temper Trap, the rest of the music is equally as good at pulling us into the story.  What I will say for the story is that it is real.  It doesn’t force feed us some drivel about love and relationships.  In fact, as the narrator puts it in the trailer, it really isn’t a love story, but it’s more about life, relationships, and our expectations as we enter them.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt is fantastic as usual, and Zooey Deschanel does a very fine job, though she always seems to be the quirky indie girl.  That’s all that I will really say so I don’t ruin it for anyone.

It is only showing in a few theaters so far (only 1 in Atlanta), but I imagine that it will open into wider release at some point for those of you who are near cities.  There is a little language in sexual innuendo in it, but for the most part it is tastefully done.  Go see it.  It’s good.

My Summer Building a Kiln…

This summer I’ve spent a lot of my time at Clemson building a new kiln.  It has been a great experience as I learn the skills I will need one day to build a kiln of my own.  The design is a catenary arch with a side firebox opening directly into the kiln, which will hopefully give us some fly ash on the pieces during the firings.  We’ve finally gotten to a point where it actually look like a kiln, so we’re pretty excited to get it all finished and fire it up.

Below are some of the pictures of the arch building process, with more to come soon as we complete it.  Enjoy…

Beginning stages of the main arch.

Back of the Kiln

Completed main arch (first layer)

Working on the firebox arch.

First Layer of Arches Complete

First Solo Show!–University of Alabama

Two Fridays ago I spent the day setting up my first solo exhibition at The Ferguson Center Art Gallery at the University of Alabama.  The show will be up until the 29th of this month, so if you are anywhere near Tuscaloosa on a weekday, please go check it out!  The works in the show are all from my first year at Clemson.  There are two separate bodies of work shown, but in each case the work is an exploration of the tactile qualities of the ceramic medium and how those qualities can be a valuable tool to express ideas about life and the world around us.

A big thanks goes out to Jason Doblin for giving me this opportunity and for spending long hours helping with the setup.  I’m beginning to suspect that he has some sort of superhuman ability of awesomeness.

Check out the pics…

the front of the space with the title in vinyl lettering

close up of front centerpieces

back section of the space

looking through the towers

towers

the back wall

detail of the figures

detail of figures

Ahem…Is This Mic On?

Hey everyone, welcome to my blog!

As I am about to begin my second year in Clemson University’s MFA graduate program, I’ve decided that this will be a good way to write about my experiences, allowing me to respond to the joys and frustrations of art school as well as get feedback for my work.  It has been quite a ride so far, and since one of my weaknesses is writing and talking about my work, I’m hoping that this will be a good way to work on it.  There will probably be posts about music, movies, and other things, but for the most part I will be focusing on art and ceramics.

So please feel free to comment on anything you see!

God bless!