New Traditions?

I'm not sure how many of you grew up in an upper working class family like I did. It seemed that there was always a night that would come around that was affectionately referred to as "Clean-Out-the-Fridge-Night." This was a magical time when things that had been neglected for who knows how long would make there way to the dinner table. Sometimes it would take the form of a conglomeration of side dishes. Though I didn't know it at the time, this is known in parlance as "tapas" and people pay a lot of money for this kind of experience. Other times it would arrive in the form of one large dish, evenly distributed to the masses. Oliver Twist was familiar with this situation. I think our musical friends from Glee would call it a "mash-up."

Well, I'm happy to say that in my household (of one at the present time), we (the royal "we," that is) have decided to revisit the time-honored tradition once again. However, this time it is received not with a begrudged moan, but with a barbaric yawp!

Feast you eyes on this feast:

One whole onion, diced, sauteed until golden brown

One green pepper, diced (somewhat soggy, but who cares, it's being cooked anyway)

One green onion (because they were a bundle for a buck)

Three plum tomatoes (better use them quick before they become "red" paint on the fridge shelf)

One handful of celery (the parts that weren't soggy from sitting in the fridge for a week)

One handful of green beans (because they were in the bottom of the drawer and until now, no one thought to cook them in anything else)

LOTS of taco seasoning (purchased from a really nice lady in the City Market who probably has some idea how desperately a single male needs to cover up the taste of poorly cooked food)

Shove together in one large fry pan, cook until warm enough, add some rice from a couple of days ago and POOF! one happy bachelor who has just enough fuel in him to go the studio and make more work in one night than he has all week!

Isn't it remarkable how the lingering memories from childhood can come back to you in a instant? I'm thinking that if this Ceramics thing doesn't work out, I'm gonna start edging in on Paula Dean's market. Looks like I better start stocking up on lard.

Eat it, Dutch Still-Life Masters!

In the same way Dutch still-lifers would display the local commerce and decadence of their far-reaching trade economy, the humble author would like to submit to his most gracious readership for approval the kick-ass deal he got today. In no less than twenty exhaustible minutes, battling the elements of cloudless, sunny, eighty-nine degree heat, vicious hordes of voracious fellow consumers, shrewd hard-nosed Art of War-literate local farm-mongers, our hero prevailed with an armful of fresh produce that could satisfy (if not choke to near death) the most unlikely of omnivorous beasts. But the battle was not won without great cost. Our long-suffered, weary gallant adventurer was forced to give up the ghost of nineteen hard-earned American dollars to the great Beast of Capitalism. May their memory never be forgotten. For without their sacrifice, the fate of the dear author would rest in the hands of a dark and ominous plague, the godless disease that knows no creed or code, Starvinium Artistia.

Thankfully the fair reader can take heart in trusting that the fortified Paladin of Produce shall live on! Imagine the bountiful feast that this same being will enjoy for the next half fortnight while dreaming of the coming weekend in which even grander dreams of conquest and plunder might ensue. Oh the hungramity!

Screen House Residency: Making the next move

If you've lived in Florida for very long, you've probably been to a Publix grocery store. They were originally based in Winter Haven, FL (which most of FL is, if you think about it), not far from where my parents live now. I think they are based in Lakeland now, not far from Winter Haven. Anyway, I grew up going to this grocery store. As far as I knew, this was the only grocery store in town. Everyone I knew from school had parents who shopped there. It would take forever for us to get out of the store because Mom or Dad had to catch up with somebody on the street we used to live on, or I was in Cub Scouts with, or my brother was on the soccer team with...

Anyway, our store used to have a mosaic tile mural like this one does. On a recent trip to West Palm Beach, FL, I was shocked to see this old mural, just like the one I saw every week as a kid. It was kind of a little sentimental moment for me. See, the store in my old neighborhood remodeled years ago, so I guess I had grown used to not seeing it for a really long time. Seeing this old school mosaic brought back plenty of memories. Like when I would ride along with the neighbor's kids and we would take glass Coke bottles back for the money and then buy candy with the new stash of cash. Or when my friends and I would hang out there on our bikes because there was nothing else to do in suburban Tampa in the hot summers.

I think one of the most indelible m

emories was when my Mom needed something from the store. I remember she gave me a list of stuff she needed and a little cash. I took off on my bike, backpack in tow. I remember that beyond the silly list of things I had to get, I was entrusted to take off on my own and get that mission done without anyone holding my hand. It was kind of a big deal.

The Screen House Residency is coming to an end. Everything is packed up. I've cleaned out the screen house and said goodbye to all my lizard collaborators. Soon it will be moving into a trailer hitched to the back of my truck. It's time for a new chapter. I've recently accepted an offer to be the new Studio Manager at the Red Star Studios in Kansas City, MO. Somehow, I feel like I'm on that bike again. I feel like I've been given a great task, people are counting on me, and I'm ready to succeed. And just like before, it's kind of a big deal.

Screen House Residency: Libby Carnahan Fellowship at the St Petersburg Clay Co.

The SHR phased into a new opportunity. I was asked by my friend Libby to housesit while she was away in China visiting some friends. So for two weeks I took care of her pets and got a nice work space at the St Petersburg Clay Company, where I had my first artist residency after college. What a wonderful homecoming! I was able to see old friends and reconnect with a few people I hadn't seen in a while. And during the two weeks I cranked out another kiln load of piggy banks. It was nice to spend a little time getting input from the AIRs (Artists in Residence) and talking with the owners, Adam Yungbluth and Matt Schiemann. SPCC has gone through a lot of changes since I was an AIR and it's really cool to see that they have continued to offer residents a solid experience when it comes to post-graduation reality checks. Residents experience a diversified climate: working with non-academic membership, outsider artists from the community, students from St Pete College, Eckard College, and U of South Florida. They also come in contact with pros who have been making pots and sculpture for years. It's a great community and St Pete's art scene has been rated tops among cities its size. Makes a Bay area native proud!

As if making work at a great place with great people wasn't enough, I also set up a solo exhibition in the store front of Highwater Clays of Florida. It's also located in the train station where SPCC is located. I got all kinds of fun reviews and comments of the work that is displayed there. Barbara Ott is the store manager and did an awesome job of making me feel welcome and helping to make the best display possible. If you're in the area, please stop by and check it out. The Train Station is located at 420 22nd St South in St Petersburg.

With the LC Fellowship closed, I returned to the Screen House and got things closed spruced up for a sale at my folks house. They were having a slew of friends from around the lake out to celebrate Memorial Day that weekend. This included a live bluegrass ensemble: a collection of friends who live around town and play at a variety of venues. I think my biggest honor of the evening was having the fiddle player, "Sticky Steve," purchase a few pieces from me that he was going to use as an award from a fishing competition that takes place later in the summer. I'm famous!

Screen House Residency: SunFest

I'm heading down to West Palm Beach for SunFest in an AmTrak train.

OK, now use your imagination...

You're on a train, you don't have to drive, you just have to look out the window. Out the right side of said train: flat-as-a-pancake land. In the distance, small collections of oak trees with tiny little mini palm trees surrounding them (in the industry, we call them palmettos). Out the left side: orange groves. Row after row of sweet delicious citrus (but that's usually in the winter season...). It's beautiful. Brings a tear to the eye.

Now, I must confess: not long ago I was living in a place pretty similar, except you'll need to substitute mini palm trees for...umm...grass. And get rid of those heavenly sugar-delivery systems we call fruit and put in the Backbone of the U S of A...corn.

I'm not saying one is better than the other. I'm just saying I know what I like. And if you could have been on the train, pretending to smell the sweet swamp grasses and orange blossoms instead of the recycled stale air-conditioned air of the train, I tell you, you would agree that Florida Prairie is something to behold.

And don't get me started on the thunderstorms that sweep across land like that. You can see the lightning, but it's too far off to ever hear it. The rain gets to thick you can't see where the horizon stops or starts. (I think I may have gotten myself started, though.) Brings a tear to my eye and song to my breast. Ok, maybe not the song part. In fact, if it were to bring a song to my breast, the only song that seems fitting is "Shenandoah," and that's not even close to Florida. In fact, the one song that's a claim to fame would be "Way Down Yonder on the Swanee River," and unless I've only heard bad renditions of the song, it's not nearly soulful enough.

Can you inherit a song for any time and place?

Oh FL prairie

I long to see you

Away you rolling...swa-amp

Oh FL prairie

I long to see you

Away, I'm bound away

Across the wide

Okeechobee

So maybe it's not the same. But I think if the pioneers had started here instead of Virginia, I bet that song would have been a little different. I betcha they stole the original tune from Ponce de Leon.

Screen House Residency: Big Whoop

Some of you out there have heard stories of various animals wandering a little too close to studio spaces. I think my favorite of these stories regularly occurs at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (Gatlinburg, TN) where a bear likes to wander in and give the resident artists a good time. I can say that in Florida, I, too, have had an experience that equals in intensity. Yesterday, while dutifully working in the Screen House Residency of Crooked Lake, I had a close encounter with a pair of Florida Sandhill Cranes. These ferocious pack-hunting birds swooped out of nowhere, calling out with a warrior cry that had me hiding under my wedging table! I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sight of their razor-sharp beaks and sun-blotting wingspans. As if trapped in my own personal Jurassic Park, I ravenously searched of any kind of escape route!

Lucky for me, I had my trusty Kemper fettling knife to keep them at bay. Whew! It was a close call and I count myself fortunate to be have captured these pictures of such violent creatures with my ever-ready cell phone. Oh course, they are a little blurry (sound familiar my Loch Ness brethren?) so I've included a shot from the ever trustworthy World Wide Web (aka: the Information Super Highway, or Internet). Behold their terrifying red-masked faces of death! They are the scourge of Crooked Lake, a murderous flying brigade of bandits, hell-bent on the destroying the peace and solace of every hard working ceramic sculptor in the land!

Will the Lake ever again know harmony in the aftermath of such shrieking horror? Will this "endangered" species ever relent its hatred of foolish man? Stay tuned... and vigilant!

Screen House Residency

So here it is, Day 2 of the Screen House Residency. And it is awesome! I get up in the morning, have a little coffee with Mom and my bro and then head down to the screen house by the lake. I hop up to the house proper for a little lunch and then head back down the hill and make some more work. Of course, if I want to, I take a little dip in the lake, like I did with Dad today. We had a light banter about the state of the water flow and how it's affecting the shape of the beach shore. And then I went to work again. And as if that weren't enough, I had a wonderful dinner at the house and then headed back to the screen house for round...4? What a day!

I was asked today what I think about while I'm making my work. Pretty good question I'd say, coming from a family who hasn't ever really seen me when I'm in work mode. I rattled off a list of things that pass through my mind: the future, my family, relationships, aesthetics, concepts, etc. One other thing I have been dwelling on is how familiar this is to grad school. Wake up, make art, eat, sleep... Rinse, repeat. Something I learned from one of my grad professors (John Balistreri) was setting up a studio that makes sense for the work being made at the time. For example, if you're making large scale sculpture, you wouldn't take up valuable working space with one foot shelving units. Right now I'm employing this tactic as I make a new body of work and dealing with a long forgotten working environment. When I was a resident at the St Petersburg Clay Company I worked in a mostly outdoor environment. (For those of you at NCECA this year, that was long before they made the sweet renovations that put everybody in the air conditioning. Look at me, I'm starting to sound like an ole timer. We also walked to the studio uphill both ways and had to drudge through a sand pit to get there...) Anyway, after that, most of the residency or school situations I've been in have been climate controlled.

Until now. I'm working in a 10 x 20 ft screen house. One wall has windows but the other three are all screen. And we get a little bit of wind coming off the lake. That doesn't dry things out too fast though because we've got about 99% humidity. Which reminds men, we just entered rainy season.

Why does none of this bother me? Well, because maybe while I was in graduate school I learned that I could adapt my studio and studio practice to match whatever situation in which I might find myself. That's not a skill I thought I needed to learn as I entered grad school. Hey, I thought I had most of the figured out by then. But it just goes to show that sometimes we learn things when we least expect it. I assume that the Screen House Residency will provide more things to learn, things I couldn't possibly foresee at the present time. If that happens, you'll be sure to see it here.

PS: Thanks, JB.

On a Rampage

You know, it's funny what happens when you start blogging. During strange times you start thinking "I could blog something about this," and low and behold, your mind goes to work thinking about how you're going to launch into a subject. I mean, you can't just come out and say that a student asked to take a picture of you for an assignment where he dresses your likeness up in a onezee and makes it destroy a city. Or maybe you can come right out and say something like that.

Justin Chronister, an undergrad, was given a portraiture assignment from Justin Miller, painting faculty here at UStF. The stipulations as I understand them were to pick a faculty or staff member and paint their likeness in some kind of surreal circumstances. When Mr. Chronister approached me and told me I was his pick, I was a bit honored. I mean, the guy has serious skills. So we set up a little photo shoot and captured a few grimacey images of my face. I must say that the end results are stunning. However, I think he may have misrepresented the chickeniness of my legs.

Unreliability

My friend and colleague told me a surprising story of woe today. A few months back she had purchased a piggie bank from me. It was one I had made in graduate school. It was a porcelain slip-cast piggie, fired to Cone 6 and refired to Cone 06 with a laser printed iron decal on it. The decal was in the shape of a dollar bill sign with the words "unreliable" repeated over and over. She took the pig and gifted it to her brother who took it to work at his law firm. Apparently it was stolen. Now the pig had not sat too long in the office and had not acquired much wealth at all. So what made it appealing to the thief?

My friend told that while it was still in her possession, she and her family had written a few notes and put them in the pig. From my understanding it was a way of investing loving thoughts and ideas. (Well, at least I'll pretend that's what it was because that sounds like a pretty good thing to invest in these days.) It seems that the thief must have mistaken that sound of paper in the bank for legal tender. How unfortunate that the would-be robber would find a bunch of notes in it after smashing the poor little piggie to bits. I find this all very conceptually satisfactory considering the label on the side of the pig and its hidden self-fulfilling prophecy!

Room With a View

There is something about the Firsts of the months here in Fort Wayne. Back on the first of December, during our woodfiring here at UStF, we got our first snow of the season. Exactly on the first. On January 1st there was a "heat" wave, sending Fort Wayne into temperatures of 50 degrees or more. And on February 1st, we were in the midst of a blizzard. I realize from other vantage points our one foot of snow in 48 hours isn't much. But here in Fort Wayne all of the schools were closed, grocery stores ran out of milk and police were handing out tickets for "non-essential" driving. In an effort to keep from getting cabin fever, I found myself at the studio. It was a wonderful and quiet time to get projects some molds finished and catch up on recent cinematic events via Netflix. Whilst there I thought it would be prudent to share with the world what my view is from my small single studio window. Being in the basement (as most academic ceramic studios are) I can see the railroad tracks a nearly eye level.

The School of Creative Arts (SOCA) here at the University of St Francis is a rehabilitated railroad depot. This is actually my third studio that has been in such a building. However, the tracks outside are the most used. More than once an hour a train comes through, taking cargo from place to another. Fort Wayne has been classified a "Rust Belt" town; a town that once served the great industrial needs of the country but has most recently survived on the tenacity of its people. They are a proud people with incredible loyalty. What with all of my moving around lately, town loyalty has barely been in my vocabulary. But the pride of Fort Wayne is contagious. Though I imagine before long I will be leaving this town as well, for now it has a hold on me. It's nice to find a place to love for a while. Fort Wayne has a rich commercial history reaching back to it's foundation. It started as a trading post at the convergence of the St Mary's, St Joe, and Maumee Rivers. It's been called the Summit City because it rises in elevation from the surrounding area. It's been called the City of Churches because of the density of places of worship in a town with a relatively small population. I like to call it Home, because for the first time in a while, it feels like one.

Made Off has a new home

After a few months of storage by the grace of the faculty at Bowling Green State University, Made Off, one of my pieces from my MFA show Loot, Leverage, and the Pursuit of Haplessness is now making an appearance at the University of St Francis. The Dean of the School of Creative Arts, Rick Cartwright, has given me permission to put up Made Off for a while.

One of our students here is a bit of a fan of yarn bombing so he has decided to fit Made Off with a single mitten for the winter. Honestly, it's a bit of an honor to have a small collaboration for the season.

Here's to you, my yarn bombing collaborator!

Starting out...

So I've been encouraged by a friend to set up a blog. Let me briefly say here that I have tried these things many time. I usually start with a wonderful first post. Then nothing really happens for a long time. Then I come back and make some kind of posting about not writing anything for a long time. Then I pretty much never post again.

I've decided to turn over a new leaf. I've been out of graduate school now for 6 months. Even though I have a great job at the University of St Francis with wonderful colleagues, there is still a hankering for feedback. After all, now that I'm out of school, the tough questions have stopped and it's play time.

Let's just see what I can get myself into in this crazy little sandbox.