Tamarak's Table: October 2008

Monday, October 27, 2008

My dog is in the dog house!

For reasons known only to my dog, Shea, he became all excited this afternoon when Cariño went out to the front of the house to put up the Christmas lights. Shea seemed to think that he was going to be going somewhere…maybe he thought the ladder that Cariño carried through the kitchen and out the front door was the board that gets put on the van floor when we take the dogs somewhere…I have no idea...

In the usual chaos that is our home, Thoth (one of my elder daughter’s cats that we are watching until she and beau find a new place – right now we have two large dogs and four cats! – a bit much, even if I do love animals) ran out the front door and after I brought him back in and was headed back out again to help with the Christmas lights, Shea decided to try to bolt past me in his 85 pounds of clumsy silliness, stepping on a very sore toe I have; I yelped and he decided to try to back into the house again…in the process, he somehow pulled over my china cabinet…I couldn’t grab it in time…

Many wonderful, special things smashed together in a horrible, broken pile – two antique pressed glass pieces, a gorgeous set of three nesting pottery bowls that my Mom had given Cariño last Christmas, a beautiful hand painted bowl from Turkey my sister gave me last Christmas, two funky wine glasses my Dad and his Cariño had given me, a lovely little blue glass vase my Mom gave me years and years ago, my cat pottery plate by Herman that I have had forever and loved, a few of my pottery pieces – this was just some of the carnage…

I yelled at my dog and sent him, in disgrace, out to the back yard (Teddy, the other dog, high tailed it out with Shea). My younger daughter and I stood and stared at the ruins, mouths hanging open…(actually I was venting verbally, but I won’t say what I said!)…

After a couple minutes, my daughter said…well…you now have lots of lovely pieces for your mosaics! And it is true…I have a whole box full of lovely shards…but I am still very sad – and mad at my dog…

I think that there is a very good chance that I will cry as I use these precious pieces to make some of my mosaics...

It seems that the lesson the cosmos is trying to teach me in this phase of my life (and I am being sent quite a few ‘opportunities’ in which to practice) is that I have to always find the good thing(s) in a bad situation…ok…I get it…can we move on now?

Friday, October 24, 2008

Artists at Work

I love watching ‘artists at work’ – whether they are sculpting, painting, potting – anything! I just love to watch their processes and how they do what they do. Actually seeing the magic of creation!

My elder daughter has sat for Karen Bailey a couple of times now and once it was for a demonstration at the Blink Gallery – so I got to watch! It was for two hours and it felt like five minutes, I was so enthralled!

This love of watching can be a dangerous thing though…there are so many videos out on the Internet that I could get lost for hours – days! And I spend such a lot of time on the computer as it is!

So, as a rule, I don’t go cruising YouTube, but I do watch the videos that I come across while cruising people’s blogs (another dangerous escape of mine – one blog leads to another, leads to another…and hours disappear!). I am also delighted when I look up some artist I have heard about or seen a piece from and they have a video posted on their site.

Both of these things happened this week…

Cariño and I had some time to kill in the Byward Market earlier this week so we walked over to the Lafreniere & Pai Gallery. The artist, whose sculpture I had seen in the window a few days before and had put on my mental list of things I wanted to see, was Susan Valyi and her work is fantastic! On her web site she has photos of her sculptures and also a video showing her working on some of her pieces. I absolutely fell in love with her piece “What I did Last Summer”, which was in the show – you can see it if you go to the Lafreniere & Pai Gallery’s web site, click on the Artists page and then click on Susan Valyi. This piece isn’t up on Susan’s web site yet. I love her morphed figures and this one, so small against the wonder of summer (it reminds me of the magic of summers when I was young) on the huge horse in a boat…a summer full of wonder and adventure is the feeling I get from this.

I am still trying to figure out the ‘etiquette’ of blogging…so I hope it is ok to post a picture of this sculpture here…

This morning, during my morning coffee and blog wandering, I came across Cath Sheard’s blog and she had posted a video of Jonas Gerard painting. He dances while he paints! It looks like he is really enjoying himself…it would be wonderful to see him in real life!

The morning has almost slipped away on me again...but that's ok!

Monday, October 20, 2008

Pottery Woes

I have decided to use this blog as a place for me to focus on and record my creative endeavours.

I have been taking pottery classes for a while now…hand building, not the wheel (I have no ‘wheel patience’) – and I love it. It is such great therapy and sometimes I end up with nice pieces to boot!

The thing about pottery though, is that you never really know what the final piece will actually look like…whether it will crack, whether the glaze will turn out how you envisioned it…whether it will survive the kiln!

I have recently had two pieces, that I was really looking forward to seeing finished, get ruined on their final firing – one (a coil bowl) was ruined when another piece in the kiln exploded, sending bits onto my piece, the other (a pinch bowl made with three diff colours of clay) cracked in two in the kiln during it’s final firing…

I was saddened both times, but knew that this happens sometimes…sometimes it can be helped, sometimes not (my piece that cracked on it’s own was too thick in the bottom)…I took both pieces home, not quite able to just throw them out…

Now I realize that I am known to be a ‘bit’ of a pack rat…so I kind of felt silly bringing broken pottery home…I thought I would just ‘sit’ with them for a bit…had no idea what I might do with them…then, just a couple days ago…I don’t even know where the thought came from…but I realized I brought them home to become a part of something else!

I am going to incorporate them into a mosaic…the coil bowl (about 9” in diameter) is going to be a part of a table top and the pinch bowl 'half' (the bigger piece with the nice colour markings on the outside) is going to be a part of a wall panel…I am going to make some tiles to go in the mosaic and also use other elements as well…like glass marbles, beads…still planning it out!

Now I need to learn mosaic making techniques…I haven’t ever made a mosaic!

I will try to remember to photograph it as I go along...