This Month at Green River Pottery: March 2008
Moonlight Mile
We’ve had our first spring-like days, the snow receding to reveal a muddy, squishy back yard, bulbs pushing up. Out by the highway there are moraines of snow-plow grit weighing down the flower beds in front of the gallery doors, and under the dried clumps of geranium, Jupiter’s beard, and salvia, little knots of green leaves are beginning to appear. It’s time to garden, time to shovel and dig, time to wash the windows.
February’s firing was a joy from start to finish. As I glazed the work and carefully arranged it in the kiln, I knew, somehow, that things would go well—the kiln would fire easily and the pots would look good. There are some months when I load and re-load, when I wash the glazes off the pots and start over, when I worry and consult notebooks and get brilliant ideas that, the following day, have to be re-thought. This firing wasn’t one of those. Everything was easy and I hesitate to even observe this, not wanting to spoil my luck. Moonlight Mile, the Pot of the Month this month, exemplified how things went. I threw this large, lidded jar in two sections, letting each half dry a bit before putting the two pieces together and throwing the larger form into a final shape. I started this piece in the morning and worked on it sporadically throughout a whole day, pausing for an hour or two to gain perspective, to let it dry, and then returning to throw some more—exploiting the increasing rigidity of the clay to finalize the curve of the side, the width of the shoulder. Finally, I painted on a white slip and incised a design through it, using a tool I made from a hacksaw blade.
I applied one of the newly-mixed ash glazes (see February 2008) to this jar, using a sprayer to achieve a very thin, very even coating; this worked beautifully with the slip, melting to a translucent, shiny surface that revealed a lively interplay of browns and whites underneath—a winter scene, a brown moonlit landscape, stretching out of sight under a crescent moon.
