Monday, July 25, 2016

SHAMAN

Based on an ongoing flirtation with my "landscapeman" designs, I recently threw a series of medium size v-bowls and once tooled black slipped and carved them with a variety of designs, this one being my shaman motif. Intended to look like two shaman animating the surface, each engaged in delving deeply into the meaning of life, to divine the hidden truths of the universe or just possibly deciding what to have for dinner. What ever the case, the design articulates the space between black slip and exposed red terra cotta to make for a lively design. In case it isn't obvious this style is partially influenced by German block prints created prior to the 1930s though the decoration and designs do not necessarily bare any resemblance to that work. Hopefully, perfectly blended and assimilated, these designs and motifs come from years of watching old movies and reading lots of science fiction to create imagery from my own vocabulary which hopefully will remain a work in progress.