AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

I am constantly sketching out ideas and filling folders with ideas for pots, surfaces and decoration. Over the time period of making pots, I am afraid I am probably responsible for the single handed eradication of a tree with all the “scrap” paper I have used for these sketches. Despite the fact that I will not live long enough to persue all of these ideas, or even want to, periodically I flip open a folder and decide to make something that is out of the norm and not as comfortable as just throwing a pot.

This weekend, flipping open the folder, it opened up to a series of sketches of slab built bottle forms. So without thinking it through, I went down Sunday afternoon and rolled out slabs for a Monday build-a-thon. I set about cutting slabs to a form I had sketched out and set about building several bottles. I should interject here that I am not a great hand-builder by any means and the process is slow, tiring and wrought with problems along the way. After a full day of working and trying to set the lines of the piece to something akin to straight and even, I end up with two bottles with thrown necks. The larger bottle, illustrated, is about 18” tall and what I didn’t take into consideration was how to glaze them. The bottles ended up much wider than my current glaze buckets. Should have stopped, smelled the coffee and thought this one through to its conclusion.

In the time I built these, I could have easily thrown a dozen pots or more. Now remind me please, what was my motivation?