Here's a tea-bowl from a recent firing. It's not part of the upcoming giveaway, though I'm showing it to start my readers looking at my wood-fired work.
Perhaps I'll give this one away if my first 'potlatch' is successful. It's from a later firing than the ones I'm giving away . . . in fact it's from a firing in which I submitted 99 cups, and got 81 out that I can live with.
9 x 9 = 81.
Here's what I like about the brush-work on the side: It looks to me like a man on horseback!
This must mean that motifs from Ancient Rome and Greece are much with me, and I suspect also, in you too. I was intending a landscape with my brush, but the fire said: "Sorry buddy, I see a horse, with his rider wading beside him, as they cross the river Styx! See he's holding his spear, while the fiery current boils around them."
You never get what you intend. Intention focuses attention, so you get something.
In the end fire is the only force inside any of us. Fire is energy, energy is life.
Those Ancient Civilizations lasted many thousands of years. By comparison we're new-borns. That ancient mind's still there, much more of what we are, than we realize.
Pagan Gods, ancient Heroes, and pre-scientific modes of thinking, ratttle about in our brains, while we fool ourselves into thinking we behave logically.
I'm not looking to be logical, or to make sense. I'm not looking to make science.
I don't even keep notes of what glazes I use, or how I mix my clay.
I just make the stuff, and accept a huge loss rate. It's from those defeats that I make changes to my practice. Lots of my work ends up cracked, glazes flaking off, or carbon trapped.
I just accept the losses, try to make changes and move on. That's my yoga. The record keeping gets done by my pagan mind.
