Lately I've been closing the draft on my gas kiln - choking it.
Heavy reduction. Starving it of oxygen. Almost all pleasant looking 'art' pottery is fired in reduction, but I've been carbon-trapping, reducing so much that carbon builds up inside the glaze itself, turning it a deep black.
I recently submitted a number of my figure drawn boxes to this treatment . . . the drawings previously were of mendicants, meditators in Buddha positions or some similar pose. . . but when heavily blackened and darkened by such a fire they became transformed.
One remains hopeful . . . I call one 'Job'. The affliction is from outside.
The other has the affliction boiling within. I call this one 'In Service of Who?".
The notion of an anti-Christ, or anti-Buddha, floats large in the world today. We live in a nation at war with its people.
So yes . . dark times are upon us.
Heavy reduction. Starving it of oxygen. Almost all pleasant looking 'art' pottery is fired in reduction, but I've been carbon-trapping, reducing so much that carbon builds up inside the glaze itself, turning it a deep black.
I recently submitted a number of my figure drawn boxes to this treatment . . . the drawings previously were of mendicants, meditators in Buddha positions or some similar pose. . . but when heavily blackened and darkened by such a fire they became transformed.
One remains hopeful . . . I call one 'Job'. The affliction is from outside.
The other has the affliction boiling within. I call this one 'In Service of Who?".
The notion of an anti-Christ, or anti-Buddha, floats large in the world today. We live in a nation at war with its people.
So yes . . dark times are upon us.
