Monday, March 7, 2011

Busy busy busy...

It's been a hectic week(end) and the next one looks to be no better.  Mostly family stuff, and that's just the way life is.  BUT! I did get to do some potting last week, even if it wasn't nearly as much as I'd like to be doing.  Here's a little of what I accomplished, and then some stuff that needs to be accomplished yet.
Finally got around to decorating this vase.  Not sure how I feel about it at this point - starting to feel stuck in a rut with some of my decorative styles.  But they're my styles, so I shouldn't feel like it's a rut to be producing work that is stylisticly repetetive, right?
Trying out some new slip colors on these bowls.  Trying some new-ish pattern types of things.  We'll see what happens!
Here's some of my white clay that started out as slip and ended up bone dry.  Which is great for recycling, if I take the time to recycle it.  Which I need to.  Just showing a little life around the studio for ya.
Here's a shelf of greenware still waiting for a bisque fire.  Maybe this week?  Don't know how I'd fit it in, but I kind of need to.  Maybe on Wednesday - firing on Ash Wednesday seems appropriate, right?
So that's really all I have to show for last week.  Of course those bowls involved trimming to go with the decorating, and that does take some time.  Mostly I haven't been able to dedicate large chunks of time to hard work (more than 30-40 minutes at a go) and not being around on the weekend has been a real productivity-suck on the artistic front.  Blurgh.  But that's the way it goes sometime.

Otherwise, I've been listening to a lot of Jars of Clay back-catalog stuff in the studio and in my free time - relishing the underrated efforts that make up their sophomore and junior (?) releases, and also picking up on some new music to be excited about.  Radiohead released their newest as a direct download a couple of weeks ago and it is a funky electro-jazz experience.  There are also new singles out from The Strokes and Foo Fighters which bode well for spring albums from those creative guys.  So I'm pretty excited about that.  And finally, the latest in the Yearbook project from Sleeping at Last has been enjoyable: of the three tracks on the March EP, one track is a beautiful instrumental, and another features guest vocals from none other than Switchfoot's Jon Foreman.  So that's a treat.  You can listen to that track in the "video" embedded below, which is titled "Birthright."
Have a great week, and hopefully there will be potting news from me sooner than not!

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