Hand-built clay sculpture, What I Learned in School, Tammy Vitale, Tam’s Originals

Do you make a lot of art?  Do you forget what you’ve made?  I’m scrounging around old files for photos for this space and remembering many of the pieces that I’d forgotten.  There are many I never even took pictures of.  I still forget to take pictures, although I’m getting better about it because I like to post new work here.

Yesterday in the studio (finally! – it’s been forever!) I made two new torsos, a mask and the ubiquitous word tiles.  Will make more today.

The torsos are taking off in a new direction – well, the one I let.  The other one is pretty standard – the new direction being sculpting on the belly area.  I sculpted  an elongated female figure that stretches from the chest to the belly button, based on Australian petroglyphs and then incised some more drawings taken from the same source book.  I am after the primitive feel of rock art found around the world and am not sure how to get that.  Maybe stain instead of glaze.  I will have to play with it a bit to see if I can get what I want.  I guess what I need is some dark matt as opposed to gloss glazes.  I thought I had some black but it keeps glossing (maybe if I fire it lower…..).  Which gives me the thought that I could use some cone 6 glazes and underfire them and see what happens.  Hmmmm – what a great idea!  And you just saw it blossom!

Started a new "note" tile – 5"x7"  hand written as opposed to letter stamped.  This was somewhat necessitated by the fact that I can’t find my letters A, Y and S.  These are hard letters to lose.  So I made up some new words to use, phrases actually, and in one instance used all letter stamps that are smaller.  I like the bigger ones, but hey, "necessity is the mother of invention."  The "notes" are thinner, too.  I’m stealing an idea from an artist in Alchemy who does postcards.  They look very cool and are unfortunately high priced.  He writes on masks, too.  Almost poetry.  I really like his work but, again, he’s too high priced for me.  Anyway, the notes are done on 1/4" sheets (word tiles on 1/2 inch) and I’m going to try to finish them so that I have stain in the writing spots and white eveywhere else.  I may have to fire twice to get that, but I’m going to try both ways,  single and double fire, and see which works best.

Today is Open Studio Day for Calvert Artists’ Guild.  It’s just for guild members and I’ve only had one indicate any interest.  But it’s 10 – 1, and I’ll just stay in the studio and work with the garage door open during the hours and see what happens.

Still thinking about the floor at the cottage.  All the tiles I plan to make are boxed and ready to travel there.  I just need to clean out my car so I can load them.  I guess I could use the van – I never think about that.  Car is full of last load out (and I can’t even remember what that was ArtWorks? ) And a trip to the local (very good) thrift store – 3 wall shelf units to tile.  And some work to fire for Bay Arts Center in North Beach.  It’s full.  I need to unfull it but not until today is over and I can return to my normal studio chaos.  Right now the studio is all clean and neat, even with yesterday’s work drying in several spaces.  It does look nice!  Totally not me, but very very nice.

Thought for the day:  "But what did all these pictures, these symbols, mean?  Like most newcomers to rock art, we wanted to know what they meant.  What was the message that the ancients had so carefully placed on the rocks long ago?

"We soon found out that there are precious few answers…No one knows the exact number [of rock art sites in the Southwest.]  One researcher claims that there are 7,564 rock art sites ‘known to exist’ in Utah alone.  Arizona and California are probably not far behind Utah, with new Mexico, Nevada and Colorado with lesser quantities…..

"Have we found the real meaning of the rock art symbols cited in this book?…The answer, sadly, is no.  There is no proof that any of these meanings are correct.  it is not possible to define a symbol, as you would a word in Webster’s Dictionary.  These quotations are only the meaning these selected writers believed was the right meaning when they wrote the original book or article – and it usually pertained only to a particular panel in a particular location."Alex Patterson, A Field Guilde to Rock Art Symbols of the Greater Southwest

photos of petrglyphs: top, Newspaper Rock in the Petrified Forest, Arizona.  Bottom in petrified Forest park, location not indicated.  Taken November 05.