Untitled torso, hand and slab built ceramic wall sculpture by Tammy Vitale

All the work on this page is made for ArtOMatic.  I hope to do my main load in before my volunteer shift this week and so have been in high gear   See what happens?  She blew out.  Lost a leg.  I knew I was pushing her drying, and clay only lets you push it so far before it pushes back.  But that’s okay.  I’ll work on this – am thinking henna markings on the lower belly.  Maybe the whole belly.  This is art – when the piece doesn’t want to be what you made, you go with it.  No point in fighting.  The energy will have its way.  You’ll just make yourself crazy trying to force it because it will reform however it wants.  I love clay!  And ArtOMatic because it’s wild and wooly and anything goes, which, artistically, is very freeing.

She doesn’t have a name yet, either, which is a sure sign she isn’t finished.

On a happier note, everything else came through just fine (and had been  drying longer, too).  Here are a torso and mask made to go together:  Torso:  Mayan Artifact (those are crystals on her right breast where the clay split when drying), and Mask:  Mayan Artifact.  The glaze is the same on both but came out spectacularly on the mask and only so-so on the torso.  It is called Jade frost and I got it while in Asheville.  Technically you should always test fire your glazes before you put them on a finished piece; however, as you can see, the test could have turned out either way and I’d have no idea what it really looks like.  Better to just go with the adventure of the fire and see what comes out.  If all else fails, there are always more Totems to be made and hammers to make the pieces for them.

thought for the day:  …whatever creative powers we have in our work are intimately connected to our ability to remember who we are amidst the traumas and losses of existence…there are tremendous forces at work upon us, trying to make us like everyone else, and therefore we must remember something intensely personal about the way we were made for this world in order to keep our integrity.  One of the distinguishing features of any courageous human being is the ability to remain unutterably themselves in the midst of conforming pressures….

Each of us has a necessary outlaw in our inheritance on which we can call.  Each of us has, in our imaginations and memories, images of freedom against the odds. David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea:  Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity

I remember Tienanmen Square, and the Civil Rights movement.  What are your culturally defining moments?