Birth/Rebirth, hand built clay sculpture with quartz and swarovski crystals and raw turquoise/lapis by Tammy Vitale

Today’s sculpture was made the same day as Phineas and waited as long to fire.  She too is very heavy – I get bored with making things over armatures or carving them out.  Of course it uses more clay, but this lady is no light-weight.  She is solid and firm on the ground even as she rebirths herself again and again over the course of her life.  Head in the clouds, feet on the ground (like a tree). (Have I mentioned that along with dragons, I love trees?)

Like Phineas, this sculpture is one of the few I’ve made recently.  They don’t sell very well.  I have a lot in my garden.  I have, at the bottom of my stairs, what is developing into a sculpture garden and since it pleases me, on days when I don’t want to make bread and butter fish or word tiles or pull designer tiles, I make sculptures.  She is about 10" tall.  What I really want to do is make really tall sculpture…but they don’t sell well either…I suppose the yard could become my museum.

Rakued yesterday and mostly everything came out really well or well enough that it could be made great.  But I’m not going to post all the pictures at once.  I am going to spin them out over the course of the next few days. 

I realized this morning that I had a mask that went with one of the women that was still out in the burn pile somewhere so i threw on my jacket and went out and rummaged in ash until I found it – still in once piece!  Luck.  I always pour water on the ashes and spread them around with a rake.  I forgot completely about this mask – maybe I should forget about more pieces.  It had a lovely turquoise crackle I’ve been chasing for over a year….I don’t know if it’s because I let it cool a little before firing or what – but I definitely want that turquoise on a torso.  I didn’t get good white crackle but that’s because I didn’t fire it really high.  I forgot you have to really overfire it if you want good crackle.  So – are you enthused?  Can’t wait to see the photos?  Good – you’ll come back- make it easy on yourself.  Subscribe by clicking in the feedblitz block on the upper left and then you don’t have to remember how to find me.  It’ll come directly to your email and you can read when you’re ready. 

Here’s today’ Art Everyday Month (AEM) picture.  It’s a spin off of Sage’s post (Wed. Nov 22 – scroll, I didn’t see a permalink to take you directly) called Cityscape.   This, titled Make Your Own Rules,  is based on seeing the red (stop), yellow  (caution) and green (go fo it) lights and deciding yourself which one is on.  And whether or not you care which one is one.  The rest is just playing with abstracting which I’m not good at, but Sage is.  check out her work.  Don’t forget to stop in at Kat’s Paws and say thanks for generating all this art out here amongst us participants.  I can truely say it has changed my life – made me think about making art regularly other than clay, made me push myself to get outside of my comfort zone, made me think daily of subject matter and not worry about whether it was perfect or not – just get in the flow and go.  I thought this morning I might have to do two or three pieces before I got one I liked, but Make Your Own Rules works on a lot of levels for me and was first and fast out of the post.  So I stayed with it.  Sort of like morning pages in paint.

thought for the day:   Whether as revolutionary, fool, bard, or witch, the hero transforms the kingdom through the power of true naming…The metaphysical assumption…is that everything in the universe, no matter how small or large, is alive; the unfolding of the universe depends on each element’s successfully completing its journey…when the hero finds her own true name and her wholeness, she becomes a namer who aids others in successfully completing their journeys.  Carol Pearson and Katherin Pope, The Female Hero in American and British Literature