A Seder Plate

Busy cooking for the Passover holiday! There's nothing like a clean house and wonderful meals as the accompaniment to spiritual events.

Double-rim Seder plate, underglaze brushwork, cone 6 white stoneware, oxidation fired, 2012.

Here is a Seder plate of recent vintage. If you have patience to wait a whole 30 seconds (slow load) it's there in the Gallery>Judaica section of my website along with others, at www.mimistadlerpottery.com. (If you want this one, or any other works from my site, email me; my site is due for an overhaul.)

Working on a new plate design for next year, because ideas have to stay fresh to make the work most fulfilling!

Have a wonderful, spiritual season.

The Way It's Supposed to Be

I think this is the way it’s supposed to be in a business. Busy, and varied.
Tureen (not pictured but it's a nice one!), Seder plate and teacups are drying on the rawware shelves.

Someone is creating a new, better business card for me.
Someone else is fixing a broken Contact link on my website (which, if you haven’t seen it in a while, is http://mimistadlerpottery.com).
I am discussing details with someone else about the space I will have at an art show in Nanuet, NY on December 4th.
Bisqued tureens with vinelike handles, and salad bowls with raised (shellac resist) designs cover the table in the glazing area as they await coats of glaze.

My electric kiln moves well along towards 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, loaded with glazed tureens and more. You can't see the heat, and it looks cold and prosaic in this photo,

but this kiln is the facilitator of poetic unions. When I put the pots into the kiln they wore coats of powdery dry raw glaze, but right now, every glaze in the kiln is molten stuff, insinuating itself in a close and gleaming interface with the skin of the pot it is clinging to. It's like the core of the earth, only cooler, with rock melting and re-forming.
And last but not least, the room where I display the finished pottery between shows is my next big project. It will turn into the Gallery Downstairs. With some de-cluttering, added lighting and shelves, paint and new flooring, and the addition of the work of a few friends to enhance the collection, it should become quite a nice place to visit.

If at First (2nd, 3rd, 4th) You Don't Succeed...

A customer asked me for really nice, big handmade tureens to give as wedding gifts. It’s been a long time since I made any, and since all I could make were small ones back then, I’m glad to have the challenge of making a new item.

So I made a group of big tureens over a couple of weeks. They really are the perfect serving pieces for soup, or your-mama’s-recipe chulent, or whatever hot food item you want to look extra nice and keep hot when you bring it to the table.

This took place in the last few weeks before the freak snowfall, when the leaves were changing colors and the gourds in the farms and markets were making their splashy debut. I thought of squash and pumpkins as I worked, and some tureens grew vines and leaves for handles.

I've applied handles for two dozen years and more. For some reason, I used (do not fear, this is a really isolated instance!) too light a hand when pressing handles onto two of the tureens. So these nice, curvy, textured handles began to separate from the pots. They were a bit too dry to fix, so I took them off completely, smoothed the spots where they were inadequately joined, and I now have two tureens that have a handleless, clean, modern style. Accidental design! The other, handled tureens will be easier to carry to the table, though. All in all, nine lidded tureens are drying, almost ready to go into the kiln.

Today I woke up with a seder plate design in my head. I think it could work this time. (Hope springs eternal!) Over the years, I’ve designed and tried at least five Seder plate versions with various levels of complexity, from way simple to image-heavy. Some were fairly nice but none, in my opinion, was quite right. THIS is the one. (I’m telling you, THIS IS THE ONE.) Try and try again. (If this one is NOT the one, I will try again.) I made the first one today, the trial run, all except for the little dishes and the graphics, which I plan to do tomorrow. The handbuilt plate is firming up, upside down on a piece of upholstery foam, on the slab roller table in the studio. Can't wait to turn it right side up tomorrow. Here's hoping I'm right about it being The One. Photos soon. And I hope to put up some new tureens on my website in about two weeks.

Rocks and Feathers, Function and Art

A machine-made pot is a more perfect pot, light and absolutely regular in form. Everyone’s place setting is exactly the same. We humans crave some order and balance. Machine made dishes also stack better in the cabinets, as my first college ceramics teacher, Dave W. Jones, pointed out. (He was a very fine potter, trained at that interesting juncture when Danish modern design and Peter Voulkos met with a bang and a slash in the 50s.) Dave was a realist about functionality. All the same, he pursued the art and craft of making pottery by hand, and so do I, because there is no real spirit in a machine made pot.

Yesterday I made a seder plate; not my first by any means. The seder plate has been an evolutionary item in my studio for at least 20 years. Its function defines it, like any item of Judaica. It is meant to sit in the middle of the table at the Passover seder and contain symbolic portions of the special foods of the meal. The first started out long ago on my wheel, too small and heavy, the design somehow never becoming “right” through modifications, until I took some time to plan it. I drew some 6-petaled flowers and abstracted the forms till I had one I liked. I made paper and upholstery foam templates and other tools to accommodate production. I make the plates from slabs now, instead of on the wheel. They are lighter, larger and I can make similar multiples. Making seder plates over the years is symptomatic of all of my journeys in clay, a very slow and sort of steady trip.

When you think of "accidents" of art, here is an analogous hypothetical situation to ponder:
Someone gives you a nice little box, and says, Fill this box. Do not overfill or underfill it. Fill it so that it remains a container, but make it more by virtue of what is in it, how well it contains, how it closes and opens, what it looks like. Go!

You fill it with rocks. The rocks are from the coast of Maine, all rounded and smooth blues and whites and grays, and so beautiful. They fit in the box just so. You admire the contents of the box and close it. Later, when you pick up the box to put it away, you stagger and the box bends a little under the weight. They look good in it, but rocks are the wrong load for this box.

You start again. You take the rocks out of the box, fill it carefully with your collection of hat feathers and cover it, and when you lift it, it is light. You open the box and a draft lifts feathers and settles them all over your sofa. The remaining feathers are all meshed together and you can’t sort out individuals by eye. Feathers are better in something other than this box.

So you say, the heck with this experiment, and the heck with the guy who gave you the box. You fit your jars and tubes of paint and pigments into the box. You needed to neaten up your easel area anyway. You have now used the box in a non-decorative way. You expect nothing more than a utilitarian arrangement, and you go have dinner.

Tomorrow you return. You open the box and you are surprised. The paint tube labels and the pigments in their clear jars are an explosion of color. The box smells interestingly of linseed oil. You find each item at a glance. This is a utilitarian arrangement, but also- Yow!- a still life. Now the box is part of a functional composition. Art! Your five year old could do it... couldn't she? Maybe- up to this point. Maybe not once canvas and brushes get involved.

You- hey, you with the box- already had an artistic spirit and a creative eye, which were working unconsciously as you gave up and accepted the box as a component of a life situation. Function balanced with- and this is the crux of the thing- the unnameable force from your arty ole head, and gave you your surprising still life.

This is really a clay story. Latent knowledge and conscious knowledge flow together as a potter works, aware of the functionality of each piece, our own voices coming through ever more strongly and even unexpectedly as we gain experience. Then just working through the everyday of clay and bringing one more challenge into the equation sometimes catalyzes into the Yow! moment.

Yesterday's seder plate is on a shelf in my kiln, drying. It's my best one yet, the most like my planned design but also with spontaneous elements. Don't want to move it while it dries, or I would take a better picture for you, but check out the raw pot in the picture. Who knows what the next one might have that this one doesn't.

Keep on doing whatever good thing it is you do!