Stories
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One never knew for sure what a glaze would turn out like. They might run and they might crack and blacken or be a completely different color than one expected. Sometimes they were a surprise and better than expected. But building big pieces; glazes were just too chancy.
Stains were great. They were bight-colored and stuck and did not migrate when fired. You could do perfect line drawings with them and there were numerous colors. The downside was they came in small jars and were expensive and you had to apply two, three and four coats; which meant steadiness of line edges; not just once, but over and over. However when fired they were permanent. So I would paint my sculpture in the living room, next to the front door to the patio. Lots of light in that room and that was one of the things I loved about San Francisco, the light was like Greece; and the air always fresh off the ocean.
The problem with larger pieces of ceramic construction, was the shrinkage of the clay. A piece could shrink as much as twenty percent in simply drying, and then the bisque and final fire, of two-thousand degrees, and so a lot of warpage could occur. Pieces of different thickness would tend to pull away from each other, thicker pieces shrinking more. I started using internal bracing as inner cylinders and struts to which the outer shell was attached. Because I was throwing everything on the wheel; the clay was structurally superior. I made a lamp with
a single drawer, that I had no idea of what it symbolized for quite some time.
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