Focus and Freedom

For the last, three days I have been mostly absent from blip. I determined to complete the decoration on the most recent sculpture for firing this week. Today the piece went into the kiln for its first firing. When it emerges the colors will be pretty changed. Intensified, darkened... Never quite know. After the bisque firing, she will get a clear glaze and go in for a second firing. I seem to have timed this without really thinking about it. She will emerge complete the day before my birthday. Or maybe I will leave her until Saturday. Voila!

Actually, I have rather mixed feelings about this work. It required such a confinement of the body. Each day, I rose from the work so cramped and aching.  Such enormous concentration of mind, eyes, body is required. I find it impossible to relax as I use the brush and the incising tool so painstakingly. I know my tension doesn't show on the piece, and I am pleased with the results. But the doing of something so small and exacting... The fragility of the delicate clay before firing (I broke a hand off as I was working, and had to repair it with slip.)... Even as it focuses my energy, it confines and restrains some part of me that longs for greater freedom in the work...a release and expansion of something within me. My body is telling me that it needs to dance.

Dance seems very much a part of the sculpting. It is the later part that I postpone...putting the whole piece on hold. Yes, I need more movement in my life. I imagine doing enormous abstracts, dancing my way through every stroke of the brush. I think the sculptures need to go more abstract, as well. I may need to veer away from my need to make designs that are recognizable.

Ah well... I am using this blip for the purpose of thinking things out. The photo is just one side of the sculpture pre-firing. My little plump Pearl is represented. Music is resting on the interior, and on the other side is a fairy. The dancer has a butterfly on her hip. More sharing after firing is done. Extra photos are Magnolias, which continue to astonish me, and a tough looking rabbit that makes me think of Richard Adam's book: Watership Down.