Finding Inspiration

I had the chance this last week to spend some time with my brother, who is an artist currently living in Seattle. Over the past few years he's been able to shed the mainstream approach to life and focus completely on turning himself into a full time artist. He surrounds himself with other artists, curates the monthly art walk, and spends hours upon hours teaching himself new techniques. Every time we visit I'm left full of new inspirations.

He showed me a video of some amazing silkscreen artists and how they do layer upon layer of designs before they finish a print. It left me thinking of how one-dimensional some of my pottery was. While sometimes simplicity is beautiful, perhaps its time to kick things up a notch.

Most of the stuff I've been working on looks fine, but after talking with my brother I feel the need to push myself harder. I could post these pieces on Etsy and see what happens, but more likely than not it will probably not sell. Maybe I'm being too hard on myself. But, instead of just junking the pottery I have, I think I'll try to layer some more designs and just see what happens. It might melt and drip all over, or maybe the colors will clash horribly and I wont know till after its been fired, but I think its time to take some chances and see what happens.

This is the only one that I really like that is left over from Christmas. I applied a silkscreen stencil of the two parakeets when the clay was leather hard, fired it, then applied the yellow and green underglaze, clear coat, and the crystal glaze on the inside and did the final firing. I think it turned out pretty good!

So, to sum things up, I'm going to be spending the next few weeks working on some totally new designs. I want to layer colors and stencils and silkscreens and glazes, and hope that something worthwhile comes out of the kiln. I'll take some pictures of the process and share what I can. In whatever other free time I can scrounge up I will be finishing the book Etsy-preneurship (by Jason Malinak) that I mentioned earlier and getting ready to open up shop.

If your interested in finding out more about this mysterious artist brother of mine, check out his blog http://kurlyamerica.blogspot.com/ .

Okay, time to get to work!