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This time of year, the fall wildflowers fill our roadside ditches and paint vacant lots with yellow (beggarticks and narrow-leaf sunflowers), red (turkish lanterns), orange (native lantana) and purple (trillium and mist flowers). Stubborn and opportunistic, they don’t need a gardener’s help. All they require is a patch of dirt underneath, the bright autumn sun above, and the blessing of occasional rain.
Hooray! All the tiles survived the rigors of raku firing and now the panel is ready to be permanently affixed to its backing.
My favorite part of this project: carving the wing feathers.
I love the way botanical subjects look in raku. It’s such a great technique for subjects drawn from nature — and sometimes you get a nice little gift from the fire: an unexpected flash of pure copper, pulled from the glaze during the oxygen-starved reduction stage. I bury the hot tiles under mounds of fresh wood shavings, where they smolder for a minute or two before being quenched in a cool water bath. I think the copper that appeared in the background sets off the canna leaf quite nicely!
This 44×22 panel will be auctioned off tomorrow night at Phantasy for the Arts, a fundraising event for the Fairhope Educational Enrichment Foundation.
…and now begins 5 or 6 days of slow, careful drying. After the moisture has evaporated from the clay, the panel will be an inch shorter and the tiles will be ready for their first firing to 1825 degrees.
Now the lower half of the raku tile panel has been carved. These are orange canna lilies, sketched right outside the studio window. (I love those big, curving leaves.) The snowy egret appears in the top half of the design… you’ll have to come back tomorrow to see him. The entire panel will be carved and ready to begin a slow drying process tomorrow evening.
This 44-inch panel, glazed and raku fired, will be auctioned Oct. 26 at Phantasy of the Arts, an annual fundraiser for the wonderful Fairhope Educational Enrichment Foundation. The foundation has awarded more than $247,000 in classroom grants so far. Need more information about this event? Click HERE.
I’m in the preliminary stages of a large (44 inch tall) carved raku tile panel, an image of an egret, canna lilies and palmetto. The design is a combination of botanical and bird studies from my nature sketchbook — I like to draw my subjects first, to get to know their angles and curves better before carving them into clay.
The raku tiles are individually rolled out on a slab roller, compressed energetically with a wooden rib, then trimmed to size with a needle tool. I work slowly and carefully, with the goal of having all the edges match up as nearly perfectly as I can make them. Then I’m ready to draw the basic design in the tile surfaces, which I do freehand with my needle tool. Here’s a section of a canna lily:
Finally, when the whole design has been drawn, I will cover the panel lightly and let it rest overnight. By tomorrow afternoon, when the tiles have lost their stickiness, they’ll be just right for carving the relief into the clay surface. See you tomorrow!
Tropical Storm Claudette is just offshore — not necessarily a bad thing, considering that parts of our state are in need of rain — but the clouds stayed away long enough to allow me to fire the raku kiln this evening. These ivory Asiatic lilies were in the Perfect Man’s cut-flower garden in April. I sketched them in my notebook then, and later carved them on the surface of this handbuilt pottery box.
Folklore says that if you dream of lilies during the summer months, you will be prosperous and fertile. Dreaming about lilies in the winter, on the other hand, is a serious premonitory no-no.
Personally, my favorite lily is this one: my granddaughter, Lily Milne, 2.
Most of the cut-flower garden has bloomed itself out for now, but the Perfect Man’s orange canna still provides a welcome blaze of color in the front yard of the studio cottage. I painted this little canna study from a quick sketch made yesterday afternoon… when you’re drawing flowers in the sun on a 95-degree day, quick is the best way to draw!
Evenings, we are turning the far end of the vegetable garden in preparation for planting fall beans next week. I need to shift the summer compost bin contents to the beds and finish pulling down the spent summer bean vines. The herb need attention. The trellis frames need to be restrung so they can hold up our winter squash. And what about all those peppers waiting to be picked, chopped and frozen? Little by little, it will all be done.
My mom, the bravest person I know, was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer four months ago. About to have her sixth round of chemo — with surgery scheduled for early September – she is navigating this strange new landscape with her usual upbeat enthusiasm.
But watching her journey has made me more aware of the prevalence of this disease. And when Anne Leuck Feldhaus posted the following note on Facebook this week, I wanted to help somehow:
Anna Millea, a longtime Guild and Artful Home artist, is fighting breast cancer — again. The disease has returned aggressively and is now in her bones, requiring an extreme sixteen rounds of chemotherapy. She has no insurance, having been deemed uninsurable due to her “pre-existing condition.”
Artful Home will hold a 5-day online event, “Hearts for Anna”, August 12-16, 2009 in which miniature artworks, no larger than 5” x 7”, will be sold. The items will be sold first-come, first serve, with all items selling for $100 on Day 1, $75 on Days 2 – 4, and $50 on Day 5. All money will go to a fund that goes directly to Anna Millea to help pay for her medical bills.
Wonderful, original artworks from across the country have been donated for this special sale. You can see them all here.
The sale will take place at http://artfulhome.com starting Aug. 12.
Please consider making a purchase, and pass this message along to others who love beautiful handmade things. Thank you!
image (c)2009 val webb
I love to draw (and carve) my favorite plant, purple coneflower. It grows easily from seed when the soil temperature is above 70 degrees — which is most of the year, where I garden. This whimsical medicinal loves compost, moderately moist soil and lots of sunshine. The native people of the prairie states used it more than any other healing plant, using mainly the root to treat a litany of ills from snakebite to venereal disease. I’m sure it was a primary ingredient in my Tennessee great-granny’s annual “tonic” — the springtime infusion she used every year to purify her blood. She learned to cultivate, harvest and compound medicinal plants early in the last century, when summer was dreaded as a season of increase in disease — and deaths — among infants and young children. Families fled the cities during those months, and country people like my Granny Griff fortified themselves with a concoction of botanicals valued for its immune-boosting effect.
So where’s the hedgehog in all this? Well…
