Two butterfly tiles

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butterflies, ecology, pottery

Carved raku butterfly tiles by Val Webb - $45

Lately, I’ve been carving butterflies — quite a few of them. It’s fun to try to capture their delicate wing structure and vivid color patterns in clay and glaze… and it’s a humane alternative to beautiful (but very dead) framed butterfly specimens. Early last year, when some entomologists predicted the demise of the world’s monarch population within 50 years, plenty of people were skeptical. Now it seems that this lovely species may have considerably less time remaining: 80 percent of the Oyamel fir trees upon which they overwinter have now been lost to illegal logging in Mexico, and torrential rains may have killed half the migratory population last year. The forecast seems grim.

Want to help the monarchs out? You can, in three simple ways:

Plant milkweed. Monarch butterflies only lay their eggs on milkweed plants, and native milkweeds are increasingly rare. If you’re not sure where to find seeds in your area, there are some great sources online who can provide seeds and advice for milkweeds that will thrive in your climate zone.

Avoid pesticide use on your lawn and garden.  Chemicals in pesticides can drift, and are harmful to monarch caterpillars and adults.

 Eat organic foods. Glyphosate herbicides, routinely sprayed on corn and soybean crops in the United States, play a major role in monarch population loss. (And they aren’t good for you, either.)

They’re small steps, but important ones. And they can help ensure that your great-grandchildren will get to see migrating monarchs.

The iris and the swallowtail

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botanical art, butterflies, flowers, pottery, raku, Val Webb

Remember the Lousiana iris I was carving into a slab of raku clay a while back? It’s all finished now… just in time to make its public debut at the opening of the Entre’ Arts studio/cafe/gallery tomorrow night.

Louisiana iris redux

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botanical art, flowers, gardening, pottery

Summer in south Alabama isn’t a season. It’s a siege. When you wait until 11:30 at night to walk your dog, and even then your back porch thermometer is stubbornly stuck on 95 degrees… well, it’s best to concentrate on things you can accomplish indoors. So I have been carving botanical wall panels. And from the look of our weather forecasts for the next few weeks, this panel will be the first of many.

Two of my favorite residents in our summer garden are the Louisiana iris and the eastern tiger swallowtail. Technically, the swallowtail is more of a visitor than an actual resident: they lay their eggs among our fennel, and their garishly striped caterpillars remain with us for a week or two before being carried off by parasitic wasps. (The caterpillar saliva, mixing with plant juices as they munch away at the fennel stalks, emits an aroma that attracts the wasp. Around the time the plump caterpillars reach two inches in length, incoming wasps arrive to airlift them away like tiny helicopters. It’s quite a spectacle, if you happen to be nearby when the raid is launched. Although 25-30 swallowtail eggs hatch each summer in our herb bed, I have only had one caterpillar lucky enough to escape a waspy death and enter cocoon stage. Still, lovely though the adult swallowtail may be, I’m rooting for the hard-working wasps. They are beneficial insects in our organic garden, constantly patrolling to remove tomato hornworms. But I digress.)

The Perfect Man grows a perennial clump of Louisiana iris in his water garden, outside our back door. They are one of my favorite flowers to sketch, with their long necks and intensely purple blooms. Older folks in this region call them blue flag, and they are the inspiration for the famous fleur-de-lis that has become the symbol of New Orleans’ French heritage. During the Sixth Century, while King Clovis was busy conquering heathens in present-day France, he escaped a horde of rampaging Goths by following irises across a shallow part of the Rhine River. In gratitude, he adopted the flower as his emblem and it became the symbol of the kings of France. Not too long ago, when I was designing a garden flag based on an antique gold fleur-de-lis, it was easy to see the flower’s form behind the design:

Pleasant (and not so pleasant) thoughts of spring

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art, food, gardening, pottery, Val Webb

In this part of the country, where you dare not venture into the midsummer garden during daylight hours for fear of becoming lunch for one of Alabama’s 60 species of native mosquitoes, spring comes early. We’re not quite out of February yet, but my gardener friends are already firing up their tillers and gleefully unpacking mail-ordered seed potato stock. At Bellingrath Gardens, just south of town, they are gearing up for the annual Azalea Watch. Starting next Monday, you can log in daily to see the progression of 250,000 azaleas as they transform the gracious old estate into 63 acres of riotously ruffled color.

Spring themes are showing up in the work of my artist friends, too. Using this stoneware cup from Steve Dark’s pottery studio in Gulf Shores, you can wet your whistle with a thistle (and a bird… which IS a whistle):

And in her rural Magnolia Springs studio, Anne Webb makes elegant pots from local clay and embellishes them with brushwork dragonflies:

Our winter garden is providing us with broccoli, chard and green onions now. We’ll start harvesting cabbage, peas and old-fashioned Morris heading collard greens in a week or two. There are three bags of red LaSoda potatoes piled on the back porch, ready for the potato patch. (Red LaSoda, the creamy-fleshed mutant form of a market potato popular in Lousiana in the 1940s, is the potato of choice in this region.)

But even springtime has its downside. For reasons known only to the mysterious inner workings of my immune system, I come down with a nasty cold every year at this time. Generally healthy all year, I can count on spending the first week or so of March slouching around with pockets full of wadded Kleenex and a voice like a bullfrog. When I first met The Perfect Man, he won my heart by cooking up a curative curried carrot soup. Now it’s an annual cold-season tradition (and extremely tasty anytime).

Curry Carrot Ginger Soup

• 3 tbsp unsalted butter
• 2 large onions, thinly sliced
• 2 pounds carrots, thinly sliced
• 1/2 cup apple juice
• 6 cups vegetable broth
• 1/4 cup grated fresh ginger
• 1 tbsp curry powder
• 1-3 tbsp honey
• Salt and pepper

Melt the butter in a large pot over medium-high heat. Add the onion and cook for five minues or until soft. Add the carrots and apple juice and cook for three minutes. Add broth, ginger and curry powder. Bring to a boil.

Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer 40 minutes or until the carrots are very tender.

Remove from heat. Working in batches, pour the soup into a food processor or blender. Process until smooth. Transfer to a large bowl, stir in honey and salt and pepper to taste.

Raku egret panel: All fired up!

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art, birds, botanical art, flowers, pottery, raku, Val Webb

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.

Raku egret: Carving completed…

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art, birds, botanical art, flowers, pottery, raku, Val Webb

…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.

Raku egret: Halfway there!

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art, birds, botanical art, flowers, pottery, raku, Val Webb

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.

Hatching a raku egret

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art, birds, botanical art, flowers, pottery, raku, Val Webb

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!

The good thing about hot weather…

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art, handmade tile, pottery, raku, Val Webb

…is that my tiles dry out very quickly. Even though the autumn equinox is less than two weeks away, the thermometer still hovers around 90 degrees each afternoon. I can open the studio windows a little and let the warm breeze play across the surface of freshly-made raku tiles, knowing that in just a few days they’ll all be ready for the bisque kiln.

My studio assistant, Atticus, supervises the tile-drying process in between his frequent naps:

Botanical box: Asiatic lilies

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art, botanical art, flowers, lily, pottery, raku, Val Webb

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.