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October 2011 Newsletter

Indigo Street Pottery Newsletter

Welcome to our monthly newsletter! It is part of our website indigostreetpottery.com , which you can browse from this page if you click on the subjects in the header. We write here about our studio, arts events, projects, studios of our friends, garden musings, and whatever else strikes our fancy. Hope you enjoy it!

August 13, 2011: 2011 Annual Art Auction, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Snowmass, Colorado www.andersonranch.org

May of 2012: Jeff Reich and Farraday Newsome, 2-person exhibition, Plinth Gallery, Denver, Colorado http://plinthgallery.com/

1 Indigo Street Pottery Calendar

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October 2019 Newsletter

Indigo Street Studio Newsletter

Welcome to our monthly newsletter! It’s part of our website indigostreetpottery.com, which you can browse from this page if you click on the subjects in the header. We write here about our studio, arts events, projects, and garden.

Indigo Street Studio Calendar

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This is our 10th Anniversary Issue!

All past issues (yes, all 120!) are available by clicking “Archived Newsletters” at the top right. Thank-you for ten years of support and readership.

In this Issue

1. Indigo Street Studio Calendar

2. Adorned, Clay Center of New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana

3. Workhouse Clay International 2019, Workhouse Arts Center, Lorton, Virginia

4. Studio Work in Progress

5. Indigo Street Studio Kitchen Garden

August 10 - October 13, 2019: Workhouse Clay International 2019, Workhouse Arts Center, Lorton, Virginia

September 6 - 28, 2019: Adorned, New Orleans Clay Center, New Orleans, Louisiana

December 7-8 & 14-15, 2019: Indigo Street Studio 2019 Holiday Open Studio, both Saturdays 10am- 4pm, both Sundays 12pm - 4pm, at our home studio Indigo Street Studio

Roadside U.S.A.

i.d.e.a. Museum, Mesa, Arizona

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Workhouse Clay International 2019

Workhouse Arts Center

Lorton, Virginia

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The Workhouse Clay International 2019 is at the Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, Virginia through October 13, 2019. http://www.workhousearts.org. This show of sculptural and functional ceramics was juried by studio ceramist Peter Beasecker of Syracuse, NY. http://peter-beasecker.com .

Where: Workhouse Arts Center, Vulcan Gallery, Building W-16, 9518 Workhouse Road, Lorton, Virginia 22079

When: August 10 - October 13, 2019. Opening reception August 10, 2019, 6 - 8pm

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Adorned

Clay Center of New Orleans

New Orleans, Louisiana

Artwork:

"Coral Bowl with Dogwood Flowers and Swallowtail Butterflies"

Farraday Newsome, 2017

Postcard photo above (and description below) from the Clay Center of New Orleans website:

"ADORNED," SEPTEMBER 6-28, 2019

The Clay Center is proud to present "Adorned," a group exhibition juried by Liz Zlot Summerfield that explores and celebrates the ceramic surface as an opportunity for imagery, pattern, texture, decoration, narrative, and commentary. Featuring ceramic vessels, sculptures, and wall- mounted works, this exhibition will be on display September 6 to 28, 2019 in the Clay Center gallery.

Current and upcoming exhibitions at the Clay Center of New Orleans

The Clay Center of New Orleans is a nonprofit organization that brings ceramic art education and professional opportunities to one central location.

Mary Cross, Tulane University News. For the entire August of 2018 article explaining how this space came to be, click: Tulane University News article about the Clay Center of New Orleans

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Indigo Street Studio Kitchen Garden

Even though daytime desert temperatures are still consistently over 100 degrees, it is nevertheless time to get fall/winter seedlings going. Our fall growing season is short but sweet. Nice weather is book-ended by this early hot weather at one end and freezes at the other. Freezes usually start around Thanksgiving, but have begun later and been less frequent in recent years. Our growing season extends through winter and into spring, but growth and productivity are lower mid-December through early February with the cold.

The soil temperature is still very warm and the ants are actively gathering seeds to prepare for winter dormancy. To keep them from gathering OUR seeds, I start fall/winter vegetable seedlings in trays above the ground.

Later I transplant the young seedlings into the garden utilizing the temporary protection of plastic cups pushed upside down into the soil, bottoms cut off to let in air and water. These barriers dissuade cut worms, sow bugs, and other small, hungry marauders.

Jeff Reich’s recently completed painting Inversion, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 36”, 2019

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Studio Work In Progress

Farraday Newsome has been working on several new vases. This one features a snake winding its way through oranges and moon snails.

Two greenware vases in the kiln for the bisque firing, which transforms clay to ceramic. Dried clay turns to mud in water, but fired ceramic lasts centuries due to three-dimensional changes in its molecular structure that occur during the firing. Nice!

After unloading the vases from the bisque kiln, Farraday sprays on a base coat of white maiolica glaze. Maiolica glaze is stiff, meaning it doesn’t run when the glaze melts at the peak of the firing. Therefore, painted imagery doesn’t slide downward and blur.

What, spraying outside in the Sonoran desert summer??? Yes, it’s hot - we reached a high of 110 F the day this photo was taken, but the spray booth is in the shade and the yard is pretty. Still, definitely a morning task!

Once the sprayed glaze is dry, the vase is carefully inverted onto a soft towel so the newspaper and painters’ tape that kept the white glaze off the bottom can be removed.

This vase, plus another brushed with a satin black maiolica base glaze, are loaded into the kiln for a cone 014 sinter firing. The sinter firing sets the base glaze to a permanent but immature state: matte and rough like fired slip. Once fired to that state, Farraday will be able to paint with colored glazes on top of the sintered base glaze without chipping or lifting it off. When decorating is complete, the work goes back in the kiln for a third and final firing to cone 05, about 350 degrees F hotter than the sinter fire, melting all of the glazes to maturity.

Farraday Newsome’s Lively Bowl with Oranges, top left, is in the “Exposure” section of the October 2019 issue of Ceramics Monthly, page 14, along with a number of other pieces in the current Workhouse Clay International 2019 exhibition. http://www.ceramicsmonthly.org Copyright, The American Ceramic Society. Reprinted with permission.

When: September 6-28, 2019

Where: The Clay Center of New Orleans, 1001 S. Broad St., Unit 116, New Orleans, Louisiana:

Young purple climbing beans at the base of a round trellis.

Plastic cups ward off crawling insects from eating young lettuce seedlings. This year we’ve planted Ruby, Black-Seeded Simpson, and Bronze Mignonette Lettuces. It should all look colorful in a month or so!

Photos above: Jeff Reich’s in-progress painting of Inversion.

Left: It began with geometric forms painted in graduated tones, then Reich applied tape (the whitish lines). Reich’s use of tape as a resist while painting is analogous to his use of tape while glazing stoneware sculptures. He has also begun underpainting the cloud formations.

Right: In the midst of developing cloud depth.

Jeff Reich, Inversion, completed. Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 36”, 2019.