more texture

ideas arriving in the middle of the night are all very well, but they do not encourage sleep.

idea number one – instead of spreading porcelain over the surface of already rolled-out and cut-out slab, make a block of layers of clay and roll out together. this is not a terribly world shattering idea – Claudi Casanovas does it, for one. but it will work differently from what I have been doing, and might give me some interesting surfaces/clay reaction, such as splitting and cracking.

idea number two – my blog is my sketch-book.

at art college, I was, and students still are, taught to keep a sketch-book as a diary, stuffed with everything which might be an idea, or just something interesting; drawings, extracts, scrap-book stuff, experiments with media, concepts, forms – and so-on. I am a lapsed sketch-book keeper. but this blog is the nearest I have got for a while, despite stacks of pretty drawing books purchased and standing empty on the bookshelf. the last one got lost with my luggage, along with pen and ink bottle.

and so, I have been making slabs of clay. one layer thick crank (clay full of grog and stuff, guaranteed to stand up straight when asked) and one layer thin porcelain. but the weather is such that in spite of workshop woodburner, nothing is quite in the right state to make big pots with yet. perhaps tomorrow.

we have had some very pretty mornings but the days have quickly dulled down to greyness. I took this on Thursday morning. within five minutes the sun had gone and the rest of the photographs are as dark as six oclock on a winter morning.