Vernon’s Digital Art

A very good friend of mine makes these fantastic picture in Photoshop and Illustrator. The posted pic is a relatively low-res version. He prints them out to 30″x40″ and they are beautiful… much detail and subtlety that is lost in screen res pics but they are still very compelling images. This one is called “Adam and Eve”.

Collaboration…

More drawings of ballerinas and pots… they’ve become collaborative at this point and if one looks at the progression, one can see that the pots are starting to like more like cartoon heads than pots. Sofia was halfway to what I believe is a “regent”-style moustache and got distracted I guess.

In-Progress Shots

Thought some intermediate shots would be fun… kinda get the feeling of getting carried away but you never know without trying. Regarding last post, the decision was not to attack the teapots but things are percolating. Maybe some of this will result in a more solid decorating direction. There’s some splattered slip under there somewhere.

The Week Ends The Week Begins

Haven’t decided whether to plunge into some teapots this week or continue with the vases and bowls. Sometimes there are so many experiments going on simultaneously that I would like to finish the pieces completely so I can disregard failed ideas. I guess I’ll decide when I’m sitting at the wheel. My makeshift studio is getting more full and I won’t have a choice soon… of course there’s always room for more cups. Sofia and I worked together this weekend and I made the mistake of letting her throw after she made things with lumps of clay… now she doesn’t want to do anything but use the wheel because it’s so much fun. Can’t argue with that. I asked her not to eat the clay and of course she said she hadn’t and then I changed that to don’t put the clay in your mouth and she assured me that she hadn’t done that either.Since she likes to draw we spent some time Sunday doing that… she likes to draw ballerinas mostly and I usually scribble some pots but I need to do some ballerinas to keep her from thinking we’re not in this together. Eventually, after several ballerina drawings, she decided to draw some pots too and this one has a ballerina on the pot. So even her pot drawings are better than mine. I put some handles on that vase, not sure what I think about that yet…

Wet Clay

When I was about 15 years old, my mom got me a job at a friend of hers’ ceramic shop. They had plaster molds and made christmas trees and lamps shaped like children with big eyes. They had a large vat of slip with a mixer going 24/7. I wasn’t really interested in the pieces but was always excited to open the molds and bump the plaster to get the piece to dislodge. In retrospect, I’ve never really gotten over my infatuation with the appearance of wet clay… not as it’s being made but just a little while after it starts to dry and still has a slight sheen. It was always frustrating in college when I realized that however a piece was fired, from primitive to raku to salt to electric kiln, it would never end up with that fresh wet look again. If there was such a firing effect, no doubt I would use it on everything.

1st “Pot” Fired

Here’s one of the first things I fired for Sofia. She had no assistance making it and it just got dipped in glaze by me.

Cold Day in Kentucky

OK… It’s colder than hell outside today – 15 degrees in Kentucky. It snowed this morning and my temporary studio is so cold that I decided to get this blog thing started. I left my previous job four years ago to do ceramics and although I got an undergraduate degree in ceramics in 1982, I had put off doing this until then. I worked in the back room of my house for the first 3 years. That room/studio was small and it became smaller as time went on. I had my kiln in there and did all aspects of my work in there too. I really couldn’t turn around without knocking things over. Consequently, last June I decided that since the room was the only un-remodeled room in the house (another way of saying it was a hovel) and tiny to boot that I would fix it. The old room’s floor slanted severely towards the backyard, the ceiling was only 7 feet tall, the walls were really the walls of an old porch that had been enclosed with shutters and odd bits of wood. During the demolition I found bees’ nests, birds’ nests and a nest of mice… all abandoned.After demolition, concrete pylons were poured and the floor built out to cantilever past the pylons. Much like a virus, when tying the new roof into the middle of the old it became clear that the roof of the house had to be replaced and when taking old shingles off, it became clear that the upstairs siding would have to come off to get the 3 previous layers of shingles off… so residing the upstairs and reroofing the house were unforeseen detours.After months of hiatus from clay, the realization that it wouldn’t be complete before winter became obvious and I settled on making sure it was done on the exterior, insulated and electricity run before moving clay stuff back in. Not sure if another burst of activity will finish it this summer or whether it will be postponed till the following summer.

New Blog – Jim Gottuso Ceramics

I am a ceramic artist in Louisville, Kentucky. I grew up in upstate New York and came south to college. After college I was involved in a couple businesses and decided 4 years ago, after news of our first child, to pursue a long postponed desire to make ceramics for a living.