Renée always arrives here well-armed with collages from which she chooses the shapes and colours of her paintings. She even had an oval cut-out ready to frame her composition. I really enjoy the way she takes the underglaze colours and mixes them to produce all manner of shades. This time she painted two plates and then a smaller oval but deeper dish. It is…
One of the four February artists visiting my studio was Sally Clay. After she had painted a regular oval plate Sally chose to paint this spherical vase. I had thrown it for her some time ago and, like the plates, it was bone-dry. On the whole these visiting painters tend to ignore the shape of the plate or the rim and take colour across these…
Just recently I had another group of artists here to paint plates. The plan is to get eight artists to paint several plates and donate one each for the upcoming Western Front fundraiser. Eric, Monique and Katie had already painted theirs in January so on this day my visitors were Sally Clay, Renée van Halm, Eli Bornowsky and Katie again. Paul Mathieu couldn't come so…
Last Wednesday executive member Kay Bonathan demonstrated how to make a simple two-piece plaster mould to members of TriCity Potters. Her fellow JingdeZhen attendees Carlene Akester, Hannah Chan, Grace Siu and Eliza Wang helped her by lending some of their moulds. Carlene helped Kay to bring in buckets, plaster and a plastic sheet. Kay started right at 7pm by explaining the process, showed samples of…
It's two weeks since Al and I returned from 12 days in Mexico. We spent 3 full days in Mexico City and it was great to see this bustling city again after 39 years! When we were there before we had driven from Vancouver in a Volkswagon camper-van with our blonde one-year-old son Steve. Templo Mayor Aztec temple had just been discovered. Al was there…