Felicia Hsieh usually works in cone 10 stoneware at Shadbolt Centre and has had her work fired in their reduction gas kiln and in the salt/soda kiln there. So her day with earthenware was a new experience for her. She worked very carefully, using two red earthenware oval plates, applying my coloured slips, using paper resist as I had just demonstrated and then finishing her designs with sgraffito. Here are her two green plates. When she popped over here to collect them she tells me that she is happy with the opportunity to use bright colours.

Linda Lebrun arrived for the Saturday workshop with clay moulds of ferns and bark from her garden. Her plan was to make relief tiles. The three red clay tiles have a tree, embellished with clay imprints of the texture. Then she filled the background with green slip. After the bisque firing I suggested she come over and stain the bark etc with some underglaze and she painted some Duncan clear glaze on the background. The plan is to hang these tiles in her garden.

Linda enjoyed a different way of working by painting one of our oval ‘coupes’. She used paisley shapes cut from newsprint for stencils and then added underglaze dots and sgraffito. Nice, Linda.

Ysabella Cheong has been interested in mid-Century modern design for a while now. I see that she and I often share selections on Pinterest! On this day she painted four of the still leather-hard red earthenware tiles with my coloured slips. Her designs are understated and elegant. They’ll provide her with further ideas for colour combinations.

The fourth attendee was Gay Mitchell. She is a professional painter who has taught and mentored many local artists. She has also taken several pottery classes. Gay was a student of mine at Port Moody Arts Centre longer ago than I care to remember and recently she has been seeing what their current pottery instructors Robert Shiozaki and Ray Tse have to teach her.

Her five pieces are experiments with the media; dry and leather hard plates and tiles, red and white clay, underglazes and slips and texture. Of her five I think we agree that the red clay tile with a fern shape and bright red and turquoise is the most successful.

Linda and Gay made several more plates and tiles than were used by the four TriCity Potters who came to play, so if any of you would like to join me to work here one day while I continue with my own work, just email or phone me and get yourself over here for a day!

I placed Bill Thomson’s large plate on its own shelf in this firing. The glaze makes the colours much bolder and I think he’s happy with the result. He will make decisions about whether hard edges are best, and if he likes a painterly look or the opacity of commercial printing ink in a print of this image. I have a feeling he will want to have another go at painting with ceramic materials!

Burnaby artist Bill Thomson is a very busy man. He is president of Burnaby Arts Council, so is always volunteering at their Deer Lake Art Gallery, as well as being actively involved in the drive to have a new larger Burnaby Art Gallery. But he is mainly known for his whimsical found-object sculptures. He also paints and fiddles with computer technology to alter images.

Recently I noticed a super twirled image he’d adopted as his Facebook profile picture and couldn’t resist saying that it would be a great image to put on a plate – involved with the painting of plates as I am… Immediately Bill responded ‘yes please, when and how big?’

So I made him a large round slab plate, using a found thrift store plate as a form, and told him that it is 13 1/2″ across. Last Friday, while I madly continued trying to get some 22 new jugbirds finished, he spent the day here. First we taped a piece of newsprint over his large printed copy of his circular image, on a window so that he could trace the design. He cut the shapes out and used them to draw onto the bone dry surface. I wish I had had some old-fashioned carbon copy paper here to transfer the outline.

Bill spent the afternoon painting the shapes with underglazes, finding that indeed, the process takes rather a long time! It’ll be exciting to see whether my colours match what he used for the original painting and whether the intensity and brightness are the same. Next day he sent me a copy of the original painting from which he’d generated the swirly design. Fun!

Now he has to learn a potter’s patience while I finish as many of my pieces as possible. That filling of the kiln will be helped by a small workshop I’m hosting here on Saturday for members of TriCity Potters. They’re keen to try out underglazes on cone 04 clay forms too. Some may use slips instead.

I will, as usual, post photos of Bill’s finished plate and all the TriCity Potters’ work, once they’re fired twice.

This is a website with some more information on Bill and his work.

http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/bill-thomson.html

This Picasa album is merely what I could capture on a sunny Fall day here in BC’s Lower Mainland. I’m hoping others will find a way to credit the artists. All I could be sure of were the pieces made by Bill Thomson and me.

https://picasaweb.google.com/112208740085943894765/BirdArtInstallationDayBurnaby?locked=true&feat=email

It was fun to have been part of an event that included artists who used all sorts of media: clay, metal, plastic, fabric, dime-store finds. I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t have made a clay/found object bird unless I had this event to work towards although the dandelion digger metal part has had me thinking sometimes! So thank you Bill, and I’ll look forward to similar events in the future.