the blog@ Old Cat Died

NEW WEBSITE- GO,GO,GO!!!

2010-02-11T13:29:00.000-05:00

Check out our new website-- www.oldcatdied.com
then our new blog--- www.oldcatdied.com/blog
then shoot us a comment with our Contact form and enter to win some OCD paraphenelia! maybe a mug? maybe a sheet of your own design toner decals? you choose!
more info at:

http://www.oldcatdied.com/valentines-day-give-away/

New Website!

2010-01-30T11:18:00.001-05:00

Hey Everybody! Old Cat Died has a new website at www.oldcatdied.com! (This one will stay up for a while as oldcatdied.blogspot.com.) Come check out the new digs and see a post about an excited two days with Arthur Gonzalez at UGA!

Carolina Chocolate Drops

2010-01-09T21:19:00.001-05:00

Last night we got to see the great Carolina Chocolate Drops here in Athens. They are, you might know, the inspiration for our name. "Old Cat Died" is the title of an old square dance tune, and the words are pretty straightforward:

Old cat died, kitten got cold,
She ain't come around here no more.

They played that song last night, and it made our night. The club was packed out, and we were up on the third-floor balcony, so we didn't try to get down to meet them after the show, but we wondered on the way back to the car whether anyone had seen our web URL painted on the bumper of our car and made a connection. It's all about the marketing, y'all.

Thanks to All our Fans!

2009-12-17T07:35:00.000-05:00

With holiday markets over, we want to thank everybody who came out to Crafstravaganzaa and the Good Dirt sale and supported us this year! We got a lot of enthusiastic buyers and a lot of encouraging comments, and we really appreciate both. We're very happy that the stories we tell on our pottery resonates with people, and that they can take it home and make their own stories out of it.

So, Old Cat Died is back to work - okay, just a few cups to keep in practice. It's the holidays, you know.

Athens Indie Craftstravaganzaa!

2009-12-05T08:01:00.000-05:00

Old Cat Died will be at Athens Indie Craftstravaganzaa today and tomorrow! Come on out and see the new wares! See Purple Myrtle in person!

Love Shack Hiding!

2009-11-23T13:08:00.001-05:00

It's been a while, what with wood-firing and working to get ready for holiday sales, but we finally got a new Love Shack out for some lucky Athens resident. As you can see, it's surrounded by books - arts and crafts books, of course.

If you found the Love Shack and followed it here, please let us know! We're glad to find them homes!

Wood Fire Opening

2009-11-15T08:36:00.000-05:00

The Good Dirt wood-fire opening at Rob Sutherland's wood kiln was yesterday. There are pictures of the whole event on our Facebook page, but here are a few choice shots:

LUCKY 100th FAN gets something from OldCatDied!

2009-11-12T12:49:00.001-05:00

Cmon! Fan us on Facebook! See side of blog for link.

Novemebr 15 Decal Workshops

2009-11-04T20:43:00.000-05:00

So we are finally doing a workshop- YAY! I hope some folks show up! A friend of mine put it best with "hey, I'm interested in that pottery tattoo thing". You know, it is kind of like that... whatever, come make some tattoos with us!

As seen at www.gooddirt.net:

PERSONALIZE A HANDMADE MUG WITH DECALS

Tuition: $25 + Materials: $15 (includes mug) = $40

Participants will generate their own ceramic decals from computer images and text and use them to personalize a stoneware mug created at Good Dirt Studio. Decals will be fired onto the pieces in plenty of time for great gift-giving.

Sunday, 2:00 – 4:00 PM (November 15) • Sealey-Morris

DECAL MAKING WORKSHOP

Tuition: $25 + Materials: $15 (includes sheet of finished decals) = $40

Learn to convert text and imagery into ceramic decals in this one-day intensive workshop. Students will manipulate images on the computer, print them with a laser printer onto decal paper, and learn to apply the decals to glazed pottery. Workshop participants may bring completed pots or tiles for decal experimentation (or some will be provided). The decals are then fired onto the ceramic pieces to bond them permanently to the underlying glaze. Students will leave the workshop with a full sheet of decals to apply to future pieces and the knowledge to incorporate this exciting decorative technique into their work.

Sunday, 4:00 – 6:00 PM (November 15) • Sealey-Morris

At the first workshop you will receive a mug made by a Good Dirt potter. No experience necessary, just come get creative! The second workshop is designed for a person with some clay experience.

Good Dirt
510 B North Thomas St. • Athens, GA 30601 • 706.355.3161

Love Shack Project #4

2009-10-24T11:46:00.000-04:00

We missed a week with the Wandless workshop, so we're catching up with another Love Shack giveaway here in the town of Athens!

Can't tell you where it is, but here's a hint - when you find it, buy a peanut-butter, bacon and banana donut for us. And eat it for us. God knows we don't need all those calories.

Paul Andrew Wandless Workshop- Atlanta 2009

2009-10-20T22:14:00.000-04:00

This past weekend I attended a Paul Andrew Wandless workshop in Atlanta. I've had his book, Image Transfer on Clay, since it came out in 2006, so it was an exciting opportunity to meet him and work face-to-face.

In his opening lecture on the first day, Paul explained his philosophy of printmaking on clay. As he sees it, we are all artists first and foremost, all of us happening to have clay in common. I thought this was an interesting take on it, since it has a lot to do with the way we think of Old Cat Died - while we're into clay, we're not opposed to exploring other media, and with incorporating techniques from other media into clay.

The first day we made monoprints from plaster bats painted with underglaze. With this technique, you build up layers in reverse, foreground to background, pour casting slip onto the surface, and by day 2 we were pulling our prints on the hardened clay.

Here's the plaster, with remnants of the underglaze painting:

And here's the print from it:

This is a slab combining screen-printed ferris wheels and a sprig mold of an army man from Paul's collection. Okay, so they have nothing to do with each other. The workshop was about experimenting with a technique, not creating a coherent statement.

Here are some sprig molds of my own:

We also worked with various kinds of stamping. I brought some of my old favorite homemade stamps, including the stamps we used for our wedding invitations, and a special anniversary stamp. Personal things, you know.

And I made a tile with one of Paul's roll stamps - a large cylinder with images that you roll across a slab.

Finally, the screen printing. We made screens with PhotoEZ, a product made for cheap, at-home T-shirt screen printing. They work surprisingly well, and considering how many screens you can get off of an $8 sheet, probably not a bad alternative if you don't want to invest in a serious screen printing setup.

And one last pic, a table full of experiments. We'll certainly be using some of the techniques in our work in the future. Can't say exactly what, but there's always time to try new things!

Love Shack Project 3

2009-10-11T12:19:00.001-04:00

In honor of today's march on Washington, Old Cat Died has left a pair of gay and lesbian Love Shacks around town.

If you find one, please comment and let us know they found a good home.

Love and civil rights!

Studio Shots

2009-10-07T15:44:00.000-04:00

Just a few studio shots to break the monotony:

Teabowls awaiting feet.

And teabowls feeted.

Not precisely sure what this vessel is. Carrie thinks it looks like a taco on a stand.

I like the prominent finger marks. They'll be exaggerated with some slip design.

Anyway, there's some studio shots. Exciting, no?

Love Shack Project 2

2009-10-04T09:00:00.000-04:00

Our first Love Shack giveaway went well. Love Shack #1 was found in the park behind Athens Regional Hospital here in our Normaltown neighborhood, and it was found by Maria Dondero's niece. (Maria is a potter, ironically, and if you're from Athens you know the Dondero family from Dondero's Kitchen.)

So where is Love Shack #2, and who is going to find it? Here's what is looks like:

It's waiting at our favorite place in Athens for lunch. Any guesses?

If you find the Love Shack, please leave a message here on the OCD blog - we'd love to know who you are!

Ron Philbeck's Sale

2009-09-28T15:17:00.001-04:00

Sunday morning we woke up and said "It's a beautiful day. We should drive up to Ron Philbeck's sale."

It's a nice little drive from Athens to Shelby, and when we got there in the afternoon Ron and Sarah welcomed us like old friends - come on in, would you like some coffee or tea or water, let us show you around! I told Carrie, that's what people mean when they talk about "Southern hospitality."

Ron's got a nice set-up for his studio and gallery, and he makes you feel right at home. Eva picked their flowers and kicked her soccer ball around their big front yard, Lucy crawled around and tried to eat grass, and we bought an awesome serving bowl and a mug fresh out of the kiln.

Carrie likes Ron's owls, and I like his goats, so the serving bowl has an owl against a nice amber background.

The mug has an upside-down goat on one side and an owl and upside-down possum on the other side. Ron confessed that he can't always draw the goat correctly. (I didn't admit that I usually forget Hector's goatee.) Sarah agreed with me that the upside-down animals are cool.

It's nice to meet a blog friend in real life, and even better to learn they're just as nice as they seem online. Carrie and I have been talking a lot lately about what makes not only a good potter, but what makes a potter a good person and a good member of the art/craft community, and it seems to us that if you can't afford to be encouraging, supportive, generous and enthusiastic about others' work, experiments, and education (because everyone is always learning), then you're not fit to be a potter. And Ron and Sarah are all of those things.

(Oh, thanks for the clay, Ron!)

Handmade. pass it on....

2009-09-27T00:30:00.000-04:00

So I've been reading this guys blog for a few months (Arthur Halversen) and recently saw that upon starting his Facebook Fan page and asking friends to further invite their own friends and build up his fan base, he was challenged by a well meaning friend as to WHY he (the friend) should care about promoting handmade? Sure, his buddy Arthur is a potter and so he's to do what most of us do when a friend invites us to a fan page-- click a button on his or her computer screen-- become a fan or shhh... sometimes ignore.

Anyway, their discussion came down to the hot topic amongst many pottery blogs already-- the idea of Educating people about handmade and craft. Now Gabe and I are not usually big fans of that approach, but what struck me here was that further into this discussion, Arthur's friend recommended a marketing guru- Seth Godin. If you are trying to sell your art/craft and have 17 minutes to spare watch this clip. This guy talks about starting a movement within your tribes, your curent circles. And telling your story everyday, so its more genuine and realistic. Sites like Facebook are created on this concept so why not jump in and use it?

Arthur and friends were inspired to start the following, and we at Old Cat Died thinks it is a splendid idea! Its called Operation C.U.P. (Citizens using pottery) and it is about getting pottery into the hands of people that don’t normally use handmade ceramics. All you need to do to participate is get a handmade cup this holiday season for a best friend.

I probably drink out of handmade cups 99% of the time but probably 90% of my friends do not.

So here's what I am thinking, from Now until the end of 2009, OCD will give you a big 5 bucks off any of our own mugs/cups from our Etsy shop that you buy specifically for this cause. Mention C.U.P. in the memo to seller and we will make sure we refund you the dough. Get those handmade wares out there!

Here are some of my fave Etsy shops as well:

The Love Shack Project

2009-09-24T14:15:00.000-04:00

We're starting a new public art project here at Old Cat Died. You remember the Love Shacks? Of course you do. You loved them.

Well, it's time to share the love. We're going to be putting a Love Shack in surprise spots all over Athens - birthplace of that famous band with the funny hair - for the next - month? Two months? However long they last. And we'll let you know on the blog and Facebook where you might find one of your very own.

Today's Love Shack is tucked into a special mailbox somewhere in Normaltown. It doesn't look like a real mailbox, but surprise, it is!

If you know where it is, feel free to go find it. Or leave it and create new Old Cat Died fans. Old Cat Died is for everybody - and we have lots of love to go around.

Some Tests and Experiments

2009-09-23T22:05:00.001-04:00

Old Cat Died has been in an experimentin' mood lately, and here are some of the products of our play.

The first is Gabe's attempt to import some William Blake etching/engraving techniques to clay, specifically Blake's method of mixing etching with white-line engraving to create layers of texture and an illusion of depth. (Many engravers use similar techniques, but none quite so boldly as Blake.).

You can see in these images that there are two layers of scraffito. First, Gabe brushed on a panel of white slip and carved through the white to the clay below - the usual scraffito method. The figures and text are in this layer. Then, after bisquing, he colored the composition with underglazes and carved through the color to the white slip underneath, creating highlights and textures in white.

All of the elements in the composition are taken from Blake - the figures come from Jerusalem (the woman) and America (the man), while the textures in the sky and ground, as well as the halo around the man, are approximations of Blake's characteristic engraving patterns.

This experiment, done on a hollow wall hanging, is relatively successful, and we can see uses for it after some refining. The colors are pale due to a watered-down application of underglaze (hoping to approximate Blake's watercolors, but just kind of weak). We also found that we could carve with a wooden tool when the underglaze was wet, but had to use metal once it was dry, leading us to wonder if we could be weakening the body. That could be a problem on a functional piece. Overall, though, it looks like a potentially attractive technique.

After finally getting a Ted Saupe cup, Carrie has been experimenting with a more intentional but still organic and rough-hewn version of the hand-built cups she had left behind for wheel throwing. This highly-textured tea-bowl is a handful - but surprisingly comfortable to hold and well-balanced.

The outside appears craterous, but the inside breaks into this rich, glassy green that makes you think of a geode split open.

Our other formal experiments have been these wall hangings. They are very simple slab constructions, folded over into pillow-like forms.

They are decorative, cone-1 pieces, playing with textures and glaze combinations. As you can see, we have all kinds of collisions between glazed and raw panels, color combinations, and textural accents. These are hung on copper wire, a holdover from the mobiles Old Cat Died began with. The copper suits the clay color and the glaze palette we have been using, and as it ages and oxidizes copper will just deepen the earthy, material feel of these hangings.

All Kinds of Craft Markets

2009-09-22T07:19:00.000-04:00

The Lyndon House Gypsy Market was a great success - we highly recommend other Athens artists and crafters to give it a try next year and support this wonderful area resource.

It was quite a day for us. We made a lot of sales, almost a third of what we brought with us, and more importantly, we made more contacts with local crafters. We also met Peter Loose, a local artist we love (I desperately want one of his handmade dulcimers, one shaped like a rooster to be specific. It used to hang in the Flat Penny, when that awesome little gallery was still there, and I would go in perdiodically to drool over it and touch it longingly).

(Note, this is not the dulcimer, just a Loose painting of a rooster. I'm terribly disappointed that he doesn't have it on his website.)

At the very least, it would have been nice to get his signature on some Bongo books.

We also met a sweet lady named Mary who makes Teabirds - little teacup and saucer constructions that sit on copper sticks in your garden or yard. She buys teacups and saucers from antique stores, estate sales, thrift stores, etc and combines them. People loved them - everybody who saw them smiled. Nice lady, no internet presence.

Seeing all the other crafters at the market, about who has email lists, who has websites, who has etsy stores and blogs, makes me think about how the craft fair, art market, and gallery relates to the new electronic world. Maybe later I'll have a chance to post some thoughts and ask for feedback. For now, thanks to everybody who came out to the Lyndon House Saturday.

Lyndon House Gypsy Market - Athens GA

2009-09-15T19:34:00.000-04:00

Old Cat Died will be at the Lyndon House Gypsy Market Saturday, Sept. 19, from 10am to 4pm. Come on out and say hello. There might be somethin' in it for you!

And if you can't come out, there's always our etsy page: oldcatdied.etsy.com

Come find something you love!

Mastery

2009-09-11T20:02:00.000-04:00

A while back, I posted a somewhat random Facebook status: "Mastering is just another word for enslaving." I've been reading a lot of William Blake in preparation for my PhD comprehensive exams and dissertation, and had in mind Blake's dictum (if there is such a thing for the most perversely upside-down mind this side of Lewis Carroll), "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's."

As I was reading, I happened to look down and see a book of Carrie's, "Mastering Cone 6 Glazes." It struck me as an odd title for a book about ceramics; even though I get the word "masterpiece," and have a master's degree in literature, I can't think of art, craft, or interpretation as something to be "mastered." I'm a pretty thorough postmodernist, at least in that I see the inquiry of art as being something reticulated, recursive, and self-perpetuating. There can be no mastery, either over art or over the critique of art, because to truly "master" anything is to close it off, to define it finally, and to end its growth and evolution.

Then Carter Gillies challenged me with a response:

"And yet not everything mastered becomes enslaved, and not everything enslaved is truly mastered. I would hate to think I was enslaving clay when my relationship to it seems more a liberation and a facilitation of its potentiality. However, that being said, some potters ARE callous slavers who use the medium in entirely self serving exercises. In art, it seems that to be a master is more like being a lover than a slaver. A master artist often creates as an act of devotion not just the imposition of selfish desires. It may even be more true that the master is a 'slave' to his medium than the reverse."

That paradox is something that a Blakean can get behind - the master becomes a slave to his medium even as he seeks to enslave it.

The way Blake presents it, we really don't have a choice as we whether we are "enslaved" or not. We are human, and thus we are limited - by the capabilities of our bodies, by the circumstances of our lives, by the environments which sustain or hinder us, by the quality of our minds, and on and on. We can't be all-expansive; we can't be gods. So, whether we realize it or not, we are always enslaved by something. We can choose to be aware of our limitations and create the thing that enslaves us, or we can remain ignorant, pretending to be free and be all the more enslaved. We can learn to work with our master, or we can resist. We can facilitate, or block.

I also like what Carter says about devotion. To me, saying that we are all enslaved by something is saying we all worship something: to the truly enslaved, the slaver is a god, all-powerful and terrible, to be feared. To the creatively enslaved though, the slaver can be a god we commune with, a god that sustains us.

Blake had much to say about self-serving art. Throughout his career he scorned commercial engravers who, unlike himself, would take any job they could get regardless of the quality of the project, and he despised painters who turned their talents to flattering the aristocracy and to painting fashionable, jingoistic historical scenes. And part of his bitterness in his later years came from being passed up, time and again, in favor of more popular or commercially viable craftsmen.

It would be nice to pursue this line of thought further - what exactly is "mastery" of an art or craft like pottery?

September Giveaway!

2009-09-08T09:21:00.000-04:00

It's time for OCD's monthly giveaway!

This time around we're offering this juice cup to anyone who can answer a trivia question about the Sparkling Bros. Carnival:

What kind of music does Purple Myrtle sing in the bathtub after a long day performing?
a. Motown
b. opera
c. jazz
d. gospel

A couple of rules:
You have to answer in the comments section of the blog - Facebook answers don't count!
Only one answer per fan.

First person to answer correctly gets their very own Purple Myrtle! Good luck!

All Saints' Bowl Complete

2009-08-24T20:02:00.000-04:00

The All Saints' Bowl, after long last, is finished. Of course, it did not end up being all saints - since that would require either a much bigger bowl, or much smaller saints. But we have five saints, and some stained-glass windows, and it's all very churchy.

The stained-glass motif came out very well with water glazes. They seem to be illuminated, even on redware.

We chose five female saints to depict on the bowl, largely because of their attributes and stories. Saint Joan of Arc was the first chosen because I (Gabe) have been fascinated by her since I was a child. I've even dreamed of Joan of Arc many times. Our Joan looks more like a riot grrrl than a medieval French peasant, but this is our Joan, not the real one.

Saint Dorothea appears here because of her iconographic attributes - three apples and three roses in a basket. Our daughter Eva is obsessed, for some reason, with apples, and carries around a basket, so Saint Dorothea is for her.

Saint Cecilia has no personal significance, but as patron saint of music she has to be one of our choices. We love and play music of all kinds, and not a day goes by without a dance party in the kitchen. Saint Cecilia lives in our house.

Saint Mary of Egypt has a fascinating story: as a beautiful, dissipated young noblewoman Mary went on pilgrimage to seduce male pilgrims and enjoy a tour of debauchery across Europe. But when she reached the Holy Land and entered the temple, she was overcome by the Holy Spirit and saw her sins. In penance, she went out into the desert with three loves of bread and lived for much longer than anyone ought with only three loves of bread. Anyway, she's normally pictured as a wasted old woman with three loaves, which seemed like a cool image.

If we were Catholic, Saint Lucia would be our second daughter's patron. Lucia has an interesting story too - she was a lovely young nun, and when a man complimented her on her eyes, she gouged them out herself. She said she would rather live the rest of her life blind than cause anyone temptation. Lucia is usually pictured either presenting her eyes on a platter (gruesome) or holding a sprig with her eyes growing as flowers (poetic). She also carries a lamp, since her name (ironically) means "light." Also, Saint Lucia may not have actually existed. That's okay.

All Saints' Bowl 2

2009-08-18T14:06:00.000-04:00

Quite a while back we introduced some pictures of the All Saints' Bowl, a big bowl/sculpture that Carrie was working on in a sculpture class. It was still green at that point, and now we've come to the next stage.

Rather than slipping the inside, as we would normally do, we decided to experiment with a majolica base for a white interior. We've tried it on smaller cups and mugs to get a smooth, glassy white inside, but we haven't done it on anything this big (of course, we haven't made anything this big).

Gabe has drawn cartoon saints in the clamshell windows with underglaze applied lightly for a translucent, stained-glass effect.

There are five female saints, in the nude, all chosen because of their special iconographic attributes. When the bowl is finished and fired, we will talk about the saints we've chosen and why.

The other windows will be colored with water glazes as stained-glass windows.

Come back soon to see the finished product, fired at cone 1!

OCD Giveaway Day!

2009-08-13T09:58:00.000-04:00

Its that time again -- Old Cat Died Giveaway Day!

For the first Old Cat Died lover who comments on the OCD blog (not the Facebook page, but the actual blog), we have a $10 gift certificate to the OCD etsy store! That'll buy you a house or a naked peep magnet, or get you $10 closer to an exciting piece of pottery. And you can give away your giveaway to a friend or family member for a cheap and easy gift.

Not refundable for cash. Not valid in foreign countries. Not edible.

So comment already!

More Sparkling! More Bros.! More Carnies and Freaks!

2009-08-09T13:52:00.000-04:00

We're sticking pretty tightly to the carnival theme lately, what with Sparkling Bros. and Coney Island and Asbury Park. We have some surprises, too - freak show decals.

We're fascinated by the world of the freak show, and of human difference in general. If you've been following our work, you know our love for the human body in all its variety, and that variety is the making of beauty. In their own way, human oddities and prodigies (the words preferred by P.T. Barnum for his performers over the derogatory and belittling "freak," which originally meant "whim" and carried the connotation of impulsiveness and rashness) are figures of great beauty, as they stretch our definitions of "human" and "perfect."

Freaks, in their own particular perfection and wholeness, constitute a form of beauty that we often ignore. You've seen Purple Myrtle, of course, the resident object of desire in the Sparkling Bros. Carnival.

Her beauty and sex appeal is based in the reality that the carnival "fat ladies" were desired by many man and some, like Dolly Dimples, were married many times to admirers. This bowl shows her in her bathtub, singing opera to herself after a long day on display. A number of bearded women had beautiful voices, owing to their hormonal imbalances.

Here is a portrait of a dog-faced boy from Sparkling Bros. that we call "Gerald." He's a buttoned-up type, and very dignified and stiff. Again, many times in histories of the freak show you will see references to the dignity of the hairy people - it was, in fact, and aristocratic disease, passed through generations of intermarrying nobility.

And we've introduced Cosmo the Dwarf and Hannibal the Giant earlier in the card game. Cosmo and Hannibal stand for a lineup that betrays Hannibal's dark secret - he's not really all that tall. You know, tall for a regular guy, but for a giant...?

And poor, lovestruck Hector looks on as Myrtle performs for the customers, stroking her beard as her rotating dais turns.

That's all for now. Maybe next time we'll have to do some pretentious pontificating on art or craft or some such junk.

Decal Pots Aplenty!

2009-08-06T12:34:00.000-04:00

So the 04 decal firing came out very well, maybe better than the cone 1. Nice crisp images, and for this firing, a mixture of Sparkling Bros. cartoons and carnival images from Asbury Park and Coney Island (special places in Carrie's childhood mythology). Today we'll feature the Asbury and Coney Island pots.

This gigantic (16 oz) mug features a 19th century ad for Coney Island on one side...

And a photograph of the legendary Cyclone on the flipside.

This mug proudly pictures the Parachute Jump from Coney Island, which Carrie's Brooklynite mother Helen was always afraid to ride.

An 8 oz cup with another cool image from Coney Island's past, the Elephantine Colossus.

A large bowl decorated with Asbury Park images. On the inside, a map of the town...

on one side, a portrait of Ernest Schnitzler, the business visionary who founded Palace Amusements...

and on the other side, a schematic of Schnitzler's gigantic indoor ferris wheel.

Finally, a small mug with a portrait of George Ferris, inventor of the Ferris wheel...

and, of course, Ferris' ferris wheel.

And lots of these pieces have tiny Tillies beaming out from obscure corners. Tillie, in case you didn't know, is the mascot of both Coney Island and Asbury Park, and the original Asbury Park Tillie, which decorated a wall of Palace Amusements, is currently being restored.

That's it for the New York/New Jersey themed pieces. Next time we'll return to the imaginary world of the Sparkling Bros. Carnival for some works featuring the soon-to-be-beloved carnies.

Some More New Decal Pots

2009-08-04T09:24:00.000-04:00

Here's some more of our new decals pieces. This first one is just a whimsical drawing of Hector from my sketchbook, an awareness that Hector looks kind of like the blow-up punching clowns of our childhood. It seemed like an appropriate juxtaposition at the time.

These three images introduce a story about Hector and Frank's weekly poker games with Cosmo the Dwarf and Hannibal the Giant (who is really only 6' 5", but has stage presence).

We never hide our errors - in any craft or art you're always learning, and contemplating problems is crucial to that process - and here's the biggest disappointment from this kiln-load. It was Carrie's favorite cup, and it was unfortunately placed a little too close to another glazed piece - not touching, but close enough for the glaze to reach out and make a connection. So, Frank and his stogie has a nice big chip in it.

There's another load coming out of 04, so when we get those we'll share. See you then!

First Round of Decals is Out!

2009-08-03T09:31:00.000-04:00

So, after failed (but instructive) experiments, a couple of harrowing days worrying about a faulty firing, and some disappointment at lost pieces, our first round of decals is out of the third firing. These were fired at cone 1; a second group is being fired at 04 as we write and should be out tonight. We'll see which firing looks best.

Here are some shots of Carrie applying the decals to the high-fire pots.

And here are some of the first official Sparkling Bros. Carnival vessels! Each one has a backstory and characters to get to know. Hope you enjoy them!

This teabowl takes us back to Hector's childhood in a sleazy Mexican-themed amusement park, where he was unknowingly a performer. It's where his love of the show life began.

On this bowl, Hector sits outside Purple Myrtle's trailer as she sings opera to herself in her off hours, oblivious to his devotion.

Another teabowl, this one featuring the Sparkling Bros. resident love object, Purple Myrtle, the fat bearded lady. She's a fine figure of a woman, and possessed of the most impressive whiskers this side of Karl Marx.

A tiny teabowl showing Myrtle's tent, where the barker attracts marks to the best value in the carnival - only 5 cents to see the greatest fat bearded lady alive!

One last little teabowl for today - Hector wandering sadly away from Myrtle's tent, lost in unrequited love.

More pictures tomorrow!

Ready for Decals

2009-07-31T16:59:00.000-04:00

Well, fortune was smiling on us yesterday, and here are about 30 pieces ready for decals (they're what we have that didn't get underfired or overfired).

Strangely, because of the firing error, even the pieces that were fired to temperature (cone-10 reduction) didn't get a reduced look - they actually look like they came out of an electric. But, it turns out to be pretty decent for decals - bland, but they won't distract. We may try some other tricks to add visual interest.

We've been getting images together all day and we'll have a decal firing this weekend. Check
back with us next week for pictures!

In Suspense

2009-07-30T13:06:00.001-04:00

So, if you didn't know, Carrie works as an assistant at a community studio, and we use the studio's kilns for our work. Well, while she was over there glazing last night, she heard some distressing news - the gas firing we have been waiting for seems to have gone "boink."

I don't quite understand what went wrong - Carrie really should be writing the blog today - but it involves some bricks in the wrong place and a resulting temperature mishap. To make it short, everything at the top of the kiln is underfired, everything in the bottom is overfired, and we won't know how badly until it's opened tonight. The studio owner isn't optimistic.

Neither are we. After all, we have most of three weeks' worth of work in that kiln. These are the pieces that we were going to use for our first (ideally) successful series of decals (you've seen the misfire with the last test round) and if things are as bad as the owner thinks, it will be even longer before we manage to get a decent collection of Sparkling Bros. pots.

Keep your fingers crossed for some salvageable pieces!

Scraffito Action!

2009-07-28T13:25:00.001-04:00

Because of our setback with decals, it will be a while before we have anything to show you in that area. So, we're back for now to the tried-and-true scraffito/underglaze combination that has served us so well in the past.

Here is a bowl Gabe has decorated with images from a comic strip he's been working on. "The Homunculus" is inspired by certain William Blake images, particularly a painting of the god Los creating the world from a glob of blood. "The Homunculus" is a kind of cartoon creation myth.

As you can see, the drawings have been accented with colored underglaze on greenware. The effect we're hoping for is a watercolor-like translucency similar to Blake's watercolor prints.

Most of the Homunculus' poses are drawn from figures in Blake's prophecies, turned into a blobby, infantile character.

Previously we've used underglaze on bisque, but after seeing David Gurney's trees of life, which he colors at the green stage, we decided to try underglazing bone-dry. We'll see what happens.

We'll show some more drawings soon. Anyway, this bowl and some others will be going into the kiln, so come back to see more images.

Living in the Blogosphere

2009-07-23T09:03:00.000-04:00

Sofa City Sweethearts, an Etsy blog, just featured one of Old Cat Died's items, a bowl titled "Goodbye, Tiny Porkpie Hat." Thanks to Sofa City Carrie and here's to returning favors - go check out her blog!

http://sofacitysweethearts.blogspot.com/

Favorite Cups

2009-07-21T20:43:00.001-04:00

Pete Pinnell’s musings on cups and the reasons he loves particular cups prompted me to think about our favorite vessels, the ones we use every day. So here are a few:

Gabe’s favorite teabowl

I use this red cup, made by our friend Carter Gillies, every day. I generally use it as a teabowl, though I sometimes drink cold water out of it as well. Carter’s form is particularly comfortable, and he has a habit of pressing in an indention for one finger which always falls in the best place to balance the cup. It’s got a good weight, and as Pinnell says of one of his favorite mugs, it forces me to stop a moment and think about what I’m drinking. Before I bought this one, I had never used a teabowl before, but I found it really appeals to me and I’ve started using another that Carrie made – the “Quack” cup inspired by one of Eva’s favorite words.

I’ve been clumsy with this one and it has some small chips in the foot, but somehow they make it more personal to me. Someone (I can’t remember who) told me when I was a kid that a thing doesn’t really belong to you until you damage it. That was probably just one of those things an adult tells you to make you feel better when you break something, but it has stuck with me, and I still follow it – I don’t feel a pipe is really mine until I’ve burned the rim or scuffed up the finish, for instance.

I also like the Quack cup because its wide mouth allows the tea to cool off quickly. Some people would hate that, but I don’t like really hot tea, and I enjoy having the last swallow be cold and easy to drink down. There’s something satisfying about finishing the cup in a gulp rather than a sip, like finishing up hard work in a coup.

Carrie’s favorite mug

Unlike me, Carrie likes her coffee HOT. If it doesn’t scald her tongue, it’s not satisfying. So she enjoys using this mug by Bekke Broadhurst, another Good Dirt potter. It’s a simple wort on stoneware with a wide bottom, narrow top, and cool tab on the top of the handle, all of which contributes in a practical way to a hot but comfortable cup of coffee.

Our favorite drinking cup

Another cup by Carter, we use this cup at almost every meal and all through the day. Like Gabe’s teabowl, it has Carter’s distinctive wave in the form and the finger indentation for grasping.

Carrie’s favorite wine cup

Carrie hates glass wineglasses – she says they feel too fragile and make her nervous. So her favorite wineglass is a teabowl made for her by Sheila Bradley to demonstrate throwing and slip-trailing techniques. Even though it’s made for hot drinks, the rounded shape actually works well for red wine (Carrie’s preference), allowing you to warm it in your hand and swirl it around like a small snifter. And it’s pretty and delicate, just like a crystal wineglass. So who says you have to drink wine from a glass?

2009-07-19T20:06:00.000-04:00

We were mesmerized by this video interview with the master potter and theorist Pete Pinnell. It’s an older video, but it’s the first time we’ve come across it and we thought it worth sharing with others who had not seen it.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=302550256698394321

You really should watch it, but just to summarize, Pinnell begins with a capsule history of modern art’s movement from abstraction and detachment at the turn of the 20th century, to the 1960s engagement with politics and public life, finally turning to the need for art to engage with private, daily life as well.

Pinnell argues that pottery, being something both beautiful and functional, is the ideal medium for artists to engage with daily life. To simplify, objects that we pick up, serve food from, put to our lips, and put in our mouths, land higher on the hierarchy of intimacy than any other object in our lives – many of which we may look at but not touch, touch but not taste, etc. They are, therefore, in the perfect situation to speak artistically to us on a daily basis, and to speak to us with a variety of sense languages – touch, taste, and scent as well as sight.

I’m grateful to Pinnell for his observations on how pottery communicates. It finally gives me a way of thinking about why we at Old Cat Died feel so strongly about narrative pottery and finding ways to communicate our own personal images and stories into our work. I am a Romanticist and rhetorician by trade, a writer by craft, and while there’s a lot that I don’t know or understand about pottery (Carrie’s been in it for quite a few years now, but it’s new to me), if I understand anything, it’s communication.

Many potters want to think about their craft in strictly utilitarian, practical, or scientific ways, and while the chemistry and physics of pottery is fascinating, and the perfection of form is an honorable pursuit, it seems that too few really give any thought to what their work communicates. Even those of us to concentrate on surface decoration often confine that consideration to practical details like color, balance, smoothness, etc. Few of us think about what is being communicated beyond whether it is “pretty” in some superficial way.

That’s where narrative comes in for us. By foregrounding storytelling, even when that storytelling is simplified and abstracted, we make communication primary. That priority does not have to come at the expense of form or composition, either, though sometimes it may obscure or distract from other elements.

The mistake made by many potters who concentrate on surface decoration is to disregard or short-change the form. But a good piece of pottery should treat all aspects equally. The whole work has to communicate; the whole work has to be beautiful; the whole work has to be well-formed. If one element is lacking, the work is incomplete. And to us, at least, if a pot doesn’t tell a story – about life, about someone, even just about itself – we are not interested.

Old Cat Died Giveaway!

2009-07-18T22:56:00.000-04:00

A special promotion from Old Cat Died: the first Facebook fan to make a comment on the blog gets this house free!

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=26252048

If you're not already a Facebook fan, go join right now! Right now! Seriously! And get a free house with titties on it.

First Decal Experiments

2009-07-16T15:14:00.001-04:00

So, we've done our first batch of decal experiments, but we didn't exactly get the results we were expecting. The problem is not the decals themselves at all - they came out quite crisp and clear. The problem was with the cups themselves.

We high-fired (in gas reduction) slipped redware, expecting a mottled, sepia look something like old daguerreotypes. But it seems a bad batch of slip made for a much different look.

The problem can be seen most in this one. The iron from the clay body leached through the slip and created these hideous rusty blotches. The Purple Myrtle cup is so bad the iron obscures the image.

The Hector cup came out the best, in my opinion, but Carrie doesn't like the color - she thinks it "looks like someone threw up all over Hector." But the decal is clean and the iron in the clay body didn't leach through so badly.

Notice the leaching here on the Sparkling Bros. logo.

And here, to a lesser extent, in Carlo's Dream.

This little cup with the OCD logo looks pretty good, being of the "so-simple-you-can't-screw-it-up" variety.

At any rate, we know what went wrong with these, and the whole process has been a learning experience. If we've learned the right lessons hopefully the next attempt will be more successful.

Feel free to share some of your own failure stories - learning from others' mistakes is the best way to learn.

Craftsmanship and Cheap Products

2009-07-13T20:29:00.001-04:00

In light of some of the conversation we've had here and on other pottery blogs, I thought it would be worthwhile to post a link to an interesting book review article in Salon today.

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/07/12/cheap/index.html

It's nothing that most of us have not heard or thought about before, but stated very succinctly in a digestible format (a book review).

Not to be a shill or anything, but it's probably worth checking out of the library for any of us who think of ourselves as craftspeople, artisans, or artists.

The Sparkling Bros. Carnival

2009-07-07T19:36:00.000-04:00

After much delay, we will soon begin featuring The Sparkling Bros. Carnival on pottery! Since we don't want our fans to feel behind, I thought I'd take a moment and introduce some of the characters.

Hector is the stone-faced hero of the strip. A life-long show person, Hector grew up performing in a rinky-dink theme park and found his niche as a capable and unflappable carny. Whether feeding the two-headed alligator or fighting a raging hot-dog wagon fire, Hector can't be shaken. His only weakness - his unrequited adoration of Purple Myrtle.

Purple Myrtle, the Sparkling Bros. bearded lady/fat lady/sex goddess extraordinaire, is the object of Hector's shy desire. She sings opera (but only in secret), always comports herself with grace and dignity, and always packs the house.

Frank is Hector's best friend and partner. He's fun-loving, lazy, and probably drunk most of the time, unless he's just a little off in the head. They may be opposites, but Frank and Hector complement each other like Spam and ketchup.

Cassandra, Mistress of Fire, is a juggler and fire breather, and just a few ink-hours away from taking over as Tattooed Lady.

There are many more characters to meet, but it will have to wait until we see some pieces. Hope you're all as excited as we are!

Our Imagery

2009-07-03T21:01:00.000-04:00

Since we have some new mugs out of the kiln, I thought it might be fun to give a little description of where some of our imagery came from. We prefer images from our personal lives and stories, and images that have some personal significance to us. We're always looking for a balance: too personal and no one can respond to them - too disconnected from our own experience, and we can't give them any personality and life.

"How Does Your Garden Grow": we've already talked about the fertility goddess figures and their influence on our work, but this teabowl incorporates one of my longtime fixations: Stonehenge. Partly it's in debt to Blake, who incorporated what he thought of as "Salisbury Plain" imagery into his prophecies long before New Age kooks caught on, but part of my fascination is personal - ever since seeing pictures of Stonehenge in a "Mysteries of the World" book as a small child, I have had dreams about the monument. So, it has a tendency to show up in my own drawing.

"I Could Birth a Watermelon": Something Carrie's midwife actually told her. The midwife probably meant it to be encouraging, as in "Don't worry about giving birth, you'll be able to do it," but Carrie found it a little 0ff-putting - after all, it's not exactly a compliment. Eventually, it became a joke she would tell people. Now it's a slightly cryptic message on a mug. Ah, the course of art.

"The day Mom squeezed the canary": not one of our stories, but my mother-in-law's - a sad, true story from her childhood. Growing up in a big, loud Italian family in Brooklyn, one of the favorite parts of her and her sisters' lives was their little yellow canary, Pretty Boy. Someone (Nana can't remember who) trained the bird to fly from its cage and land in their hands, one of those cute things people train birds to do. One day, though, her mother called the canary over and, in a moment of "don't know my own strength," grabbed the bird too tightly. "Nancy Ann and me just screamed," Nana describes; "We called her 'murderer'." It was the end of Pretty Boy.

"this pier lights our carnival life forever": Growing up in New Jersey, unsurprisingly, one of Carrie's heroes was Bruce Springsteen. She has pretty much every Springsteen album on vinyl, and many a Sunday morning has been spent blasting "Born to Run." (Why Sunday? Why not?) Springsteen inspired a fascination with Asbury Park, carnivals, and suburban decay, and living on the Jersey shore inspired a love of piers and boardwalks. All of those come together in this teabowl, with its Springsteen quote and image of (as usual, me) driving a bumper car.

We hope our imagery gives people a sense of connection to us. We've talked so much recently about pricing and selling, and it seems that one of the best ways to create customers and fans is to make meaningful relationships.

As always, we love comments. Any similar stories for your pottery, or images you love?

OCD's newest potter

2009-06-30T19:59:00.000-04:00

We put these pictures on our Facebook page, but we thought they were worth sharing here too:

Here's our daughter Eva making her first pot at 20 months old (sort of)!

Yes, Old Cat Died endorses child labor. Her cups will sell for $40, from which she will be paid in blueberries and crayons.

All Saints Bowl

2009-06-27T20:07:00.000-04:00

Just for the heck of it, let's do an actual pottery-related post!

Carrie is using her sculpture class as a justification for experimenting with larger forms than she has previously used. This bowl is slab built on a mold, with a thrown footring. It's the biggest canvas (to borrow a metaphor from another art) we've had to decorate on so far, so there's a lot of work going into the planning. Here's the first stage. We'll keep updating along the way.

Wetting the rapidly-drying piece.

The decorating theme is going to be "saints on a half-shell" - inspired by gothic cathedrals, lots of naves for saints' images and stained-glass windows carved into the thick walls.

Here's Carrie carving a window into the wall. When it's finished, it will have lead lines built in and colored with underglazes.

That's all for now. Keep coming back for updates as this project comes together!

Another update: The Bride of Frankenstein is finally fully dry and ready to bisque. Soon we'll see if the ungainly planter survives for the next step!

The Cost of Pottery- Follow-Up

2009-06-25T20:39:00.000-04:00

Not everyone will agree that hand-made pottery (by that I mean functional ceramics) is now an art rather than a craft – that is, that it should be judged by the same artificial standards as art, rather than the practical standards (time, energy, materials, etc) of a craft. Here’s why I think so:

The problem with selling pottery – the reason this discussion is necessary at all – is that pottery, as it is currently understood and practiced, is in a middle ground. Pottery is, and has always been, a utilitarian item, one of the oldest utilitarian items produced by human beings. And it is still one of the things we use most frequently. The problem is, the technology of mass production means it is no longer necessary to hand-make pottery. Pottery can be machine-made faster, cheaper, and in some instances (as one of Philbeck’s commenters notes), more durably and at higher quality than hand-made.

So people still buy pottery. The “problem” is that they don’t buy hand-made pottery from craftspeople – they buy mass-produced pottery from Target. And that’s only a problem to the craftsperson – not to the consumer, the economy, or pottery broadly considered.

It’s a big problem for a craftsperson who wants to make a living from their craft, however. Everybody who has tried or is trying to make a living at a craft knows that. If you want to make accessible, useful pottery, there is no way to compete with Target in price, no matter how incredible your production schedule. And for the majority of people who drink coffee or bake casseroles, hand-made does not carry a value in itself. It’s not enough to educate people about how much work it takes to make a mug by hand – they can just ask, Why bother?

That means hand-made pottery must belong exclusively to an elite who can afford the higher prices hand-made requires because they appreciate the artistry of hand-made pottery.

Many have made the analogy that, for people who will pay $50 for a shirt or $200 for a sweater, paying $40 for a cup should not be a problem. In general, someone who will spend a lot of money on food might spend a lot of money on clothes, but when it comes to utilitarian items, what you will pay becomes a subjective decision depending on where you place your value. So that analogy breaks down. Some people will pay $100 for a pair of shoes but balk at buying a shirt for more than $10. Some will buy $15 a pound coffee but could care less to have quality clothes.

But hand-made pottery, because of its price and relative rarity (compared to mass-produced pottery), is no longer strictly a utilitarian item. It is a collector’s object. And if what you will pay for necessities is subjective, then what you collect is totally idiosyncratic. There is no reason a person’s preference for expensive food and clothes – things everyone needs – has to extend to hand-made pottery – something that, let’s face it, nobody needs.

(If I wanted to be really brutal, I could say that nobody needs pottery of any kind. We can use glass, we can use plastic, we can use metal – why pottery? Pottery is only necessary because we have a culture that says we should drink our coffee out of ceramic. Pottery is not a practical necessity, it is a cultural necessity.)

So this is pottery’s middle ground – on the one hand, a utilitarian item meant to be used, eventually broken, and finally discarded; on the other hand, an objet-d’art for an elite. And an object simply cannot be utilitarian and art. Art has always belonged to the elite, and if the object is meant for use, it has to be for an elite who can afford to break.it. Coffee mugs break. Plates break. Even plates used once a year or for special occasions break. A fellow pipe collector once answered the question “How much is too much to pay for a pipe?” with the same formulation: “If you’re afraid to smoke it, you paid too much.”

There are a lot of reasons you can decide a hand-made cup is worth the price. Maybe because it is hand-made, and you are aware of a person making it; maybe because it is one-of-a-kind, impossible to exactly reproduce; maybe because it is a beautiful object that appeals to you in an inexplicable way. But it has no more inherent, practical value than a mass-produced Target cup – or a glass jar, or a tin cup, or your own hands held together.

Hand-made pottery has to be considered art. Whatever the potter intends, he or she makes art, in the sense that hand-made pottery is expensive, rare, and only available or desirable to an elite that has developed a sense of taste and value the makes it significant. You have to decide that hand-made pottery is valuable, because on a purely practical level, a cup is a cup, and a $5 cup will hold water as well as a $40 cup.

The art market is an artificial market, because it is sustained not by people buying a necessity but by elite collectors buying desired objects. The value of a work of art depends on the artist’s fame, the desirability of the object, the rarity of the object – all kinds of factors unrelated to the practical aspects of creating it.

So on an art model, some potters make cups worth $70, some make cups worth $40, some $20, some $10. That’s not devaluing the product – it’s recognizing that artists who are starting out, still learning, with no known value, make objects worth less than known artists. That’s the reality of selling art. If you can price your cups at $40, do it. If you can price them at $90, do it. And if all you can get is $10, get $10.

The Cost of Pottery

2009-06-25T00:02:00.000-04:00

One of our favorite pottery bloggers, Ron Philbeck, opens a provocative question for discussion in his latest blog – what should pottery cost?

Since Carrie and I have been debating this exact question (prompted, like Philbeck, by Ayumi Hori’s opinions on the subject), I thought I would take it on here in the OCD blog.

Just to be honest, I’m not sure I can answer this question as a potter. Old Cat Died is a family business, but I don’t consider myself a potter – Carrie is the potter. But I am equipped to address this question with an analogy from the world of publishing.

No one – NO ONE – makes a living exclusively from writing poetry. Some poets teach poetry classes, some teach in other fields, some work 9-5 jobs, some write for other kinds of publication – but no one makes a living as a working poet.

In the 19th century, however, many people were able to live from publishing poetry. The reason is simple – at that time, an exploding publishing market and a public taste of poetry made it practically possible. Newspapers published poetry, magazines published poetry, every periodical published poetry. Poetry was entertainment, but more importantly, it was a part of daily life and culture. Poets were craftspeople providing a cultural necessity.

That is not possible today, because there poetry is not culturally necessary in the same way it was 150 years ago. So poetry today survives as an elite taste, poetry books (usually quite short) have tiny press runs and poets have to make a living in some other way. Poets live off the patronage of a set of elite poetry fans, who can afford to buy books that are priced well beyond books of comparable length and who have developed a taste for poetry that gives poetry value to them. For the culture at large, poetry has no value.

The situation is the same for hand-made pottery. For the culture at large, hand-made pottery has no value. Hand-made pottery has no inherent value, no practical value, no economic value. Its only value is an artistic, elite value. Its only value is the value of beauty, of craftsmanship, of cultural cache and status. Its value is the same value as any product of the humanities, whether that product is fine art, literature, dance, etc. And it’s time for potters to accept that.

Maybe it’s the wrong question, asking what potters need to do to convince people who will spend $200 on shoes to spend $40 for a coffee mug. You cannot create a market; you cannot create collectors. You cannot convince anyone logically, because realistically it is not logical to spend money on an unnecessary object.

Some practical advice makes sense – develop a relationship with buyers, find a patron. But one piece of advice, one that comes from the world of poetry, may be more apt – get a job. It may mean getting a degree and finding one of the scarce and violently fought-for academic jobs that can pay for your materials and cut your costs. It may mean working in other fields and struggling for time to produce pottery on your own time. It may mean finding an understanding spouse who will work to provide while you work to produce art. If you love your art, you will find a way to do it.

This is what poets – and a lot of other kinds of artists – have been doing for generations now. The era of the yeoman craftsperson is over – good old-fashioned American technology has made sure of that. And barring a cataclysm that destroys all modern technology and leaves us only mud and stone, that era will not return in our lifetimes.

So pottery needs a new business model. As another of Philbeck’s commenters tells us, trying to make a living as a professional potter will get you a working-class salary or worse – not enough to live the kind of comfortable life your collector/buyers live.

We all want to make a living doing what we love. But sometimes that means finding other ways to do what you love. This is not a problem of the economic downturn. It’s a problem of a capitalist manufacturing culture. And it is not going to change.

It will have to be craft that changes – not our pricing, not our advertising, not our networking, but our way of thinking about what we do. And that is not going to come from longing for a craft past or dreaming about a utopian future where craft is valued for its own sake. It has to come from looking at similar fields and learning from them.

Influences Part 2

2009-06-22T21:35:00.000-04:00

Carrie started the influences gallery, so I thought I'd add to it.

She didn't say much about R. Crumb and Ben Katchor - they're probably our two favorite cartoonists, or at least two of the top three. Katchor creates an odd world that's kind of New York in the 1950s and kind of his own mind, where minutia is everything and characters are driven by obsessive desires. His books and strips are so deeply realized that you don't really even care that there is no factory where metal grommets from old shoes are recycled for new shoes.

Crumb is a weird, sick, dangerous man, far braver about admitting it and making art out of it than any artist I can think of. Somehow his art turns his dirty mind into beauty, even when you're sickened by what he actually writes and draws.

To the list of top three cartoonists I would add Charles Schultz.

A mutual love of Peanuts was one of the things that brought us together, and believe it or not it has shaped both our lives and personalities. The most admirable thing is that after 50 years of merchandising and licensing Schultz's characters still retain their humanity and dignity, and that's a difficult accomplishment for people made up of, at most, ten lines each.

One of my biggest influences as an artist is William Blake, the greatest (and only) prophet England ever produced.

His work united word and image in a way that anticipated comics and electronic text, but has never really been equaled. I'm always borrowing words and poses from Blake, because he developed a language of the body that I wish I could speak.

And of course, let's not forget the neolithic sculptors who created the stone venus figurines that represent the oldest known human art.

Seriously. Besides creating beautiful images, they started humanity down the creative path. Who cares what they were for - idols, sexual aids, cave-man porn - they are gorgeous and, as far as I'm concerned, perfect expressions of womanhood (except for the creepy headless thing).

I, for one, subscribe to the minority opinion that they were actually carved by women looking down at their own bodies and depicting the perspective as they saw it subjectively. It makes sense to me -- it explains why so many of them are headless, and I think it's just old-fashioned chauvinism that the stone-age artists had to be men.

We've drawn and sculpted lots of them, and so what if they're becoming played-out in pop culure? They've survived 30,000 years, and we can hardly ruin them with overexposure.

Gallery Outing

2009-06-20T20:36:00.000-04:00

I'm told its my turn to write. Gabe's been doing a fine job don't you think? Though he says I need to add some Carrie flavor to the blog. OK, he didn't use that phrase -- I don't think I've ever heard him utter the word "flavor," but you get the idea. Well, this will mostly be pictures as I am not much of a writer.

So we checked out the Good Dirt gallery yesterday. OK, so I work there -- not exactly a real deal field trip, but I am usually sweating it out in the back loading kilns and glazing kid pots, not admiring our fine digs from local/regional potters and artisans. This prompted the following: I thought I would show some work (clay and otherwise) that I admire and I would say currently influence OCD. One artist is represented at Good Dirt Gallery, but good ol' Google Images lent me a hand with the rest.

Ted Saupe

Amy Sanders

Ben Katchor

R.Crumb

Danny Gregory

Obviously there are some common themes here -- drawings, surface decoration, the human figure. We don't have any fixation on farm equipment here though -- I just couldn't find a decent Danny Gregory example. He has some great books though, and I encourage anybody to pick one up. Gabe and I spent many of our first dates sitting in coffee shops doing drawing exercises from his Creative License book.

Good Dirt displays Ted Saupe and that is where I first saw his work. It was about a year ago and I had just started exploring the world of drawing on clay. Now I can name about a dozen clay artisans that do so- but nothing looks quite like a Saupe for me. Now if only I had 70 bucks for one of his little tea cups!

Amy Sanders is a recent find. It just so happens I married into a quilting-rich family. Gabe is a country boy from NC - everybody in his line quilted-- so we have a chest full of beautiful quilts-- everyday/wedding/first born--you name it! When we moved down to GA I talked Gabe's dad into passing on Aunt Vera's old Singer so I could try my hand at the family craft. Yeah, never got a round to that... I use the sewing table to dry mugs though. As corny as this sounds, I have an obsession from my teenage years with that Winona Ryder movie too -- How to Make An American Quilt. I probably just liked the fact that her Aunt and Grandma both toked up on the porch.

OK, getting off topic here-- what I am trying to say is that I really admire quilts and quilting and when I saw Amy Sanders applying it to clay I got really excited. I also really like that Paragon Kiln ad in EVERY Ceramic Monthly magazine with Earline Green, I think her name is? -- " a Texas Potter fires a 1300 pound quilt with our kilns..." You know who I am talking about if you flip through those magazines. So anyway, my recent sculpture, as Gabe posted about already, is quilted.

The other pictures above are from R. Crumb and Ben Katchor. We love sketching, we don't do it often enough (keep in mind we have Lucia at 6 months and Eva at 20 months) but we are such wannabe moleskin totin', graphic novel writin', beatniks. Yeah, I wanted to be a beatnik, I'm not gonna speak for Gabe (but i think he did too)...

The Bride of Frankenstein

2009-06-18T20:09:00.000-04:00

Carrie's taking a new sculpture class at Good Dirt, and this is the first work in progress. It's a sort of sculpture, sort of planter, in the shape of a watering can.

It's mostly slab-built, assembled in a quilting technique borrowed from Amy Sanders, a North Carolina potter.

(Incidentally, why are all the potters in North Carolina? Easy - clay. Everything's clay. Everything. And all the other potters are in Georgia. Why? Peaches.)

With the quilting construction, small pieces of rolled slab are attached to leave a pronounced seam on the outside, making it look like the pieces are sewn together.

The spout is wheel-thrown and manipulated to follow the curve of the body.

We decided to keep the top open rather than build a handle or a lid, because the quilted construction looks really cool from the outside. It was that decision that made it a planter for sure.

The shape was my contribution. Originally it was a rectangular box, but Carrie was bored with the shape and wanted to find something more interesting. I took it apart and played with it with the freedom of a person who doesn't know what the hell he's doing and found that the clay really wanted to curve, so I decided to go with it.

Carrie always tells me that clay has memory, and that's why it's not that big of a deal when I bump or squish a wet piece a little. So, if clay has memory, I guess it also has kind of a mind of its own. I think of it as a turtle - once it decides to go in one direction, you can't turn it around.

So, the planter curves.

This side is the part I think is the most beautiful - the texture Carrie impressed into the slab and the shape of the panel reminds me of a cathedral, and that gothic element kind of puts me in a particular frame of mind.

Add to that the fact that, from behind, the top looks like shoulders and the back panel like a woman's waist.

Add to that the fact that I took it apart, cut it up, and stitched it back together again, and you get the Bride of Frankenstein.

So from here, there's still a lot of superficial work to do. The two white panels are preparing for scraffito, and on the wide white panel (you can see it in the first picture) Carrie has a surprise that I don't want to give away quite yet. But you'll get to see the progress right here on the Old Cat Died blog.

The Naked, the Nude, and the Pottery - Part 3

2009-06-16T19:21:00.000-04:00

For us, the nude imagery just came naturally. We love the body, and we love drawing it and sculpting it. The motif started with our naked peeps, which were Carrie’s idea. She made them years before meeting me, mobiles with little naked women of different races, hair colors, and body shapes – little tributes to the varieties of womanhood she sculpted and strung for friends’ Christmas and birthday gifts. But after making a couple to look like us for Valentine’s Day, she felt inspired. What if we sold custom-made clay couples online? She’d been trolling Etsy for months talking about how she’d like to start her own store for her ceramics. She needed something simple, easy, and fun for Etsy, which is all about simple and fun (though not necessarily easy). Polymer clay naked people seemed perfect.

Some things we didn’t expect. One of my friends, seeing the website, said, “I was shocked. I thought it was really you for a minute.” We were surprised by the detail, even the relish with which people would describe their naked bodies. And once we started doing nudes on pottery, we were surprised by the reactions of customers at craft fairs – amusement and embarrassment.

Nudes on pottery was a natural extension of our tastes. It’s not like we came up with it – the ancient Greeks decorated pottery with nudes, sometimes artistic, sometimes erotic, sometimes outright pornographic.

We make no claims to be fine art. We’re more interested in making things that are beautiful, personal, alive and honest, things that people can make part of their lives.

So far, we’ve used the naked motif in four different media:

Naked Peeps – custom-order couples, mobiles, and magnets

The Naked Peeps came first. At first we considered OCD a separate enterprise from Carrie’s pottery, and the Naked Peeps were OCD’s main project. They’re made out of ordinary polymer clay, a medium always in danger of becoming kitsch, and we took special care to keep them from becoming crass and exploitative. We still think the Naked Peeps can be beautiful expressions.

Pebble People

Pebble People may be the weirdest thing we make. Carrie’s been doing them for years, painting scenes on reclaimed wood and gluing pebbles for heads. They’re all kinds of scenes – sketches from life, borrowed images from children’s books, images inspired by lines of poetry. Once, a painting of a naked little old man in the garden was bought very enthusiastically by an elderly woman who exclaimed, “It looks just like my husband! He loves to garden naked!”

See what we mean by being surprised at the things people will tell us?

Pottery

Extending our nude motif to pottery has actually been a very recent development. We’ve been using both colored underglazes and a combination of slips, scraffito, and underglazes. We’re still experimenting with techniques and effects, and so far it’s been an education in what is possible with different clay bodies, firing temperatures, and decorating elements. Our next experiment, as you’ve already seen, is decals – another learning experience. But you’ll have to wait to see the product.

The Naked, the Nude, and the Pottery - Part 2

2009-06-15T14:37:00.001-04:00

To oversimplify for the sake of argument, in our culture nudity can only be pornographic or artistic, and we frequently confuse the two.

Sally Mann and Jock Sturges have both been banned at various times, Mann for her photographs of her children playing naked in their mountain farm, Sturges for pictures of families and young people on nude beaches and communes. Janet Jackson is fined for an accidental titty on the Superbowl, the internet is filled with shots of celebrity “nipple slips” and “up-skirt” shots, and the rite of passage for every teenybopper female star is a nude or semi-nude photoshoot, which will inevitably be attended by hours of drummed-up controversy.

A few weeks ago, a fantastic incident – at the Cesar awards, France’s Oscars, a young French comedienne, in character as a ditsy starlet, came out to present an award with one of her breasts “accidentally” exposed. The Bristish actress Emma Thompson (the British having much the same cultural confusion as us – witness Benny Hill and Victorian prudery) came onstage and covered her up, obviously feeling terribly embarrassed for the girl.

The French must have thought that was hilarious – a comic satire of prurient media prudery aided and abetted by an unwitting (and surprising) prude.

Or consider an even more recent incident. Tom O’Bedlam, a pseudonym for an unknown spoken-word actor who posts himself reading his favorite poems on YouTube, had a posting removed because it included a nearly 100-year old photograph of a nude Sri Lankan girl to accompany a poem about the islands. YouTube’s explanation verged on the absurd – if a user flags a video, it is electronically scanned for “flesh tones” and other signs of nudity, and removed if it meets the criteria it is removed.

Obviously, this broad definition is designed to filter out pornography. But a computer program has no discernment and cannot distinguish between pornography and art, or between art and anthropology. Ralph Bakshi’s racist, misogynistic, and unapologetically pornographic cartoon adaptation of R. Crumb’s Fritz the Cat, however, is available in its entirety on YouTube. Enormous animated anthropomorphic animal penises and vaginas, apparently, don’t tip off YouTube’s filter.

But even when the filters are human, the criteria can be laughable. When we first posted oldcatdied.com, our hosting company took it down within 24 hours. The offending image was of a nude male figurine, obviously not real and even without a face. Turns out the hosting company was based in Utah, which has draconian Mormon-mandated anti-smut laws, and that no nudity whatsoever is permitted – even artistic, even historical. I angrily asked a customer service representative, “So if we took a vacation and took a picture of Michelangelo’s David, we couldn’t post it?” That’s right.

Obviously, we got a new hosting company.

Speaking of Michelangelo – when a dirty-minded cardinal expressed his disapproval of the nude saints in the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgment, Michelangelo painted him into Hell, nude and sporting donkey’s ears - with a serpent biting his penis. That’s probably the most delicious revenge I can think of. Sadly, the church eventually had another artist paint clothes on the saints. But Mike still had his revenge hundreds of years later when the church paid millions of dollars to restore the painting to its original state.

The Naked and the Nude and the Pottery - Part 1

2009-06-14T20:28:00.000-04:00

We’ve been asked about it over and over. Yes, we do a lot of naked people in our art.

It was the main thing a reporter from the local newspaper wanted to talk about when she interviewed us for the features section. Granted, the article was about the custom-order nude figurines we make (Naked Peeps, so named by a customer). My answers didn’t make it into the paper as I had hoped – it comes out as some absurd utopian mush about freeing people and making nakedness a part of casual life. And the reporter presents it as a joke – the headline, “Couple’s Art Proves Everybody Looks Funny Naked.”

No, dammit! Everybody looks beautiful naked!

The human body is the single most glorious thing in the known universe, the most perfectly designed machine and the most magnificent, soulful of creatures. As a Christian, I think the most dangerous thing in Christian doctrine is the neo-Platonic separation of soul from body – the beauty of the body is that it has and IS soul, vitality, goodness, and that we cannot corrupt the body – only our minds.

And most of us just elbow each other and make eyes when we see one stripped.

We see the same thing every time we do a craft show. People walk by, snicker, point, turn red, grab their friends, pick pieces up, tell us how cool it is, how funny, how liberating – and then buy nothing. How many times has someone picked up a bowl, a cup, a magnet, and said “I have to have this, it’s so beautiful,” then, in the end, cannot bring themselves to buy naked pottery in public.

As I said to the reporter, our culture’s attitude toward the human body is confused and diseased. We are the inheritors of a mixed tradition – Puritan anti-body, anti-sex rigidity; Enlightenment Neo-Classical glorification of the objective, idealized body; and working-class bawdiness of the kind embodied in Hogarth. Sometimes these traditions clash in amusing ways, as with Greenough’s Neo-Classical statue of George Washington shirtless in a toga, which was rejected by the government that commissioned it in 1840, probably because they were intimidated by Washington’s well-developed, shaved pecs.

Imagery in the Pop-Rotted Imagination

2009-06-13T08:05:00.000-04:00

We don’t want to produce kitsch. We don’t want to be ironic. We don’t want to be arch, disconnected, self-conscious, or sarcastic. Most of all, we don’t want to make pop culture references.

Too bad I can find a Simpsons’ reference for almost every situation.

Let’s face it – we are middle-class white Americans from the tail end of Generation X, and we are saturated in pop culture. It provides the context for every social interaction, for every intellectual exercise, for every conversation and argument. We fight with our spouses with scenes from sitcoms and 80's teen movies in our minds. We play with our children wondering if they will think of us as the parents from “Growing Pains” or the parents from “Married with Children.” On some level, we really wish our pets talked and our cars turned into robots.

Better writers than I have considered our generation’s borderline-diseased fixation on the pop-culture detritus of our childhoods, the combination of nostalgia for the simple, safe leisure of our suburban summers and over-developed, too-early cynicism that results from an education by TV, colliding with unprepared entry into a world that does not meet the expectations formed by our pop-coddled upbringings. It is this psychology that results in our fascination with Saturday-morning cartoon shows, Saturday-afternoon B-movie cheese, and all of the garish merchandise that we saw advertised on those programs. It results in adults wearing Thundercats T-shirts, hanging “Supervan” posters on the wall, and having children for the express purpose of showing them The Smurfs.

And we at Old Cat Died were raised on the same diet of TV, comic books, teen magazines and trashy, product-placement focused children’s movies.

So when we think about how to decorate our pottery, what Pebble People to paint or how our Naked Peeps should look, we are walking a fine and often imperceptible line. At what point does cute or appealing turn to cheese and kitsch?

Let’s face it – there is no such thing as originality. There are no original images. There are no unique images. Especially in a media- and image-saturated culture like ours. There are billions of images free-floating in our collective consciousness ready to be plucked out of the air and drawn, painted, sculpted, or carved.

So, when we use cloth diapers and Carrie starts drawing clotheslines in her sketchbook, it’s only a matter of time and a Google search before she finds another potter already drawing clotheslines on pots. When Carrie puts doors on bowls and cups, there’s no doubt that someone else has a whole door motif. It’s a vicious thing, really – when someone beats you to an image, it becomes theirs by the curious laws of temporality, but in reality, anyone could have drawn a robot on a teapot first. The first to do it is original. The second is an imitator.

But we all draw our images from pop culture to some degree. Few of us know what an owl looks like except from Tootsie-Roll Pop commercials and public-school educational cartoons, and even when we’ve seen the real thing, the simulacrum is more compelling.

And, since we all draw our images from pop culture, we are all on the verge of kitsch.

We’re all going to be tempted to draw, paint, or sculpt robots at some point in our lives. If we consider ourselves artists, the question is how to draw robots as a genuine personal, social, and cultural expression, rather than a knee-jerk response to the pressure of having to create out of a pop-rotted imagination.

Pop-culture nostalgia is a tricky gnome. As soon as it gives (common experience, unity, memory, the momentary joy and comfort of recognition), it takes away (irony, snideness, the bleak recognition that our innocence is behind us). While the imagery – cheesy surf T-shirts, big-eyed Japanese cute, robots, space ships, whatever – belongs to all of us, in belonging to all of us, it belongs to no one. It cannot be taken truly personally. It cannot be made one’s own. It can only be regarded from the outside. Ironically.

With Old Cat Died Carrie and I find ourselves constantly confronting this problem. Almost daily while sketching or decorating pots we ask each other “Is this kitchy? Is this ironic? Is it too hip? Is it too cheesy?” One of the pitfalls of coming from a self-aware and ironic culture is second-guessing yourself (and fighting the brain farts that remind you “Pitfall” was an awesome Atari game).

We’ve tried to combat the problem in different ways. I’ve embraced the inner child who wanted to be a cartoonist, and designed pieces that bring cartooning front and center, including panels, bold primary color and narrative. But then Carrie asks, “Why is it pottery? Just draw comics.” Carrie has made a conscious effort to explore personal imagery from our daily lives and childhood, taking great care to focus on imagery that is unique to her experience and not our pop-culture common knowledge. To which I can say, “But how much of our experience was even unique?” Did anyone of our class, race and generation have an unmediated childhood experience without TV and teen movies to show us who we were supposed to be?

There is probably no way to solve this problem. It’s one of those problems that has to be negotiated, not solved; treated, not cured. We will continue to second-guess the images that pop into our heads and into our hands; we will always wonder if we’re being ironic without meaning to, or whether irony is just our generation’s version of sincerity in the face of corporate fascism. In the meantime, I’ll be drawing Yoshi in my sketchbook and worrying whether it’s hip.

Google Images and the Artist’s Filing Cabinet

2009-06-11T20:56:00.000-04:00

A story: when Carrie saw Crumb, Terry Zwigoff’s documentary about the great underground cartoonist R. Crumb, she went out and bought a digital camera to start a file of stock images. This was a while back – you know, the days when a top of the line digital camera boasted an impressive 3 megapixel resolution. She watched Crumb sketching incessantly in public and as cool as that image seemed, the movie also made it pretty clear that Crumb looked like a weirdo to everyone around him. Not wanting to call attention to herself by sketching in public, Carrie thought a camera would be more helpful – she could take quick pictures of things she wanted to draw later in the privacy of her own apartment.

The inspiration faded pretty quickly. The camera itself was slow, bulky, and inconvenient, and besides, she began to feel silly carrying the ugly, awkward thing. It just wasn’t as cool as an old-fashioned SLR. And it was just as embarrassing to be seen taking pictures of everything as to be seen sketching everything. Bottom line, she was self- conscious. She was also very fortunate that another great innovation appeared around the same time: GOOGLE.

The filing cabinet stuffed with reference photos used to be a basic furnishing in the cartoonist’s studio – and the painter’s, the sculptor’s, pretty much any artist. I remember vividly a young adult cartooning book I had as a kid, a “how to be a cartoonist” primer that had an entire chapter about developing a stock photo collection. That was my inspiration – gathering hordes of cuttings from newspapers, magazines, books, and so on, categorizing them, and filing them away for future reference, really appealed to my obsessive-compulsive tendencies. And collecting magazines and newspapers for their images lasted long past my determination to be a cartoonist.

But seriously, who still needs to do that? If you have internet access, you have the biggest collection of reference images ever. We’re all like Steven Wright in his old joke about having the world’s largest seashell collection. I have the world’s largest reference photo collection. Maybe you’re seen it – I keep it on Google.

There is, quite simply, no need for a reference file anymore. If you need to draw a dog, you can immediately find millions of photos of every breed developed by man. If you want to draw a fire escape, like Carrie did just this afternoon, and there’s none close by, you can find pictures from every conceivable angle.

Granted, reference photos can’t replace drawing from life – they were never intended to. The point of a reference collection is to aid experience, to remind you of things you’ve seen but can’t quite remember, to give you access to pictures besides those in front of you or in your head. And just think how lucky you are, next time you Google “dachshund,” that you don’t have to go find one of those yippie things just so you can draw it.

Cartooning on Clay!

2009-06-09T22:33:00.000-04:00

Old Cat Died has been experimenting with new techniques and images, looking for new ways to glorify the human body and beautify your world. And we’ve got lots of stuff up on Etsy for you to peruse, admire, buy, and gift.

We’re most excited about a new media: decals. Carrie’s been talking about using decals on pottery for years, and finally Old Cat Died has a new printer and a bunch of decal paper to experiment with new images.

First, inspired by the merchandising juggernaut of Peanuts (one of OCD’s less-visible but strongest influences), we’ve decided to begin our decal project with a pottery series featuring The Sparkling Bros. Carnival, Gabe’s work-in-progress comic. Now you might wonder, why create merchandise for an unfinished comic? Well, in today’s commercial climate, why not? When most trailers are better than the movies they prelude, and marketing campaigns can stand alone as works of pop art, it somehow seems right that Gabe’s wistful, eccentric brainchild greet the world on the unique products of Carrie’s hands.

(Okay, admittedly Hector and Purple Myrtle, our main characters, have already popped up as Pebble People and Love Shack denizens. But those were isolated products of Gabe’s obsessive-compulsive drawing. We’re talking about a full-scale project here.)

It’s a fusion of good old-fashioned storytelling, alternative comics, iconography and artcraft, and we think you’ll get immersed in the world of Hector, Purple Myrtle, Renaldo the Soothsayer, and all the rest of the Sparkling Bros. Carnies.

Spring Craft fair 2009

2009-04-26T15:52:00.000-04:00

The Athens Indie Craftstravaganzaa is happening Saturday May 2nd, 11am to 7pm and Sunday, May 3rd from noon until 5pm. Come support LOCAL and HANDMADE goods! Also, this is the first time that the Craftstravaganzaa is two days! Come by the OCD tent and mention this blog entry for a free goodie from us (til we run out of course). Same place as November-- behind the 40 Watt/Agora thrift store, downtown Athens.

OCD BLOG

2009-03-05T21:05:00.000-05:00

Old Cat Died is blogging! Just like you, your significant other, your mother, your aunt and all your cousins, that friend of your dad’s who always says something racist at summer barbeques, and that creepy guy downstairs with the combover who looks like he’s 50 years old but orders pizza almost every night and is always muttering to himself!

And Old Cat Died! We’re here to tell you all sorts of things about our life. For instance, we just went two nights without power because of a freak Athens GA snowstorm and spent a night desperately filling the fireplace with wood to keep our two small children warm. Or this: we both need haircuts very badly, but can’t find time to go. Gabe’s bald spot is showing, though. Time to do something about that.

Or this: Old Cat Died is going to be featured in the Athens Banner-Herald on Sunday, March 8, 2009. We’re very excited to be exploiting the local news media for our own attention-seeking and commercial benefit, and the Banner-Herald couldn’t have been nicer. We had a couple of enjoyable conversations on the phone with reporter Merritt, who was considerate enough not to come over and spread the disease she picked up from an elementary school. And Tricia, the photographer, complimented our babies like crazy.

Anyway, we hope a little exposure (that’s a pun – see, we make lots of nude figures) will let people in Athens know that we’re here too, toiling away at our little naked peeps and love shacks, and whatever else we can decorate with tiny breasts and penises. Well, maybe not toiling away. Kind of just doing it when we get a spare minute. A spare minute when we’re not blogging. Or filling out surveys on Facebook. Oh, those Facebook surveys.

Don’t miss our mass-media sellout debut!

Welcome to our Blog

2009-02-26T08:10:00.000-05:00

Old Cat Died joins the blogging world.