What is my Art all about?

Art Forms

    Most of my life I have been involved in various types of so-called arts & crafts, in fact one of my earliest memories is of making clay jack-o-lanterns in kindergarten. I have done leather work, lapidary, copper enamel, copper tool, ceramic tile, reed basketry, lanyard weaving, and other crafts in elementary and jr. high.  I learned photography while in high school, and dental laboratory in the Air Force (which taught me the principles of lost wax casting of plastic, gold & stainless steel.) I learned to slipcast clay while in the Air Force, and to throw pots in my first semester at Central Michigan University. When I returned to Central after graduation in 1976, I first added an art minor to my teaching degree. I started in ceramics and was gradually drawn into sculpture over the next few years, until I had a dual concentration in both. My road as an artist started in functional ceramics, led into sculptural ceramics, to sculpture in clay, through some video experiments, and now into computer graphics.

General  

    Most of my work consists of wheel thrown porcelain forms based on organic patterns of microscopic and macroscopic organisms.  Some are based on seed pods, teeth, pollen, sea animals, squash, and even watermelon, but as the development proceeds, they merge and take on new forms of possible and imaginary organisms.   All are hand made, one of a kind pieces, usually done in a series, so there might be some similarity among some pieces, but no two are ever exactly alike. 

The Process

Most are started as a "closed form", which means that I start to throw a bottle, but I close off the opening and trap air inside the form.  I can then push and pull the shape until I get what I want, often distorting it completely from the basic form I started with.  Next I add clay to the form or cut holes into it, to further change it into what I have in mind.  This all takes place over several days after I threw the orriginal form, and as it starts to dry I evualate it several times and many do not survive this and are recycled, with only the best ones making it to the first firing. 

Finally I get to the point of deciding on a glaze to finish the piece, and it not only involves color and texture but also the type of firing as well.  Some are High Fired in a gas kiln to cone 9-10, which is about 2300 to 2600 F.  Some are Low fired in an electric kiln at cone 06 which is about 1800 F. While some are Raku fired in a portable gas kiln to about 1800 F, then removed while still glowing hot, and put into a barrel of burnable material like leaves or paper or sawdust.  This process developed in Japan results in some very interesting colors and textures and is a very difficult process to completely control.  I can fire ten pots with the same glaze and get ten different colors and textures depending on many different factors, many of which I can't control.             
Seed Pods

    For most of my life, I have been both attracted to and very allergic to, large numbers of trees, grasses, and bushes.  I have refused to become trapped indoors just because of these allergies, and as I began to develop my own sculptural forms, I examined both macroscopic and microscopic forms in nature.  By examining the form and structure of seeds and other natural objects, I found great beauty in these simple forms, and developed simple organic sculptural designs, based on slightly abstract versions of these natural objects.

Teeth

    Because I had a great deal of dental anatomy at one time, I decided to do some teeth, and try to run it into abstract.  So I threw a bicuspid, molar and third molar.  I Liked them and did just enough detail to hint at teeth. Later I did a few in the white stone ware.  But I hesitated continuing into the direction I had started, because it seemed to lead through detail into funk art. I instead tried to be less detailed, more vague and abstract, but I didn’t like the product and scraped most of the attempts after looking at them awhile.  I may come back to this in the future, possibly with porcelain.


Gumball Machines

    I had been looking at gumball machines for some time, trying to figure out how the mechanism worked.  Finally several years ago I saw a few wooden machine in the bookstore and it showed the mechanism, so I sketched them and started playing with the ideas on paper and I worked out several ways to do it, simplifying it more and more until I made one out of scraps of wood.  Eventually I decided to develop it into a sculptural form, while keeping the functional aspect.  I think that working with wood puts certain limits on me, while ceramics could really set me free.  I also need to break away from the glass wine bottles too, into another form such as porcelain bottles or hand blown glass, maybe one day.  I stopped making them after a local shop class teacher copied some of my designs and started having his class produce them as shop projects.  This taught me the value of registering copyrights with the federal copyright office.

Skip Bleecker
Mt. Pleasant, Michigan