Ansó, 28 March
by Isabel Isherwood - 21:18 on 28 March 2017
I’m making reasonable progress with my pottery at the moment. After Christmas I raised the issue with Blanca that while I wanted to make things and learn more, I was worried about accumulating too many pots that I wouldn’t be able to bring home in our already heavily-laden car. She said she’d been thinking about this too, and to my delight and astonishment she suggested that I should consider the rest of my time working with her as an apprenticeship, in which I effectively work for her in return for tuition. Anything I make which is good enough she will sell. So she has been setting me tasks. Each week I have a different theme, one week small bowls, the next bowls with a broad rim, then tiny cream jugs, then mugs….. learning new skills and progressing gradually to bigger things (bigger is harder – the clay is harder to get centred on the wheel in the first place, and harder to manage once it is there). The great thing about making the same shape over and over again for a week is that you can really see the improvement from one item to the next; each time you complete one you can see how you could have done it a bit better – and you have chance to go straight back and make another and try to get it right there and then.
The thing I’m finding hardest is the final stage of painting the fired pots. This is a surprise, as the reason I thought I might like to have a go at pottery in the first place was because I had some ideas of designs I thought would look good on ceramic and wanted a chance to try….. In fact I’m loving the process of shaping the clay and struggling rather with the painting. This is because the paint we use is basically very wet pigmented clay, which lends itself to quick decisive sweeps of the brush but not to detail. Once you’ve painted something any attempt to tweak it just makes it look messy. I can’t seem to develop a style of painting that works well with this type of paint.
All Blanca’s pottery is either pale cream stoneware or white porcelain, which she fires then paints, then glazes with a clear glaze and fires again. I am trying to work out a few types of design which I can manage to apply cleanly. However I am also aware that the realm of pottery painting and glazing is vast, and that I’d really benefit in the future from spending time with some other potters and learning about coloured glazes or different types of paints. My instinct is to choose deep, bright, strong colours, and while I love Blanca’s style of pottery, her method of painting and glazing lends itself much more to pale pastel colours than the deep colours I prefer, and inevitably always has a pale background. So I will have to learn some more techniques and develop my own style over time……. Which will be fun!
This picture shows a few of Blanca's porcelain cups.....
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