Tuesday, October 18, 2011

For a Good Cause







Coming up here in Tampa on November 5th is the annual Zoofari at Lowry Park Zoo. It's a fundraising event for the Zoo. Lowry Park Zoo is a fun place to visit and has great activities for the kiddos. This year I'll be participating in their Artfari and will be selling my wares during the Zoofari event. It runs from 6:00 pm to 11:00 pm. As part of the deal to get a reduced price for the space, artists were asked to donate a piece of art for the silent auction. The piece had to be animal themed, best to relate to the zoo theme. So I went to work on a tic tac toe game using tiggers. Orange and white tigers to be exact. Hopefully someone attending will fall in love and bid high on this piece. Just so we're clear, I used no molds in the making of this piece, just my two little hands. I did roll out the clay for the board, but it was all from moist clay. Each tiger is slightly different from the next because they were human formed... I'm not a machine!!! Maybe a dancing machine, but not a ceramic machine.

Evolution







I know that man's evolution was slow to get us to where we are today, standing upright, able to type our thoughts on the computer and read the hundreds of e-mails that we receive on a daily basis. In artwork there's an evolution as well. I've realized that the evolution of my teapots has been a slow one, not quite as slow as the evolution of man, but slow none the less. I've been making some minor tweeks to my fishy teapots lately. The most recent tweek is to try to give the girls more movement. Almost a feeling that they're trying to jump out of the water. I'm making their base section taller so that I can get more clearance on the tails and making a more exagerated turn of the head. These changes, I think, give the girls more personality. I've been on a roll with teapot making and have one new one that I just finished, one that's drying post-construction, and components for two more under plastic. It helps to make the new teapots close in time so that my thought process continues it's momentum. These changes may be so minor that to the eye of the beholder that it may not be apparent, but to me I see these modifications as a step on the path to evolution.