Still getting the hang of this

The story behind this blog.

I have gotten sick of tinkering with my current web site. I am no HTML wizard and my ideas for it got ahead of me.
I have a lot of little projects in process and I thought this might be more spontaneous in terms of sharing them, as I go along. So, I'm not so much a "blogger" as a really lazy webmaster. I will link this blog on my main site and that's it for now on there.

Anyway.

I quit my job in September 2004 as ceramics tech at the Richmond Art Center in California. I had been there for 5 years, I'll be 35 in October, and tech was never my #1 career choice. I always figured 35 was kind of a cutoff date. If you're still a tech after 35, then you're a lifer. I still teach at RAC, sculpture, raku, and saggar classes.

When I left as tech I had a whole bunch of pieces that I was eager to finish up, and develop further. However, when I was in my studio a month or two later, I realized I hated most of them, and they were progressing badly. Bad news. I'll probably salvage a few.

I was in a slough of despond, for a bit. I decided to just make things that cheered me up. I started with books in clay, and fired them in different ways, mainly saggar. Now I am making cameras. I download pictures from ebay of cool old cameras and make replicas in clay. At first, I was trying to make them up, but this is working out much better.

The first ones I did I wedged into what I thought was stain. They looked so cool before firing, that of course I completely neglected to take pictures of them. They came out of the kiln at RAC and they were nude. What I thought was stain, was actually paint pigment and completely fired off. (One of the advantages of being a tech is scoring different random art supplies from students who don't come back and clean out their lockers or cabinets.)
So those didn't pan out, and I ran them through raku firing. I have pictures, which I will post today.

I am having trouble interfacing with this program a bit. I am using their recommended program "Hello" to send images to the blog page. But when it previews the blog page, it opens up in Internet Explorer, which I otherwise never use, being a Mozilla person. So then I have to open up Mozilla to text edit. Whatever. I'll get the hang of it. Maybe I will just bite down and wipe IE from my drive and let "Hello" try to figure it out. They don't have any option to switch browsers that I can find.