Grotesque

I've made a grotesque thing.

I've been mucking about with clay for a few months now over at St. Pete Clay. It took about two months for me to get back to something like the skill level I had back in college, but now I can crank out a series of fairly decent items of reasonable size. I'm still working up to really large things, three gallon jars and such, but I'll get there eventually.

The three gallon jars have been my toughest project of late. Jugs I can handle (though the biggest I have now is one gallon and is far too heavy); pickle jars and apple butter pots are coming along, and the pitcher I made this afternoon actually looks rather nice. But the three-gallon jar... ah, it's very hard.

The way the old folk potters would have made such a jar (and larger ones; one North Carolina potter is known to have turned a 15-gallon jar, which is just incredible) is, they'd throw a tall but fairly stout cylinder, remove it from the wheel, and set it aside. Then they'd throw another one the same width but slightly less stout. Then set that aside. Work on other things for a few minutes until the clay sets up slightly, then take the stout half and set it back on the wheel, score the rim and add slip, and then cut the base off of the other half and attach it to the lower portion. After fusing the two halves, you could then make one pull on the lower half to give a little extra size, and then push out the sides to make an appropriate form.

The way I've been doing lately is, I throw two cylinders, fuse one to the other, and then destroy the result by working it too hard. The first one I made, I didn't let the clay stiffen up and it sagged down and fell over. The second I made, I left the walls of the bottom half too thin and it collapsed under the weight of the top half. The third one I made Monday evening; everything was going great, but then I accidentally jabbed the side of one of my rubber throwing ribs into the pot and set the whole thing off center. Try as I might, I couldn't save it. But, since it never actually fell apart or fell over, I went ahead and saved it until today to see if I could do anything to make it better.

Well, I couldn't. There was nothing to do; it was off-center, had two thin patches in the walls that are in danger of breaking anyway, and the rim wasn't even close to level. But it's really damn big, and I like big pots, so I decided to salvage it.

Back in the 19th Century (the era I draw my inspiration from), potters occasionally made a series of jugs and jars of various sizes with horrible disfigured faces on the side. Big round eyes with scary-looking pupils in them (off-center, too), hooked noses, fat sneering lips--the things are awful. They're called "grotesques." Their exact purpose is not entirely clear, but it's assumed that you'd put things in there that you didn't want the children getting into.

This jar seemed to be the perfect candidate to be a grotesque, so I made eyes and a nose and lips and little pointed beard (because, you know, in Star Trek parallel universes, everyone in the evil universe always has a little pointed beard). It's very ugly. I had one of the other potters at the studio verify this for me ("Why did you do that?" she asked). And it's just bloody terrific. So I'm going to take my camera to the studio tomorrow so I can take pictures of some of these things before they sell. They must be seen by the wider world