Lead, linked to the planet Saturn by alchemy and with the glyph ♄, inherits the planets attributes in astrology.

The god that Saturn is named after was the god of Time. The Greeks called the god “Chronus” which is where we get words like “chronograph”- aka a timer that counts forwards. Greeks and Romans worshiped this god primarily for good harvests, which is why Saturn is portrayed with a sickle or scythe. Time allows things to grow, but likewise, it brings death as well, which is why astrologically the planet relates to death.

I believe that as a result, this why the grim reaper carries a scythe.

Looking back at lead, which has the power to change things dramatically,

Lead = Saturn = ♄ = Death.

So aesthetically, within a glaze, poisonous lead is linked with death.

☉ = our Sun, Solar = Gold (this was when they believed earth was at the center of the universe)

☽ = our moon, Luna = Silver

☿ = Mercury = Mercury (that’s why this element is called Mercury)

♀ = Venus = Copper

♂ = Mars = Iron

♃ = Jupiter = Tin

♄ = Saturn = Lead

In later times, ♂ and ♀ later began to symbolize the male and female genders as well. Then again, Mars, the war god was like the epiphany of the masculine and Venus, the goddess of love, the epiphany of the feminine. Also recall the saying “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”.

Still I came to a realization this quarter that by adding copper and iron to glazes, aesthetically I was engendering them:

feminine = ♀ = Venus = Copper, therefore Copper was feminine by association!

masculine = ♂ = Mars = Iron, therefore iron was masculine by association!

It seems strange, but with this logic, a male glaze contains iron and a female glaze contains copper.

While working with these colorants within glazes I noticed that no other colorants behave quite the same way, and yet they behave so much alike. They both produce bright vivid colors under reduction firing while the other colors dull or remain basically unaffected.

Their similar behavior, and aesthetic / psychological links seem to coincide to set them apart from the rest of the group of elements.

Jim didn’t write this—instead, I found it over on PostSecret.com. Still, I thought it was worth putting on here.

Carlin’s “Words are just words” philosophy can also hold true in art. When you look at a work of art, you’re looking at an artist’s context. There’s idea, thought and meaning put into the work, and it’s up to us as the audience to do one of two things: decipher the original artistic meaning behind the piece, or develop an entirely different one completely personal and from within based on our own ideas, thoughts and meanings.

Language and art aren’t so different when you think about it.

So whenever I start a painting, I have to think about it. When I got this idea, I found myself in this position:

 Ok so I have an idea now, thanks to the extra blood in my head. Don’t ask me why or how I ended up in this position either, I just did.

Now I have a canvas I pre-prepped with gesso. Here’s me next to it, showing you the size. Yea I’m out of focus, but I’m not pretty and you’re not missing much.

 Next, I draw out what I’m going to paint on the canvas. I don’t need detail, I just want shapes so I can get my proportions correct.  I guess this is where all the art teachers turn to their pupils and go “See? what did I tell you!” and the students go “aww fine I’ll do it alerady! sheesh!” Believe me as much as I want to start glopping it on, I need to get this done first.

My first layer of colored paint is actually gesso mixed with cadmium red, an inorganic pigment derived from cadmium oxide.  I make two colors- one for the background and one for the main subject only differing from the background by about half as much cadmium.

Cadmium oxide is a toxic substance. Don’t allow the water you rinse it with to land on anything you eat off of, and if it does, run it through the dishwasher before eating off of it.

For the second layer, I mix two organic pigments together: Quinaicndrone Red and Hansa Yellow. These pigments are comprised of complex carbon-based molecules. The red pigment Gamma Quinacindrone tends to mix more brightly with other paints than cadmium, and also tends to run more transparent than cadmium. The same goes for the yellow pigment, yellow arylide, found in hansa yellow. I also mix thalo (or pthalo) blue, an organic pigment containing copper phthalosyenide with a little bit of red to form a very indigo pigment. I wind up with a caution-cone orange and a dark purple. These semi-complimentary pigments mix to form a very pretty and dull green. I make a smooth gradient on the canvas with these two pigments, and then its on to the next step:

    For your examination, here are two pictures. The one on the left is a picture of a forest in Indiana, and the one on the right is a picture of a forest in California. I wanted to compare both of them to show you how watered down the colors of my birth land is. I lived in Indiana for about 9 years and then moved to California, returning every summer and winter for a time to visit my father. The visits were not enjoyable to me, first of all, because my father and I don’t get along, but also because of the difference in color.

I believe that this affected me psychologically, giving me a natural craving for vivid colors and high contrast within my artwork. I was psychologically jaded to those colors while growing up, and now I find pleasure in creating realities on a canvas or on a piece of paper with very high contrast or color.

There’s a saying I heard from one of my art professors that I liked. It went: “The difference between being an art student or an amateur and a genuine, full fledged artist is that the former creates works from what s/he sees, while the latter creates works for what s/he wants to see.”

This is of course just an opinion, as the definition of a professional artist is the sort of thing to have a small philosophical debate about, however, in this case, I agree with it. Nor am I trying to glorify myself, I have yet to achieve 100% independence from creating things from what I see, but so far I feel I’ve already made at least some of that journey.

The problem is that I am finding it hard to think of good things to paint or draw because I am too used to thinking in terms of sculpture. I can think of a subject easily enough, but I can’t think of a significant background to place the subject into. If I can’t think of a good background then why paint or draw at all? I may as well just sculpt it!

I have this concept that whatever medium I choose to work in, I exploit it to its fullest extent. For example, with bronze I would exploit form, shape and the center of gravity. With clay I exploit texture. I use oils for smooth shapes and I exploit acrylics for their layering capabilities since they dry much faster than oils. I would therefore exploit sculpture to portray a piece solely based on a subject, while with a painting, I exploit my capabilities to fix lighting and backgrounds that would interact with my sculpture.

Perhaps I am thinking too hard? Perhaps I am worrying too much? I have made plenty of pictures before that were purely about the subject and had backgrounds of little significance other than to enhance the subject. Perhaps I need to just loosen up.

I wanted to obtain a pigment that would oxidize red, and at the time I had a hypothesis that if I were to add a certain amount of a Vanadium stain to any glaze that fired pink, I would obtain the red that I sought.

I arranged nine tests that fired like this:

I wanted this glaze to flux properly at cone 5, and it was firing a little dry, so I wanted to try adding Nepheline Syenite (nicknamed neph sy) to the glaze in order to melt it a little more. The columns labeled A, B, C all contained increasing amounts of nepheline syenite. Rows 1, 2, 3 contain gradually increasing amounts of Vanadium yellow stain. Unfortunately, I was very tired and also ramped vadadium yellow in columns A,B,C, and I tried to fix this by adding even more vanadium to 2 and 3 so I could get a good gradient going. To further the chaos, the kiln I fired it in over fired by a couple of cones- it could’ve been up around cone 8 or 9 for all I know.

At least some good came out of this. I was happy with the results of A2, B1, and B3. I also know that I can’t add more than 10% neph sy to the glaze or the pink-creating environment is destroyed and you get what you see- brown. I also know vanadium is a good stain that minds its own business and doesn’t mess around with the nickel stain.

Starting in the fall, I will continue to research this tile, and attempt to recreate the glazes that pleased me.

I think I’ve gotten to the point where I’m really going to want a pickup truck to load sculptures into. I had to take this sculpture into my back seat and buckle it in to keep it from flying forward if I braked! On top of that I had to roll down the window in order to prevent one of the elbows from shattering my side view window from vibrations. I had to rotate the sculpture slightly so that I could shift my stick out of park and into drive.

The thing probably weighs about 100-150 lbs- I mean it is really heavy- despite the fact that I built it extremely thin and light, and all the water that was making it really heavy was purged from it in the firing process.

Hmm… lets see… the other hardship I had to face was the rag on the face. I soaked it in white engobe slip (engobe means that its purpose is solely for coloration), and after the cloth was saturated in the stuff I placed it on his face. Because time was very short- I had to construct it within the span of a week or so, I had to glaze it in green ware form. The glaze I used was a shiny boron glaze- which created the streaks of white. Because I fired it like this two things happened:

First, the clay shrank greatly since it was loosing water during the firing and the platelets were binding together. Also the organic cloth material was being burned off. As the water and carbon emigrated from the head, it pushed against the glaze which was fighting to stay adhered to the piece. In the end, the glaze couldn’t shrink with the piece as it cooled so it formed an eggshell thin layer of basically pure glass a few millimeters above the surface of the head. This cracked when I touched it and flaked off.

I had to buy a vial of super glue and glue each individual flake back where it came from. Fortunately it didn’t all flake off at once, so it was basically like trying to assemble a puzzle together again. The super glue worked great however, and now, aside from a few ridges poking out of the surface, the glaze is fine.

I apologize to my viewers for my long absence, this summer session in school was a terrible one, and I had to spend a lot of my free time studying Spanish. I am making a mid-summer resolution to blog more.

Unfortunately, I can’t sculpt over the summer- my professor is only letting her favorites work in the studio, and she’s not offering any classes what so ever. I’m going to talk about ideas and paintings and drawings I create over the summer instead.

The bad news is I used too much chromium in my tests… the tiles came back ranging from the typical dull green of normal chromium, becoming lighter and lighter with each addition of zinc. The best sample was a lime green, but it was very faint. The tin addition cause a greyish pinkish tone to occur. I was glad to see that.

The good news is two things: first of all with each addition of zinc, strange and interesting lumps began to occur on my tiles. The 5% Zinc, 5% Tin tile was a dull pink glossy, bumpy glaze that resembled skin with goosebumps, but glossy. Accidental discoveries are cool….

The other good news is that I now understand that in order to obtain chrome yellow, I have to do two things:

1) use less than 1% chrome colorant OR

2) use a lead glaze with zinc as one of its primary fluxes rather than just a color additive.

In the fall, I think I’ll create some new tests: both using a zinc/lead based formula. Then I’ll add chromium in small succuessions- 0.5%, 1%, 1.5% and Nickel in small successions: 0.5%, 1%, 1.5%. I hear that in the presence of zinc, nickel forms a lovely bluish color.

Sorry about the lack of pictures, I’ll try to get some up soon.