A day between teaching, clay and mold making
An ordinary studio day: teaching students to draw hands, checking a glazed vessel, and continuing experiments in clay and silicone molds.
My day began with a three-hour Fundamentals of Drawing class. After working with still life and landscape, the students were turning to the body for the first time, using their own hands as the subject.
I asked them to make four drawings. They held a pose with one hand and drew it with the other, beginning with a line sketch. In the following studies, they paid increasing attention to detail, light and shadow, value and perspective. They could change the pose, or keep it if their hand was still comfortable. Each drawing was a chance to look again at a familiar form.
I brought in the hand from the classroom skeleton so we could examine its structure. We looked at the bones of the palm, wrist and fingers, and how the joints allow movement. I spoke with the students individually as they worked. Even for those who draw confidently, looking beneath the surface brought new questions about the hand they see every day.
Classroom drawing studies by students, shared with permission. This photograph documents their work with trees, light and shadow; it is not a photograph of the hand exercise described above.
After teaching, I went straight to the ceramics studio to see whether my kashk-sab had come out of the glaze firing. It had, and seeing the finished surface was an exciting moment. I set it aside for the following day's critique and returned to work on another vessel I had started the week before. That piece was nearly ready to dry before its first firing.
Alongside it, I have been developing a more abstract ceramic form—something like a vase, with space to hold something, but different from my other work. For this piece, I combined two colours of clay. It is still a work in progress.
From ceramics, I continued to my mold-making class. I worked on silicone molds, adding a supporting shell of gauze and plaster to one and leaving it to dry. I also continued another mold and poured plaster, waiting to see how the result would come out.
This is how my Tuesdays and Thursdays often move this fall: from teaching drawing to working in clay, then on to mold making. Some work is ready to be seen, some is drying, and some is still taking shape. The day holds all of those stages together.
Read the story behind my grandmother's kashk-sab · More studio journal entries