The Eye of the Gold Lotus

For a few days, I have been watching in fits and starts a series of Bill Moyers interviews with the late Professor Joseph Campbell. The series of interviews were made in 1988, and as such, may no longer be thought pertinent. That was the year I started graduate school. The Personal Computer revolution had not yet taken us by storm and people interfaced without the internet. I was not walking around with a cell phone in my pocket. Amazing to think how unplugged we all were! So interviews with a professor speaking about how myth applies to the modern age at first did not seem like they would be relevant. Yet despite the context and the time, Joseph Campbell’s lectures were still moving and relevant. I suppose this is because regardless of the medium through which one presses on through life, the struggles for identity and the quest for meaning remain eternal.


Some of the myths that were expounded upon in the Bill Moyers interviews ( looking about boyish) were incredibly beautiful and often illustrated with a gifted painterly hand. One of my favorites was the myth of the lotus emerging from the omphalos of Vishnu upon which Brahma the creator is born. I was fascinated by the concept of time in this myth - a day in the life of Brahma being the equivalent of four billion earth years. A new universe is created in the blink of a Brahma eye.

The mosaic I just completed is a condensed version of the aforementioned creation myth. I made the central eye from fused glass. The central surrounding glass is the recycled piece of beautifully incised stained glass which had relief carvings of floral motifs. I adhered metal leaf on to the back of the stained glass to give it the look of gold. (Sometimes I used real gold leaf on the back of glass but I believe this one is brass - I neglected to label it). The surrounding areas in this mosaic are made in pique assiette style with fragments of ceramic shards and blue/green glass smalti to symbolize water. The ceramic shards come from three sources: a collectible antique plate with a rose design, a hand painted arts and crafts plate, and a piece of Chinese hand painted porcelain that broke into fragments a long time ago. The last piece I had a sentimental attachment to but finally came to the realization that it was useless to just have a bag of shards lying around fallow. As I write this I realize that these four materials - the three ceramic plates and the smalti can also be considered consistent with the Brahma myth - there were the creations of the four Vedas by Brahma. So if it is not pushing the metaphor too much I guess it all fits.

A Mosaic of Conjoined Twins

I had made a mold of a head of an old China doll and used it recently to create the mixed media mosaic above of conjoined twins. Like most of my mosaics, it took several steps. The heads were first made with stoneware clay pressed into the molds. I then hand sculpted stoneware bodies onto these heads, spontaneously melding their bodies to make them conjoined twins. Why? Perhaps it is a subliminal self portrait of myself and the illness I battle - lugging along an unwanted appendage throughout the day that makes for difficult maneuvers to get anything done.


I stamped a print of a stone seal in the oval space joining the twins which reads, somewhat sardonically, “the breath of life.” Instead of glazing the stoneware, I burnished the raw clay surface before bisque firing then smoke firing in the outdoor pit kiln. A final cleaning and wax polishing gave the figures a surface look like a metal patina - which was what I was trying for.

The figure at the left rests on a stoneware cicada that I cast from a mold I had made earlier. The cicada represents a hope for rebirth and restoration of natural balance.

The background rocks come from various sites in the Carolinas. These were quartz pieces in white, gold and topaz that I carefully cut with a hammer and anvil then fitted around the figures. In some spaces close to the figures I used the white quartz and even some white marble to help delineate their form. In other areas I blended them with similar background colors for an embedded and amorphous look.

Clay on the Wild Side: Processing Locally Mined Clay

For the past month, I’ve been slowly mining and processing local clay. I try to tell myself that by using local materials I not only save money but help keep the planet green by not ordering clay that is machinery mined elsewhere then shipped. But in fact I am really fascinated by the process of foraging for raw materials in nature and making things entirely from scratch. The clay that I processed above is in slightly different hues depending upon what part of the clay vein it was mined from. It is clay from the wilds. Collecting it feels like harvesting wild berries or acorns for food.


Every one of these lovely lumps of clay is a natural color except for the large cone shaped piece. That one wasn’t quite dark enough so I added some red and yellow ochre pigments that came from Italy and Southern France. So that piece is an international clay body. Actually all the clays have some additions to them to strengthen them or make them more plastic. My intention with these wild clays is to pit fire them unglazed so that the natural clay color can shine through.

In processing the clay by hand I soon learned just how tedious this could be - mostly because I had been doing it the hard way by letting the clay dry out, then pulverizing it and sifting. It took forever. After doing some reading and with the help of an expert on Etsy, I learned that the wet method of processing the clay is by far superior, cleaner and faster.

The first step is to wash off the surface debris from the clay then break it into smaller pieces. These pieces are then softened under water in a large bowl or bucket - about half clay to water. After softening a few days the clay is then mixed to a smooth and creamy finish. I used an old blender to do this. In the blender, I add a small amount of volcanic ash for clay strengthening and a small amount of ball clay for plasticity. My colleague on Etsy uses a drill that is fitted with a mixing tool (found in the paint section of Lowes) which probably goes faster and would be much easier to clean. The resultant slip is then left to settle. After siphoning off water from the top, the thickened middle part of the slip is run through screen that is 80 mesh or higher. I use a very fine mesh that not only removes sticks and stones but heavier sand as well. The slip is usually a little too thick to just run through on its own so I squeeze it through the screen with a stiff paint brush.

I let the sieved clay slip settle again for a few days, then siphon off the water that accumulates at the top. The slip is then spread out onto thick plaster bats to dry. (These can be easily made by pouring plaster of paris into old aluminum casserole trays or in larger plastic trays - but be certain to grease them first so that the hardened plaster can release. ) Sometimes I hasten the drying process along a bit by leaving the slip on the plaster to dry out in the sun. Depending upon whether the drying slip is indoors or outdoors and the humidity, it can take one to two days for it to become ready to roll up and wedge. That’s the fun part, when it finally feels like Free clay, despite the time to gather and process the stuff.

The final step is to wrap the clay in plastic bags - supermarket bags will suffice. For extra caution against drying out I put the plastic wrapped balls of clay into a large plastic bucket with a lid. The lid is marked “Wild Clay.” But before packing it up I like to meditate on it for a short time, envisioning the sculpture and vessels that will be produced from it. I pack those visions up with the clay - letting both season a while.

Culinary Cat is Added to the Small Book of Marvelous Cats

“Can’t at least one of the cats be a Siamese?” pleaded my Siamese owning friend and avid collector of cat books. I had to do a bit of looking at images of Siamese cats to come up with one for the poem “Culinary Cat” to add to my ever growing “Small Book of Marvelous Cats.” This one is in the new larger format which allows for greater details and for more elaborate compositions. There are now only four more illustrations to complete. That is, unless you count the two more cat poems I just wrote while vacationing in the hills of North Carolina. Will it ever end?


As always, the illustration above requires some close scrutiny to see some of the pertinent details, like the dead bird, paw prints and decorative mouse heads on the cake. Paw prints are also on the rolls and the hanging cutting board in the background. To add to the Siamese theme, I blackened the edges of the drawers to imitate the markings of the cat. The rest of the embellishments were also kept plain and sleek.

My tawdry little poem for Culinary Cat goes like this:

Culinary Cat makes tuna fondue

With lizard and mouse puffs for a party of two

He never cooks anything straight from a can

Not even for his delectable Mew Goo Guy Pan

-Janet Kozachek, in a very silly mood

Acrobatic Cats Illustration

Switching gears again from painting back to illustrating, I dug right back in to working on my Small Book of Marvelous Cats. If I keep on writing and illustrating these short poems, then I may have to take the “Small” out of the title and not market it as a humorous chapbook.


This week I just finished the second larger format illustration for the poem “Acrobatic Cats.” My friend described the smaller cat balancing on a ball on a tight rope as “whimsical” for the expression on his face while he hold a mouse by its tail. It occurred to me later that the other cat’s dramatic twists and turns could be an allusion to the infamous cat death dance in celebration of the captured mouse.

I tried something a little different on this illustration with dramatic spot lighting. Note the interspecies audience.

And Then There Appeared One More Chinese Folk Paper Cut

Just when I thought that I had recycled all my old Chinese folk paper cuts into collage art, one more turned up. It was yet another paper cut of a lady riding on the back of a bird. So I carefully cut her out with a utility blade, primed the flimsy paper with gesso and secured her onto primed paper with neutral PH PVA white glue. The next day she was ready to paint. Before painting I added an aura of metal leaf around the figure. She still looked small in her environment so I painted in a third creature underneath the bird. The bird itself I transformed into a human headed harpy-like beast alluding to the one I had read about in the Chinese classic, The Shan Hai Jing (A song of mountains and oceans).


With reddened hair and a color patterned dress, the figure once again has been edged slightly out of China and into Eastern Europe. I cannot say what the turquoise color creature is, but it reminds me of a tapir. And with this small work, my chapter on small paintings based on folk art is closed.

Expiring Painting of a Collapsed Building

This weekend is the last chance to catch the South Carolina State Fair and the exciting exhibitions that go with it. As usual, my husband and I did our autumn ritual entering of our art work; photography for him and a painting and drawing for me. This time my painting was juried in but my drawing, which I actually thought was much better, was juried out. I chose to enter my painting of a collapsed building not because it was a work that I was excited about, but because I thought that I had painted it at the end of 2011 and therefore about to “expire” with regard to the nothing over two years old rule that usually is the guideline for public exhibitions. This rule has always been a bugbear for me. It is ostensibly meant to deter people from being lazy and not producing anything new for a few years or so. But it also penalizes artists too prolific to exhibit everything they make. Time goes by, and before you know it, the studio is filled with “expired” art that never sees the public light. Then it goes on line or in brick and mortar galleries for a while, then back to the utility room or studio. It rests there for a while until a time that I really want to be rid of it. Then it goes to a fund raising auction. Such is the life cycle of art in South Carolina.


But I can live with this painting of a collapse building, it roof forming a gentle arc like a Brancusi sculpture. I was happy to capture the structure at this particular stage of collapse, in between a time when it was a functional piece of architecture and then no more than a pile of rubble on the ground. And since it was actually painted in early 2012, it can be recycled into the County Fair next year.

Paintings of the Fire Dance

In late spring I burned color paper dolls in an outdoor pit where I usually smoke fire my pottery.


I photographed them in various stages of their transformation into ashes. Then I put the photographs aside as my ideas about how to use them slow cooked in my consciousness. And there they simmered until I brought them out again this autumn.

I had thought about tooling with them in photoshop but I’m not adept enough in that medium to be sufficiently creative. So this week I just painted from the photographs, transforming the figures the old fashioned way - through the manipulation of paint and medium. Using acrylic paints and mica mortars I tried to capture a fiery, smokey atmosphere for the figures. Instead of “Burning Paper Dolls,” I renamed the series “Fire Dance,” making the figures active participants in a strange ritual rather than passive victims of the fire. Nevertheless, there is still something macabre about them - good for October.In late spring I burned color paper dolls in an outdoor pit where I usually smoke fire my pottery.


I photographed them in various stages of their transformation into ashes. Then I put the photographs aside as my ideas about how to use them slow cooked in my consciousness. And there they simmered until I brought them out again this autumn.

I had thought about tooling with them in photoshop but I’m not adept enough in that medium to be sufficiently creative. So this week I just painted from the photographs, transforming the figures the old fashioned way - through the manipulation of paint and medium. Using acrylic paints and mica mortars I tried to capture a fiery, smokey atmosphere for the figures. Instead of “Burning Paper Dolls,” I renamed the series “Fire Dance,” making the figures active participants in a strange ritual rather than passive victims of the fire. Nevertheless, there is still something macabre about them - good for October.

Working in acrylic on paper is still a challenge for me because I prefer the slow pace of oil painting. In acrylics, in order for the painting to remain fluid and gestural, I have to paint very rapidly. I suppose this is where my Chinese brush painting training helps. I even sometimes used the Chinese ink brushes and finger painting techniques to keep the colors moving. A lot of medium and washes helps with this as well.
Working in acrylic on paper is still a challenge for me because I prefer the slow pace of oil painting. In acrylics, in order for the painting to remain fluid and gestural, I have to paint very rapidly. I suppose this is where my Chinese brush painting training helps. I even sometimes used the Chinese ink brushes and finger painting techniques to keep the colors moving. A lot of medium and washes helps with this as well.

Autumnal Cicadas

Autumn marks the end of those chirping, buzzing cicadas. But for people like myself, intrigued more by the sight than the sound of them, you can always keep a desiccated sample of one around for a while well after the cicada season is over. I had a dried specimen of a cicada that I kept for its golden ochre markings and its flash of iridescent green on its wings. In order to study it better I placed it on my computer scanner to scan and enlarge it.


When painting from my cicada scans I used many variations of greens, golds and violet hues. To make the creature a little more “lively” I also remembered to alter the legs as I painted - pulling them outwards and away from the folded corpse pose. These images I combined with a small wildflower that I had photographed earlier. The painting may become part of my small works exhibition in February if I don’t use it before then for a local wildlife exhibition. Or perhaps it will do double duty and be in both.

Magic Cat

I finally finished editing and revising the poems for my illustrated book of cats and have proceeded to slowly make the illustrations for the second generation of imagined felines. The new illustrations are about four times the size of the former ones. This helps with detail and composition. Now this feels like “serious” illustrating. I didn’t want to face it at first but I am now coming to the conclusion that my earlier illustrations should be enlarged and done over as well. I’ll see how I feel after finished eight more new ones. The new illustration is for the poem


“Magic Cat.” As with all of the previous poems, it is an Ogden Nash like whimsical piece of fluff - not nearly as hard to write as it was to illustrate. The illustration, pictured above, I think captures the spirit of the verse:

Magic Cat does many tricks

Sometimes for money

or just for kicks

Should his conjuring cause us fear

Then Magic Cat will disappear

Cats of Prologues and Epilogues

Conversations with knowledgeable people can always improve upon one’s creative output. Last year, I had completed a small book of fun poems and illustrations of imaginary and extraordinary cats. It started out as a project to fill in one of my sister’s handmade books that she had given to me as a birthday present. She later compiled the illustrations along with my poems into a small hard bound book. I was on the cusp of attempting to publish this and had even sent out one on-line query when I began chatting on line with an old friend who happened to be an avid collector of cat books. So I began sending her a poem and a cat picture daily so that she could bind them herself into a volume for her collection. In the course of our conversations, I found from my research on her suggested publishers that publishing would be no easy feat, even for an attractive book that could have broad appeal. But I also discovered through my friend, ways of expanding and editing the book to make it better. For one thing, in addition to the cats that were illustrating the small book, I sent to my friend other sketches of cats that I had made from life. She chose one of a sleeping cat and modestly suggested that it required a poem too. I was confused at first because the sleeping cat was a drawing of a real cat and the illustrations were imaginary ones to go with the nonsense poetry. Then I came up with the idea of using this study of the sleeping cat as a prologue to the book, making the sleeper also the dreamer of the fantastic cats.


As our conversations continued I started coming up with more poems for cats not yet illustrated; Shaman Cat, Culinary Cat, Designer Cat, and Magic Cat, to name a few. While my ideas for illustrations for these cats were cooking in my head I came across another sketch that I had done of the same sleeping cat that I was now using as a prologue. Only this sketch was of the cat waking up and rolling around. So I carefully recreated the same detailed background in this drawing and waking kitty became the epilogue to the book, with his own poem.

I’ve made much more work for myself, but I do believe when it is finished it will be a better book to approach a publisher with.

Fossil Fueled Art

The nice thing about going through old boxes and cases preserved from one’s youth are the treasures that can be found there. Parents often preserve what we are likely to forget or not understand the value of as we become teenagers and young adults. Such was the case for my mother and for my husband’s mother as well. Despite living in a small apartment, my late mother-in-law kept the things her children made and preserved the precious nature items that they found. My husband had a collection of rocks, arrow heads and fossils which again were shown the light of day after his mother’s storage area was opened and gone through. Some of the broken fossil shark’s teeth I repaired with plasticine clay and made plaster casts. These became the molds for my clay whistles and ocarinas. But there was also an intriguing segment of a shark vertebra amongst these fossil treasures that I had also made a cast from but didn’t use until now.


The center portion of the vessel posted here was made from the clay impressions of this vertebra, to which I then added a lid and three feet. The glaze was a simple terra sigillata white which was bisque fired then pit fired for a smokey effect. This was one of the pieces that did not get a lot of dramatic coloring because the fire never got very hot - a consequence of firing too soon after a spate of drenching rains. But I liked the subtlety of the white barely grazed by smoke. There will be opportunities ahead to make more vessels from the vertebra, most likely in red and blackened clay but possibly ochre with a touch of earthy green as well. But that is for winter.

Intact, Browned and Beautified by a Pit Fire

Finally I have a lidded vessel that I didn’t chip or poke a hole into. Although it was an interesting challenge to come up with ingenious ways of disguising or revising these things it was a pleasure not to have to save a piece from my clumsiness for a change. This pit fired lidded vessel has all the characteristics that I sought - a surface that looks drawn upon in inks and charcoal. Mission accomplished here, I’ll return to drawing and painting for a while. The next pit firing will probably be in December or January - when dry leaves have all fallen and been raked up.


Yesterday was the closing celebration of my exhibition “A Gaze Upon Woman.” It was a pleasure to see old friends again. The show was expertly hung by the curator, Michael Wessel. Doing all those drawings to distract myself from symptoms, I had no idea that they would one day be put to use. It was nice to share them.

All Seeing Eye Vessel

In my second attempt to make a ceramic urn for holding ashes, I opted for a more elongated shape than that of my previous urn-turned-into-a-soup-tureen. This time, after I added a hollow knob on the top, I realized after inspecting the lid that the hole from the lid to the knob was closed off. So I carefully carved from the base of the lid through the neck and into the knob to allow air to exit in the firing. Unfortunately the clay in the neck was too thin and was punctured. This left a hole in the neck just under the knob. I patched this immediately. But some time later the hole came back to haunt me. Once again, during the burnishing process it burst through the neck. Well, I had put a lot of work into the vessel so I fired it anyway, then smoke fired it in the kiln.


After that I had a decision to make. To fill in the hole with an inlay or leave it blank? I left it blank for a while then asked my husband for a second opinion as to whether or not the hole was disconcerting, distracting, or otherwise evoked a feeling of a wounded or incomplete vessel. The consensus between the two of us was that the hole must be filled. I tried out several kinds of fillings; stones, glass, smalti, gold. Nothing seemed to do quite the trick. Then I found a small eye that I had made earlier from fused glass. It fit the space perfectly so without much more deliberation I sealed the eye into place. Now the vessel became rather disconcerting. The eye seemed to animate the piece in a rather unsettling way. This would be a very weird vessel to use as a container for storing the remains of a loved one, I thought. It would look like the dearly departed were still there, keeping a watchful eye upon the living. Not an attractive idea.

It occurred to me that the vessel was just too weird to be commercially viable but I posted it in my online shop anyway. It also occurred to me that I could always enter it in an art exhibition as a curiosity piece but thus far has not made it into either the state or county fair. Perhaps next year.

Rabbit's Elixir of Longevity Vessel

“And that’s why you’re dying,” a doctor said to me recently after a diagnosis that was based on a dubious technique. I didn’t jump at those words and I’m not sure if it was because it was a relief to finally hear words from someone else’s mouth that had been circulating around in my head for the past two years. Could anyone be this symptomatic and not be dying by slow increments? Or perhaps I was not moved because of the doctor’s technique of determining that I had radiation exposure by having me hold my right hand on “the cure” drops while holding my left hand in his right hand and watching a gold chain held in his left hand spin in circles. I just couldn’t take it very seriously. Really. I suspended a gold chain from my own left hand later in the privacy of my home, sans “cure drops” bottle and it spun in circles just the same. And I seemed to recall that this suspended chain spinning technique was also superstitious technique for determining the gender of a baby in a pregnant woman. So much for homeopathy. I haven’t entirely given up on homeopathy as possibly having some value but probably not in conjunction with this particular diagnostic technique.


But getting back to death and dying, it occurred to me after this pronouncement about my appointment with the grim reaper that since I had requested that my body be cremated when my time arrives I could be prepared by making my own cremation urn and pit firing it - ashes to hold ashes. So I made a free form vessel using a pukit mold and coiling techniques then added something intriguing on the inside of the vessel - a print from my ancient Chinese stamp that read “Long Life and Eternal Joy.” I liked the idea of my ashes resting on those words. But it was not to be. The bottom of the pot distorted the print when I altered the shape. Then later, as I was applying the terra sigillata glaze to the greenware I inadvertently broke a chunk out of the vessel along the upper lip. Now what? So the piece became something else entirely. I smoothed over the break and created a ladle so that the vessel would look like a soup tureen. It would have to be a non functional soup tureen. Somehow it no longer worked as a cremation urn either. Just what would the ladle be for? To slowly season steaks and omelettes with my ashes?

As I finished the piece I thought of the Chinese myth of the magic rabbit making the elixir of longevity for the goddess Guan Yin. He had a mortar and pestle for this but perhaps he could have stored his elixir in a small tureen with a longevity stamp in its interior. So now the piece has a new name: Vessel for Rabbit’s Elixer. And for now I’ll be trying more healing methods, and even had the effrontery to start scheduling exhibitions for spring 2014 should any of these methods actually work.  Or perhaps I could find a magic rabbit?