Artist Inspired

The two artists that inspired this project are Kurt Anderson and Patricia Volk. I like Kurt Anderson's work because of his sgraffito figures and use of colored spots or stripes. I like Patricia Volk's work because of how simple but also complicated her forms look. I also like her use of solid color. 

My idea was to make two vases, one of them will be solid color and the other will have sgraffito forms on them, with colors that match the solid color one. When I started, I wanted to make two cylindrical vases, and I used the slab roller to roll out a tube. The original shape that I wanted was kind of complicated, and my piece would be way bigger than I wanted in order to be that shape and to not crack. The tube was also very thing, wo I was worried about cutting it and scoring it back together. I decided to just make the first one an arch. I also decided that the second one would have sharp corners, and that they wouldn't be tightly fitted together so that I could display them separately and also work on them individually. The second vaes is made out of slabs that I rolled out with the slab roller. I cut out two matching arches, and then a long rectangle to fit the outer edge, a smaller rectangle for the inner edge, and two smaller rectangles for the top parts of the arch. I also made a little base. I covered the holes on both ends of the tube as well, and cut two holes in it near the top, so that it could be an actual vase. I cut two rectangular holes in the two top parts of the second pot. I used black underglaze to paint chickens on the round vase, and then used the scraffito technique to add the details. Kurt Anderson uses underglaze on his pots, but he makes it look like watercolor. I wanted to just use actual watercolor, but after I started, I realized that I needed to put glaze on the inside of both pots so that they could hold water. Once they were glaze fired, watercolor paint didn't work as well, so I mixed acrylic painyt with water to thing it down, and I made polka dots on the chicken pot. The acrylic paint that I used was the same as the paint that I used on the smaller pot. I made a light pink to cover all of the pot except the top, which has a darker pink. I mixed those two colors as well as red with water to do the polka dots so that the two pots matched. 

I really like how the chickens turned out, but I think the rest of the project is just ok. I'm not sure how Patricia Volk gets her paint to look so smooth, but I don't really like how it looks on the smaller pot. I think that the polka dots on the chicken pot look fine, but I should have added more colors and made them look more uniform.