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#18 winter solstice 2011

By Catherine White on December 18, 2011 8:02 PM | No Comments
18 bolws.jpgA year ago today we left to visit our daughter in Florence Italy. Due to snow we got stuck in Paris for 24 hours. I made endless drawings of luggage, weary travelers, morning coffee and evening espresso. A year later I am happy to walk my same old circles at dusk, racing to get out before it is completely dark, content to return for warm bowls of leek and potato soup.

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#13 winter solstice 2011

By Catherine White on December 13, 2011 7:12 PM | No Comments
This evening, while handing a cup to a friend, she asked, "how do you make this work?" I said I like working within tight boundaries so when I wake up most days I don't have to question which direction to go to feel fruitful once I'm in the studio. I step into my field of clay as if words were shapes waiting to be made. The goal is that they look as if they descended from nowhere, effortless and timeless.

13 cup gesture.jpg"But this morning, a kind day has descended, from nowhere,

and making coffee in the usual way, measuring grounds
with the wooden spoon, I remembered,

this is how things happen, cup by cup, familiar gesture
after gesture, what else can we know of safety

or of fruitfulness?"

--Marie Howe, from From Nowhere in The Good Thief

#7 winter solstice 2011

By Catherine White on December 7, 2011 5:32 PM | No Comments
In October I went to the memorial for my parents' wonderful friend Irene Towbin. Irene's brother spoke of how every object in Irene's life had a story--the grocery cart chair, the photo my Dad shot of her on Prince Street, and her art works that were puns on toast, cake, combs and hangers.

On this gloomy Wednesday afternoon, I took the dog for a sodden walk around the pond. The ground is completely saturated and a muddy field intersecting with a rainy sky reminds me of the inspiration for the plates I made this firing. Every pot I make has a visual story, its state transformed by fire. When embedded in a meal the pot--at its heart--becomes a poem clothed in the food we serve.

07 long field plate.jpg"--a poem needs to have at its heart a transformation, a fire where whatever story within you is burned into something else."
--Marie Howe from an interview in Bomb

#6 winter solstice 2011

By Catherine White on December 6, 2011 10:09 PM | No Comments

06-lines-plate.jpg
"We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss -- we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you."

From 'What The Living Do' by Marie Howe



#4 winter solstice 2011

By Catherine White on December 4, 2011 9:09 PM | 2 Comments
My father told me that he dreamed that Mom came back to the living. She could stay with him for the day but in the night she had to go back to the land of the dead. It made me think one version of the myth of Demeter where winter represents her sorrow for the abduction of her daughter to Hades. The dark and cold night is hard and long.
 
In the dark cold of my house with our heat pump humming I dreamed of my mother. I was holding her by the elbow and we were walking through the snow talking about making prints in Maine during the summer. She told me about a poem she had lost, left on the dirty dessert dishes.


In the light of the morning I talked on the phone to my daughter. We spoke of the poems she wrote, collected and printed for her class.  I am amazed by this triangular pattern of influences from daughter to mother back to daughter. My mother wrote poems, but was reluctant to share them with us. Now, years after her death, when I visit my father I find her voice again as  poems surface in her papers or drawers. Zoe is writing a poem about my parents' New York City loft and over Thanksgiving she photographed it for visual clues. I looked over her shoulder as if through her lens and learned to articulate the details of my own childhood and young adulthood with new clarity.  Recently I listened to an interview with Marie Howe on Fresh Air. She read poems about grief and the death of her brother and mother.  Howe teaches at Sarah Lawrence College where my mother went and where my daughter now goes--both with an intense connection to the education. The poems, the school, the child, the mother, are all so intertwined in my history and in my present; they shift the focus on the dawn of a winter day.

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"I called her name into the fold between night and day I called it without expecting to hear an answer."
--from the poem Questions by Marie Howe in The Kingdom of Ordinary Time

#1 winter solstice 2011

By Catherine White on December 1, 2011 10:10 PM | No Comments
This is the first of the 2011 winter solstice series. The first image in a series leading up to the winter solstice and the shortest day of the year on December 21.

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I have recently fired my wood kiln so this series will also provide a preview of a selection of the new work.

pattern

By Catherine White on May 5, 2011 2:21 PM | 2 Comments
Recent warm up experiments in pattern first with paint on paper and then with slip on bats.

iron- paper patterns.jpg
"you should not create pattern from pattern." Tomimoto Kenkichi 

white-slip-patterns.jpg"Art is Pattern informed by sensibility" Herbert Read

circles of march

By Catherine White on March 30, 2011 9:47 PM | 2 Comments
small-circle-1.jpgI remember when I was a student at Antioch University in Columbia Maryland  I would tape newspaper to my wheel head and paint perfect circles as I turned my wheel on and off and held my hand steady. I was chasing an idea of perfection.

small-circle-2.jpg
Recently I was pursuing the question of how to express an idea visually.  At the end of my day in the studio I cleaned off the plywood table,mixed up my black glaze and  I dipped my fat skunk tail brush in  black glaze and let it run until the drips slowed down and ran my hand across the bowl so that I got a line of drips  and an asymmetrical circle on a series of white bowls.

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When I revisited painting circles it was a moment of re-examining an old idea. I think of my work as being like traveling along a gentle upward spiraling path. I make a loop and revisit ideas and by the time I come back to them I have traversed a big circle and I am looking at the idea from a slightly different angle. It is not pure repetition but readdressing old ideas with new vision experience and hopefully insight. I am not just documenting answers but always chasing a more interesting question.

visual clues

By Catherine White on March 23, 2011 4:55 PM | No Comments
grass-plates-1.jpg

I have been working on panels to exhibit my landscape plates.When I focus on an individual plate it's like I am laying in the grass with a macro lens looking at each blade. When I laid the plates out on the panel it was as if I began to see through a window onto a field. The plates have drawings behind them so that when the plates are in use there is still something visual for attention. The drawing also serves as a visual clue as to where each plate belongs. I have a photo series of these plates on evidence, my tumblr site, and they cycle into a cool animation.

I have updated my website this week with  galleries of woodfired, earthenware, and whiteware -- all listed under <pottery> on the main page .

grass-plate-close-up.jpg Above is a close-up of  the drawing; below is the inspiration for this series of plates & drawings.

onion-grass.jpg

fence posts

By Catherine White on March 6, 2011 7:47 PM | 1 Comment
After yoga one day I snapped a photo of a fence post with torn wire fencing  and the Naples yellow field behind was cut by the pale blue winter sky. I didn't see the connection then but as I drew from my image I saw the correlation to my plates.

Landscape-drawings.jpg
 The last few afternoons I have walked with my camera looking for the intersection of bare tree trunks and the fields beyond. The sky weights the hills down. These colored drawings are becoming clear fodder for my slab plates.

landscape-plate.jpgUrban myth has it that when Bob Dylan first heard the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, he only made it through the first few songs. He turned it off afraid his own creative process might be influenced or blocked by the inspiration of the Beatles. I find that I need to look at lots of stuff. I need the stimulation of other artists and visions to translate and focus my own ideas. My motivation grows by seeing other versions of excellence. I remember being inspired by Sean Scully's paintings when I saw them at the Met a few years ago. He opened my eyes and heart to brushy stripes of resonant color.  I am revisiting my horizon plates and interrupting them with fence posts, tree trunks and window mullions.

landscape-series.jpg
Last weekend I was also very taken by  a series of images called Sunday walks and Shower songs by Leanne Shapton the former art director for the op ed page at the New York Times. If you have time you should check them all out.

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