Michael is unloading for Fountain Hills in an unusual hailstorm in Cambria! Come visit in Fountain Hills…

P.S., all of our videos are updated to HD and use YouTube. Checkout the great detail on the video’s wax resist lines… Much, much, better video detail!!

The kiln opens and the first piece retrieved is a very big flair (thrown by Michael and wax resist glazed by Peggy).

We want to give a big shout out to Andrew Snyder of Bootleg Pottery. Andrew is teaching ceramics at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, where our son attends. The work we’re hearing about in Andrew’s class inspired us to experiment in some fun new directions.

A great and full kiln load today! Lots and lots of Peggy’s wax resist on our mugs. Also Michael’s latest large platters and medium vases. Waiting until we could safely hold the pots was sooo hard!

It’s our first firing of the new year! Welcome to a new and productive 2011… We have a lot of pots. Let us know what you think of the latest work.

Amphora (Wikipedia)

I’m preparing for the Pompeii Amphorae weekend at Greg Worthington’s Worthington Gallery in Utah, September 11th and 12th. Labor Day weekend right beforehand, I have the Kings Mountain Art Fair in Woodside. We’re working really hard right now, and loving it!

More amphora coverage soon… And if you’re anywhere near Utah, mark your calendar and join us.

This is the third post focused on focused on my new glazes and work. Read part 1 and part 2, too.

When I try a published glaze I experiment on different clay bodies, and in different areas of the kiln. I then refine the recipe over the course of many firings until satisfied. The same, of course, goes for my own glaze creations, though mine are more experimental and may never, ever, turn out. I’ll write more about experimentation in a later post… I’m covering my glazing process for now.

I spray glazes over each other to varying degrees and thicknesses to obtain more color variation. Sometimes this is beautiful- sometimes hideous. Clay body, firing temperature, glaze thickness, reduction schedule (the temperature at onset of reduction, strength and length of reduction), and local material variations all affect glaze color.

Glaze thickness has a huge effect on color. Too thin and the glaze doesn’t develop good color, too thick and it can run or be a poor color. The same glaze needs to be thin on porcelain, slightly thicker on white stoneware, and thicker still on brown stoneware to develop the desired color. Some glazes are beautiful on porcelain, and terrible on brown stoneware.

Clay shrinks when fired. Bad glaze “fit” (making sure the glaze shrinks at the same rate and overall shrinkage as the clay) for a given clay body can cause crazing, crawling, or shivering. One must consider physics and thermodynamics in addition to coloration and texture.

Any glazes with rutile as a component are more prone to pinholing as a glaze defect. We have had entire kilns of our work go straight to the dumpster when these defects crop up. In the early 90s when I was trying to perfect a rutile blue we fired twice a week and went months without a success. Perhaps it’s contempt, but I’m no longer excited about rutile blue.

Now I fire a glaze firing every 2 or 3 weeks, and try to do some glaze tests in each. We are constantly learning and adding to our color palette. The somewhat frustrating and humbling part of being a potter is that once you give a piece up to the fire, anything can happen.

Right now I’m working on a custom set of dinnerware for a client with my sprayed glazing (see us unload it at 5 minutes, 57 seconds in to episode 3 of the Kiln Room). The dinner and lunch plates and large salad bowl are perfect. The pasta bowls and cereal bowls have pinholing on 60% of the pieces. Three bowls were fired on the same shelf – two of the three are pinholed. One is flawless. Why?

I really have no clue at the moment why this happened, but yesterday I threw ten more pasta bowls and 16 more cereal bowls to meet the order. You’d think after 40+ years I’d have this figured out, but it just doesn’t work that way.

We were at a 60th birthday party for a potter friend of ours a couple months ago with 6 potters with 35+ years experience each. We had this very discussion of how the kiln will throw you a curve every time you think you have the process down pat.

After all these years I still have only a tiny piece of the puzzle worked out.

This is the second post in a series focused on Michael’s striking new work. Read the first post here.

For the glossy blue and red glazes Michael starts with a clear glaze formula and adds colorants (metallic oxides). For dark blue, cobalt oxide; for light blue, a combination of rutile (rutile is titanium with iron impurities), cobalt carbonate, and red iron oxide. For red, copper carbonate, tin oxide, and a small amount of red iron oxide.

The matt blue is a low temperature copper blue glaze Michael modified for high fire. The yellow glaze uses yellow iron oxide as the colorant. Each glaze is in a different base. All glazes require extensive and continuous testing, and most glazes from books or articles haven’t worked as expected and need adjustment.

Michael designed and fabricated the kiln around his firing technique, which is tailored to our clay and glazes.

This is the first post in a series of Michael’s striking new work. He has focused on colors matched with shapes intended to catch the eye. Many of these colors are unique and extremely difficult to reproduce in high fire ceramics.

Michael’s glazes are the result of over 40 years of research and experimentation. Thousands and thousands of firings, tests, failures and successes along the way have resulted in this style and presentation.

Try clicking the photos for full resolution images. Zoom in to see detail.

Also on May 22 is the Paso Robles Wine Festival in the park, directly across from our gallery in Studios on the Park. This is a huge tasting event for fantastic local wineries. Michael will be watching the gallery, so will miss Tai Chi open house for the first time in 13 years (we’re sad about this – but we’re very happy about both events). Family from San Francisco are coming down to see Peggy at open house for the first time, so that will be fun for her.

On Saturday, May 29th, of Memorial Day weekend is the Paso Robles Festival of Art in the down town park. This event is put on by Studios on the Park in conjunction with the City of Paso Robles. It will feature top notch artists from the area, in many different mediums. The city closes off Pine St. between us and the park and Studios on the Park becomes an integral part of the show.

On Father’s day weekend in June (the 18th, 19th, and 20th) Michael will be going to the KCBX Live Oak Music Festival. It’s near Lake Cachuma on the way to Santa Barbara (see their site for maps and details) and Michael will be selling our work while soaking up great music, fun and sun. Peggy will be in the gallery in anticipation of family arriving for our annual Miller/Vrana big family reunion (a huge hug and hello to our family!)

As always, join us at Studios in the Park, where we have our gorgeous gallery space amongst a plethora of great artists.

In this first image, top right, the kiln is partly loaded and I’m building the setting to hold the various sized pieces for this firing. The way the kiln is stacked – how tightly and whether the shelves are staggered – all affect how the kiln will fire. Air flow, heat distribution, oxidation, reduction, intake, exhaust, gas and chemical reactions, shrinkage, timing between changes… It is always slightly different with so many variables. Just firing a kiln is an art and science.

In the second and third photos the kiln is fully loaded. It’s 1pm and I’ve lit the burners.

The 4th shot, at right, is of the kiln ~12 hrs into the firing at 1am. The peephole plugs are out to show the effect of reduction on the kiln. The intensity and color of the flame is an indicator of the strength of the reduction. This firing took 13.5 hours to reach 2350f.

The final photo was 36 hours later, after the kiln had cooled to ~250f.

Until the temp is below 400f we barely open the door…

The finished pieces go through quartz inversion at ~400f – a time of rapid shrinkage when they will easily crack. One can hear ting ting ting through the cracked door. In high fired stoneware and porcelin, there is approximately 13% shrinkage – about 10% of this happens during the glaze fire – torturing the pieces. A true trial by fire.