Wood-Fired, Salt-Glazed Sculptures #6006 Dead Tree Sculpture, #6206 Vulture Sculpture and #16006 Skinny Dippin' Sculpture have production glazes, which we mix up at WJC and some of my own glazes applied to the snakes, vulture, lizards, frogs, wrens, female figure and dress. The rocks on #6006 are glazed with a commercial glaze. The rest of the glazing on these pieces is done by the process of firing with wood to temperatures of 2300 to 2400 degrees F (+/-). The wood ash is carried through the kiln with the fire, by a flue and damper system fueled by a 17 foot chimney. Wood ash is deposited on the ware throughout the fire and toward the end of the 15-20 hour firing process, salt is added to the firebox. The salting adds a shine (glazing) to the pieces. Different woods and whether or not you use raw wood with bark or no bark, or if you use kiln-dried wood, can all change the appearance of your pieces when you open the kiln. The kiln cools for three full days before it is opened and the ware is still sometimes too warm to touch when we first get the doorbricks down. After the door is open though, it's Christmas...every time! There's actually many different ways to wood-fire and quite a bit more to the process but it's much too much to lay out every detail...unless of course I was to write a book. #107 Mountain Lion Sculpture has been my most adventerous piece to date. I used different clay bodies to achieve nearly all of the color variations in this piece. The lion (panther) was made from cone 10 White Stoneware primarily. The muzzle, chest and white around the eyes was done with a cone 10 clay body called Australian Ice Porcelain, with a cone 10 Dark Brown Laguna forming the black areas on the face. The dead log was a combination of White Stoneware, Dark Brown Laguna, Australian Ice Porcelain and a cone 10 Red Clay mixed up by another student a few years ago. I did glaze the eyes with a glaze I reformulated a couple of years ago (Rosie's Reformulated Gerard Green). The whiskers were retrofitted from the 'gift whiskers' my cat Sceeter always leaves laying around for me to sweep up. The hair in the ears actually used to belong to my Siberian Husky, April, who has now passed.

January 2010 Price Decrease $100 January 2010 No Longer For Sale (NFS) January 2010 No Longer For Sale (NFS)