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white

By Catherine White on February 10, 2010 11:27 AM | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks
White clay seems like the appropriate palette for this time of year especially the winter of 2010. We had over 24 inches of snow last weekend and we are getting more as I type.

bone cup_2222.jpgI often think of winter as being barren, the landscape stripped to the essential bones of structure, but with the recent snows the simplicity I find inspiring is the minimalism that happens through blanketing and softening.

snow horizon_2244.jpgI am always drawn to views composed only of hill and sky. When storms pull in and views are reduced to a limited palette of gray and white it reminds me of slip and clay.

horizon plates raw_2229.jpgThere are moments when the landscape seems flattened like a drawing and then pops into more intricate and sculptural 3-dimensional forms.

slab-pot landscape raw_2249.jpgslab-pot landscape raw_2250.jpgThe drifting snow has allowed my imagination to make new connections  and translations from the summer palette of stoneware and the woodfired kiln to porcelain in the gas fired kiln.

text plates woodfired_2253.jpg
text plate porcelain bisque_2232.jpg

#21 winter solstice 2009

By Catherine White on December 21, 2009 3:32 PM | 3 Comments | No TrackBacks
Today is the shortest day of the year. The sun sets early and I'm posting this message before the light merges with night. I have numbered the short days with captured images to share new stories of the year.

21-monkey-balls-2.jpg"As black days came unnumbered, merging with night, the pulaar--visits between villagers---started up again. They told new stories about animal and human doings, about the demise of their traditional lifeways and melting ice caps, and waited in their cold heaven, for the coming of light."
--Gretel Ehrlich, This Cold Heaven, p. 356.

#20 winter solstice 2009

By Catherine White on December 20, 2009 5:13 PM | 3 Comments | No TrackBacks
The tiniest remains of the orange sunset linger and ignite the contrast of hill and sky. The indigo blue of the night snow is like a river of reflective surface. A week ago my friend Willi offered me a huge pomegranate for my photo and I told him I was trying to use objects from my or nearby gardens. Now that the ground is buried in snow drifts, I reach for the clementines on the counter to flavor my palette of images. I break my own rules, relying on an intuitive direction for this year's solstice series.

20-tangerines-on-white.jpg"Darkness reconciles all time and disparity. It is a kind of rapture in which life is no longer lived brokenly. In it we are seers with no eyes. The polar night is one-flavored, without past or future. It is the smooth medium of present time, of time beyond time, a river that flows between dreaming and waking."
--Gretel Ehrlich, This Cold Heaven, p. 47.

#18 winter solstice 2009

By Catherine White on December 18, 2009 9:29 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
We got our Xmas tree, our daughter is home and we don't have to go anywhere. Arriving  home after dark we had a dinner of story telling and time on the couch. Can't ask for much more.

18-pod-1.jpg"Greenlanders say that only the Quanallit-- the white people--are afraid of the dark, while Eskimos like nothing better than long winter days of story telling and talking to spirits."
--Gretel Ehrlich, This Cold Heaven, p 38.

#16 winter solstice 2009

By Catherine White on December 16, 2009 7:53 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Endings faced me as my intro to wheel class met for the last time today at the Corcoran in Washington, DC. On the way home the day faded with a violet sunset over the far blue-ridge mountains, making elegant blue purple lines in the distance. It was earlier than my usual pattern when I pulled off the highway, but It felt like the middle of the night.

16-birdhouse-gourd.jpg"No matter what you did in winter, how deep you dove, there was still no daylight and no comprehension that came with light. Endings were everywhere, visible within the invisible, and the timeless days and nights ticked by."
--Gretel Ehrlich, This Cold Heaven,  p. 36

#15 winter solstice 2009

By Catherine White on December 15, 2009 5:55 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
Heading down to the studio in the dark I reached for a headlamp flashlight as my guide. When I stepped out onto the gravel and snapped it on I realized the battery was dying. The fading ray seemed like it would barely illuminate the path. But the further I got from the lights of the house the headlamp was just enough to decipher grass from gravel and the difference of wet and dry. Every year as the days get short I have to re-learn the art of walking in the dark, a seasonal lesson about moving forward only once the eyes have adjusted to a new type of vision--just as a twist to normal sight is sometimes required to resurrect creative momentum.

15-candle-2.jpg"Tonight the darkness jolts me. I walk around the room trying to lift the dark cover of night with a flashlight in my hand, as if its fading beam were a shovel. I am trying to understand how one proceeds from blindness to seeing, from seeing to vision."
--Gretel Ehrlich, This Cold Heaven, p. 38

#13 winter solstice 2009

By Catherine White on December 13, 2009 5:55 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
Friday night after Thanksgiving we had a simple dinner at my father's loft. We began to exchange stories about his father's youngest sister. Dad and I traded stories back and forth till Warren reminded us there was a profile written about her stashed with my mother's books. I went to the shelf and found the slim booklet.  Zoe began to read about the time that Frannie had slipped in the bathtub.  Zoe soon looked up laughing and told us that Dad and I each had told a different half of the same story. That evening, bathed in  candlelight, with stories, laughter and the last of the pumpkin pie, was the highlight of my visit home.

13-squash.jpg"We sit side by side on the porch swing, waiting to see what tale will be told next. We are learning the way in which stories end, how they drift into near silence, yet leave an after-ringing, like a bell."
--Ted Kooser, "Lights on a Ground of Darkness"

#12 winter solstice 2009

By Catherine White on December 12, 2009 11:48 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
After yoga I had coffee with my fellow yogi Tom Davenport. I am always a sucker for his stories of what Delaplane, Marshal and The Plains were like when he was a kid. We often talk about movies because among other things, he is a story teller, filmmaker and founder of Folkstreams where he posts films and short videos. For instance, his stories and films document and connect musicians, craftspeople and the history of the Delaplane church or street festivals in Brooklyn with specific images and sounds to ignite imagination. In the back of Tom's Subaru were a few turnips rolling around, complete with frozen greens and dirt from his garden that have resurfaced in today's image.

To keep people all alive a little longer, it just takes honesty to write a few pages in handwriting. That person will lift up into the light a little bit. 
--Ted Kooser talking about writing his new book Lights on a Ground of Darkness [from my notes listening to a radio interview].

#11 winter solstice 2009

By Catherine White on December 11, 2009 7:34 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
The day seems bracketed by the ground of darkness. A cold predawn walk for the newspaper began the path, and a post-sunset drive home from a neighbor's concludes with disappearing light. The space in-between seems like a short spurt of energy and imagination.

11-red-onions.jpg"Our memories of a place, no matter how fond we were of it, are little more than a confusion of lights on a ground of darkness." --Edwin Muir

#10 winter solstice 2009

By Catherine White on December 10, 2009 6:22 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
It seemed that any time my mother cleaned her desk she came across a collection of postcards. Newly discovered, they would inspire her to send to one of her four children, the odd exhibition invite or photo with her haiku-like message describing her travels in NYC or a recently attended public reading.

This afternoon I sorted packing materials, images, and pots and cleared off surfaces in the studio racing to take a photo before I lost the light. I came back to the house as if walking in my mother's footsteps, seeing through her eyes the spectacle of the sunset. The light drained and the trees stood in silhouette while I sat in my daughter's bedroom listening to an interview with the poet Ted Kooser.

10-locust-pod.jpg"Were it not for the way you taught me to look at the world, to see the life in everything, I would have been lonely forever."
--Ted Kooser from his new book Lights on a ground of darkness from the poem,  to the memory of my mother.
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