Just five days after our first Raiders’ show, at Terminal Creek Contemporary Art Gallery on Bowen Island, the tradition of artists raiding our home continued. Five of the regular artist visitors arrived on my doorstep on Thursday. Luckily the Raid was pre-planned and I had a fresh batch of bisque-fired plates ready for them.

Birthday men Pierre Coupey (last Saturday) and Eric Metcalfe (this actual day) and Michelle Normoyle, Kate Metten and Marlene Madison were our guests this week. The conversation flowed, we were happy to re-live our expedition to Bowen Island and lots of work was completed.

Our Summer lunch included Michelle’s salad, Eric’s home-made potato salad, cold cuts, cheeses, bread and paté. Perfect.

Pierre had asked me to leave his requested large round plate un-fired. He had a marvellous time scratching the leather-hard surface and applying a selection of my coloured slips instead of the usual underglazes. Then I showed him how to dampen pieces of newsprint so that they would adhere to the plate’s surface.

After that he painted a loose layer of black slip over the slips and newsprint. Soon after that he carefully lifted off the strips of paper to reveal a nice contrast with the underlying colours. Philippe Raphanel has done a similar process of resisting, using underglazes and wax resist on several of his beautiful platters. You’ll see Pierre’s plate, resting in a batt to dry in the last photo of finished work. It will have to wait for more work to be completed and join another bisque firing. Everybody else’s work merely needs the clear glaze firing .. soon.

At tea-time, outside again, we enjoyed some delicious lemon tarts made by Kate, and then Eric and Pierre shared the candle-blowing-out and cake slicing of a wee birthday cake, for a second time.

I chased the Raiders out shortly after five o’clock so that I had time to turn around and prepare to attend this month’s opening at Port Moody Arts Centre. I didn’t want to miss seeing this year’s work by the traditional Korean pottery master Clay Jung Hong Kim, his wife and his students. Photos of that splendid work and some of ‘Upcycling Port Moody’s Heritage’ will appear in my next blog or two.

There has been a slight glitch in the forwarding of my blogs by FeedBurner this month and none of them reached you, my subscribers, until there was a burst of blogs earlier this week. Turns out, thanks to my web designer Avrom Digance’s investigation, that I have been optimistically including far too many megabytes for the blogs to be delivered. So now I shall try to be more selective of photos, or make them smaller, or link to a separate photo album.

https://web242.com

Another computer helper, potter Ronald Boersen, has shown me how to save my Google album archive and to compile future albums, and how to link them to my blog. So much learning is required in this field!