On Saturday Al and I went in to Vancouver to attend Renée Van Halm's opening at Equinox Gallery http://www.equinoxgallery.com/exhibitions/. This was our first visit to the gallery's new enormous space in a converted warehouse off Great Northern Way. The area has been divided into two large, very high-ceilinged exhibition spaces. On this afternoon there were two openings, Renée Van Halm: French Curves in the East…
Renée tells me that she took a pottery class many years ago. Certainly she is comfortable working on a curved surface and right away understood how to achieve opaque consistent surfaces. She comes to work for the day prepared with paper collages, carefully cuts out a paper template outlining the plate's shape and places it over her collage. She then draws the composition onto the…
For Rebecca and Elizabeth underglazes are a whole new medium, and the idea of not knowing the final colour or surface texture until after two firings is a challenge. I can provide glazed sample 'cookies' and discuss thickness and layering but it sometimes needs a couple of painting sessions for an artist to achieve the result in her mind. Rebecca painted three plates this…
Elizabeth will be donating one of her four painted plates to the Western Front fundraiser.
We postponed the second painting day here for a week because it was so cold! When the temperature drops below zero outside, the furnace just can't keep the basement studio warm enough to work comfortably. So the next three painters came here on December 5th instead and with a little ceramic heater we were fine. Renee van Halm brought two newcomers to my studio for…