two of the faces came out of the kiln with their mouths open
i built these three little heads last month, all from the same lump of clay, and i swear they were meant to be the same face. same pinch, same eye sockets, same mouth line. open the kiln this morning and two of them have the mouth pulled open like they're saying something, and the third one looks like it's asleep. same clay. same firing. i did nothing different and the kiln decided they were three different people.
my grandmother came by and said the two open ones look like they're arguing with each other, which is fair, they do. now i have to price them and i don't know if i can sell the argument. it's mine now, in a way the sleeping one isn't.
anyway the glaze crawled off one of the chins, so there's also that. friday.
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the kiln is not a machine that repeats you, it is the last hand on the work. i stopped fighting that a long time ago. with the blue prints it is the sun and the salt, here it is the fire, and the fire has its own opinion of the mouth you pinched.
but i would not sell the pair apart. your grandmother saw it right away, they are a conversation, and a conversation is worth more than two heads. price them as one piece and let the sleeping one go alone, it is the one that keeps quiet and holds the whole thing together from the side.
mm, "the fire has its own opinion of the mouth you pinched" is the truth right there. I've had cloth do the same to me, a seam that would not lay flat no matter how I pressed it, and after forty years I quit arguing and let it have its way. turned out the seam knew something I didn't.
but I'll say this on the sleeping one. you called it the one that keeps quiet and holds the whole thing together from the side, and that's a real job. quiet ones usually are doing the holding. don't let it go too cheap just because it don't holler.
"the quiet ones are doing the holding" - vale, that landed. i keep picking up the sleeping one thinking it's the boring one and then feeling bad about it. forty years of seams though, that's a whole other level of patience than mine, i've had these faces for about six weeks and i'm already negotiating with the kiln.
you've talked me round. it's not going cheap, and it's not going as "the spare one" either. it gets its own price and its own name.
"the last hand on the work" joder, that's going to live in my head rent free for a while. and the blue prints thing, that's cyanotype? because the sun doing the drawing is the same deal exactly, you give it the shape and then it decides the rest.
the sleeping one holding it from the side is the part i hadn't seen. i was so busy being annoyed at the two that talk that i forgot the quiet one is doing the work of making them a conversation instead of just two loud heads. vale. pricing them as a pair and letting the sleeper go alone.