CROWS
A few years ago I started creating ceramic birds, which I'd been wanting to do for some time.
My first series were colorful common birds, realistic but simple. Then I fired a couple of the birds using "pit firing" with a wood fire in a large container and the result was a blackened bird which I immediately was drawn to because Crows are one of my favorite birds. The Crow series began although the pit firing was too cumbersome to repeat. Finally I settled on using black clay rather than use glazes.
I began this series looking at a photograph I had taken of a Crow. Each drawing was done rather quickly and I was trying to create the perfect gesture drawing at first but quickly became engaged with just the act of drawing a simple drawing of a Crow. What started out as a quick sketch turned into a repetition where each was both similar and different. I had 25 frames I had picked up at different places so my goal became 25 drawings to fill 25 frames.