Lately I’ve been painting, getting ready for the Bellevue Arts Museum Fair at the end of July. Here’s my latest, a pika at Mt. Rainier, 11” x 14”.
This nice big tub surround went home today. This will be 3’ wide on the right and left walls, 5’ on the back wall, tub to ceiling. There’s a window in the back wall, and the tile will come all the way to the floor in front of the tub. The client specifed the sunset, the surfer, the windsurfer, the girl with the dog (including the breed), and the waterfall. The tropical foliage was my idea. I like how the waves look like they have foam on them. This one just barely fit on the floor in the kiln room.
The Artist'‘s Tool Belt is installed on the Montana Museum Art & Culture! I went over Sunday and we mounted it Monday and grouted Tuesday. I’m really happy with how it looks but I must say it looks small on the building.
This is one wall of what will be a tub surround. This will go on your left as you look into the tub enclosure. The back wall will have a sunset and a surfer riding a wave. The right wall will have a windsurfer, a girl walking her dog on the beach and more flowers.
These tiles will go on the outside of an outdoor fireplace. They’re painted on 3” tiles because the end of it is rounded, in a tight enough curve that they needed to be that small. It’s 3’ straight on either side and the middle 4’ of this will be the rounded end. I hate working on 3’ tile. There are just so many of them to number and keep track of and, at least in this case, they come on a sheet held together by dots of glue. I try to cut off as much of the glue as I can because it smells so horrible when I fire it. And I have to do a separate firing to burn the glue off because the burning glue will affect some of the china paint colors. But I like the image, which is all animals that are likely to end up on the grill. The pig goes to the right of the sheep.
I forgot to take a picture of the tile that went out of the studio today after sitting around for several months waiting for its new owners to come home from Arizona. So this is a picture of the drawing for that tile. The tile is 18” square and will be set like this, on the bias, over a stove. The madrone tree is on the bluff in front of their house in Port Townsend, WA.
Looks like this may become a popular image for backslashes. The other one had only been on the web site for a couple of weeks when this lady decided that’s what she wanted in her kitchen. The compass rose will go on a facing wall.
The MT mural isn’t the only thing I’ve been working on lately. Here is a series of flower tiles to go in a shower. There are 85 of them in all, 8 different designs.
Here are a few pictures of me painting the Clay Tools tile. They’ve been fired twice in these pictures, and I’m adding color on top of the grey colors and printed outlines. These will be the last pictures of this mural for a while, until it’s installed. That will probably be late May.
Hera are some pictures of me working on the Clay Tools tile. In the first one, I’m getting ready to take a screened tile out of the frame after it’s been printed. In the second one, I’m screening the ink onto another tile.
