isaac button
Chris EARLY shared this series of videos with me and I am absolutely enamored by them. You have to watch the efficiency of movement and the skill with which Isaac Button labors. He throws with such speed and consistency; you would swear that the videos are sped up, but watch the pipe smoke that lazily floats in the air as he manipulates the clay. Watch the method in which he puts the handles on the sides of the pots with three or four "simple" motions. You have to see the way the he glazes the insides of the pots by dipping them into the glaze without getting any on the outside.... incredible! This is not to mention the methods in which he fires so as to maximize the output in one firing. Thanks to Chris for sharing.
Country Potter pt1
Country Potter pt2
Country Potter pt3
Country Potter pt4
5 comments:
oh. my. gawd.
oh yeah! and did you notice he's missing a finger? I also love the way he puts the cap on top of the larger vessels so he can pick them up without collapsing the forms.
Found this bit as well: http://gritinthegears.blogspot.com/2008/12/isaac-button-country-potter.html
What really floors me is that he doesn't seem to consider what he does as artisanship, just manufacturing of a sort.
The bit with using the cap on the large vessel confuses me a bit - I assumed that it was so that he could safely move a large piece somehow, but I'm not sure how. Does he form an airtight seal with some slip between the rim and cap so that internal air pressure will help keep the form while being handled?
That was a good read. A grad student here at UWM introduced me to all of this and I was blown away! He shared the history of some of this with me, but the link you sent fills in some of the holes in what he told me.
As for the cap; I believe it forms an airtight seal and the air trapped inside keeps things from getting squashed. I'll see if I can get Chris to explain this to us.
The clay cap is to keep the air from escaping when the pot is picked up off of the wheel. Sometimes you can use newspaper or a plastic sheet, but if you are worth your salt it is clay or nothing! He is also using a cow rib for support in the back so the pressure around the pot is even. Isaac could through a 28" dia. bread crock in 70 seconds, and he would just pick the pot up off of the wheel. If you read about when the video was made Robert Fournier talked about how soft the clay was when making the cider flagon and Isaac was not sure if he could make it as well since he was not using the proper, stiff clay. Of course it worked out fine in the end.
The other thing to realize is that these old country potteries ran on a 'cast' system. Meaning you were payed per cast, or per 100 pounds of clay thrown. So a '1' or '1 cast' is a single 100 pound pot... a '2' was 2- 50# pots etc. So you would have potters turning between 1500-1800 pieces a day if they were making 'thumb pots', used to start seedlings. The other interesting fact is that the pots were so plentiful that when a gardener or farm hand was going to plant the vegatable or flower hey would smash the pot to not do damage to the root ball.
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