Blue Winter Tree
Blue Winter Tree
There is a pigment for painting on a glazed ceramic surface. The glaze itself is a glass that forms on a piece of clay that has been through the heat of a firebox called a kiln once making the clay hard like a biscuit of wheat dough after being baked. It's called "bisque" anyway. Then they paint this stuff, the glaze, made with stuff like sodium and other things, silicates and such like to vitrify when heated again. So that gives you the nice shiny surface on your coffee mug. It's actually a layer of glass on clay.
The interesting thing comes when you sort of mull these realities over till you've learned them and then mix them around in your thoughts to makes something out of them, that is just as long as the reality of the stuff will permit it to happen. Your mind is almost like a guy with a bunch of arms, grasping things and coming up with new possibilities and combinations. Then your real arms tend to reach out to try to make it happen.
So now let me tell you about the paint. Well, of course, on the tile pictured above, the paint is transformed to glass and has joined with the glassy surface of the tile, the glaze. It's all become part of the glaze and the result is something quite exquisite, depending on your personal values, of course, and also beautiful, if not in an aesthetic way than in a manor of beauty of the material itself; the tactile sensation is like glass. But this is a special glaze I tried out not really knowing the outcome. It was an experiment.
I noticed that the pigment came as pigment should, in a powder. That powder was a certain substance in each instance that would either remain or transform into the color you intended or as close as possible to what you intended after being fired in the kiln, sent through the heat. The final heating or "firing" is about one thousand degrees to melt the glaze sufficiently. I understand it has crushed glass in or something. And because it's used to paint on glazed ceramic or "china", it's called "china paint".
Well, it's not like most sorts of oil paint you get over here in the States which is usually already prepared and in tubes, but it's in the powdered form. So that means you have to mix it with something to make it into the buttery paste used to paint with. Well, I noticed certain oils being used that, when I tried them, they turned out to never seem to dry. Apparently the trick is to fire them just after you paint them. But I tried mixing the powder with linseed oil, the same oil that's used in most oil paints.
The result, and I took a chance, not knowing the outcome, was that the glazed painted tile looked partially like a glazed china painting, but also partially like an oil painting, and I got some nice effects with the pigment power. The prepared paint went on with some thickness instead of the smooth effect the standard mixtures got with a weak, transparent, filmy effect. This was gusty and robust like an a-la-prima oil painting.
In this tile (as I say, "Tile, we meet again"), I only had one color to work with and a vastly limited time to do anything. At the time I was gathering carts at one place and cleaning floors at another place. I was, as the title of the play goes, being "nickel-and-dimed" and came out of it all with a splendid case of whatever it is, who can afford doctors, not me -- it feels like that chronic fatigue syndrome they talk about, when you can hardly move and am always excruciatingly tired. And besides, I had to rent space in Bob Couture's kilns in Lebanon about twenty miles away (even though Bob charged reasonable rates, any money was scarce).
But it seemed to have worked. Where the tile is now, I don't know. Things got so hard after that that it got lost in the mobile home along with hundreds of other things as it became harder and harder for me to even move around, let alone straighten up the many projects in progress in about seven work stations, as I called them, usually desks or card tables. When we left for California, we were only able to take about a third of the things I made, the equipment, the references, forget any furniture except the bed. We even left the folding chairs behind. Rick got all that stuff including just about all the ceramic things I made. If you're interested you can contact him at rlf@turbonet.net. Tell 'em Paul sent ya.
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