Kaeli’s Ceramic Studio
Kaeli is schooling me in carving porcelain. She brought me to her studio out on the marsh and showed me her work. The woman is super-talented and there seems to be nothing her hands can’t do. Has anyone seen her exquisitely knit socks? I just can’t get them out of my head. Her socks would make turn-of-the-century Parisian fuss-pot toillerists tres envious. I made up that word-toillerists- I hope it makes sense. Anyway, Kaeli has this really nice scene, a fully equipt ceramics studio in the middle of a field of wild flowers with a view stretching down to the Bay of Fundy. Every now and then a train goes by outside making the iconic train whooo whooo sound, everything around here is just so…- I feel like I am in the idea of a place rather than a real place.
We went to her house and I brought my bird book so I could sculpt me up some little geese, the adoptive parents of Bog Billy. Turned out that I had once upon a time ripped out the geese related pages from my bird book. So I sculpted some geese from memory. No matter what radical changes I made they looked like seagulls. With every change they would go from seagull to seagull with big wings, seagull with duck head, seagull with fluffy butt. When I thought I had almost achieved goosedom, I held them out for Kaeli and she remarked that they looked like seagulls with swan necks! Happily, the next day I looked at pictures on the internet and was able to give them goose looks by adding a lot of butt and removing most the chest. Also, geese have decidedly ungenerous faces, they look pinched and bitter and not at all cute-faced like ducks. I had never noticed that before.
I’ll fire up these guys in Kaeli’s next firing and they will turn bright glowing white and stand out among the cattails and grasses of Bog Billy’s habitat.
