Saturday, January 28, 2023

Pueblo Pottery Fakes.....


 I took a class to help renew my teacher's certificate. Its been quite a while ago. I was to recreate work of another artist's style.  I chose Maria Tofoya Martinez who created hand built pottery near Santa Fe, New Mexico.  In her culture the woman would make the pottery and the men, her husband, would decorate it.  The cover of the magazine shows her husband Julian painting the design on her pottery.  When Julian died the son Popovi Da painted the designs on her pots. 


 Maria would create her pots using the coil method scraping it smooth during the process.  Once it was almost dry she would polish it with a smooth stone to get that shiny surface.



Here are three of the pots that I made for the class requirement.  I too scraped smooth the coil pot and then polished it with a stone. I also found another thing to polish with was the back of an old stainless steel spoon.


I also carved into one of my pots with an "avanyu" water spirit design. The pot is made from white and red clay mixed together to give it my own personal touch.  The pots were all fired in a bon fire on a beach along Lake Pokegama, near Grand Rapids, Minnesota.  It was successful to the most part but years later I fired them in a kiln to make sure that they were sturdier. 

 

We had a snowfall overnight and I got out the snowblower to clear it this morning.  It is 15° F. this morning and our temps are going to drop into single digits. The snow did clean up our dirty snow and it almost looked nice to me.  Thanks for stopping by today.

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