Death and Rebirth of a Pot

I go to a Korean Master Potter’s twice a week for two hours and make porcelain objects. (Many examples on this blog.) In April of this year, I designed and constructed a large, 20″ x 24″ oblate spheroidal vessel, laughingly named “Bouteille de Parfum.” It took about eight hours to construct. Since it is totally asymmetrical, it was not thrown on a wheel but painstakingly constructed from 1″ wide slabs. When nearly finished I took a photo of it in the studio.

After some discussion, including not painting or decorating it at all, I was pressured to cover it with drawings from my Nightbook Project. It was a laborious process, which I finished about a month ago. Last week, my master gave it a preliminary bisque firing. I found many places where the paint needed touching up. I spent last Tuesday doing that. Last Friday I was ready to finish touching up and then apply the over glaze. Before I started painting, my master, said he wanted to blow the dust out of the inside of the piece. Alas, when he put the compressed air hose in the spout of the “bottle,” it blew out of his hand and smashed on the stone floor.

He was devastated. I was upset but kept up a jovial demeanor saying, “Well, master, all pottery eventually breaks. Some just sooner than others.” While he was walking around feeling bad, I gathered the shards and took this photo of the resulting assemblage.

I telephoned him on Saturday and told him I wanted to take the pieces to make the above as a real 3-D sculpture. He said he’d already ground them to dust. I am now double bummed.

New Nightbook Sketches

Recently for my nightly sketching, I have switched from pencil (8B) to ink using an Arts Hybrid Technica 0.3mm pen by Pentel. I’ve also rediscovered my Shaeffer 585 gold nib medium-fine fountain pen. This pen was a gift from a music composition teacher. For years, even after e-mail, I wrote 90% of my correspondence with this pen. Shaeffer black ink. (Not permanent).

There’s a certain harrowing esthetic with all the dark lines that I’m enjoying at the moment. The subject matter remains at the intersection of sleep and wakefulness where images, (erotic, mundane, and terrifying) meld into a surreal gumbo of lines.

Continue reading “New Nightbook Sketches”

Le Temps Perdu

DR Harris, Coney Island, November 1982
Photo by Bruce Johnson

Proposal for Ceramic Teapot

I submitted this drawing to my Korean master ceramics teacher as a possible new project in porcelain. He said: “You can draw it, but you can’t make it out of clay. Metal, plastic, or glass, but not clay. It will collapse in the kiln.”

DR Harris Entries Mobile Digital Art Contest

Here are my three entries in the Mobile Digital Art Contest. All three were made on an iPad using various art apps and my finger as a stylus. Unfortunately, due to a technical error on my part the images the judges received were thumbnails, not full size as required. So my entries were disqualified.