The studio is so choked with pots that I left the first bisque in the kiln because I needed the shelf space for greenware. The last few weeks have been consumed with making new plaster batts and learning to make plates on them. I throw the plate on the wheel with my cool new Power Arm – visible background right, and  as soon as the rim is no longer tacky, and in some cases even if it is, I put another bat on top of the plate to weight it down and slow the drying process down, so that when the plates pop off the bats they are flat, and will remain so through the kiln firing.

The big bowls in the new shape look great. Next week, when we return from Florida, we’ll run a bisque, maybe two, and then get to glazing. Zach and Samantha’s families got them everything on their list, so it’ll be a full kiln.

Five potters at the train station

Local potters Daniel Bellow, Mark Rowntree, Brendan Fitzpatrick, Nancy Magnusson and Mary Ann Davis, who all fire their work together in Rowntree’s giant wood kiln, present a self-curated gallery show at the Great Barrington train station on Castle Street, Dec. 18-24, with a gala opening Friday night from 5-8.
A wide variety of handmade ceramics will be offered, from Rowntree’s giant outdoor urns to the delicate, brightly colored dinnerware of DaviStudio, available in fine stores nationwide.  Many of the works will be from the most recent firing of the newly rebuilt kiln, completed just before Thanksgiving.
The train station is the former location of the SKH Gallery and the site of a successful fall show by the same artists’ cooperative. It is made available by the generous and benevolent landlord, Dale Culleton, himself a recovering potter.
The gallery will be open from 10-5 every day until Christmas Eve, for all those who have procrastinated in their Christmas shopping. The artists will all be at the opening, and will take turns staffing the gallery all week.

For more information, call 413-429-7111
http://danielbellow.com
 

By Bill Shein, Saturday night, cone 7, or at least the cones said so

On day 5, Linden Gray and Young Mi Kim got cone 9 in the second stack to fall, using an ingenious method of building up the coal piles in front and in the side stokes and closing down the damper to keep all the heat in the kiln. But the front remained stubbornly stuck at cone 7 throughout the sixth day, and nothing we did, stoking with dry pine, burning down the coal piles, would move it.

Young Mi at the controls

On day 7, Sunday morning, Mark woke me with a phone call at quarter to eight to say “all hands on deck.” I came out and found all the dry hardwood in the sheds, and split it all for side stoke wood. It produced an incredibly hot flame. We were stoking the front with giant clunkers of pine which produced a flamethrower effect if you didn’t get the door shut fast enough. At one point, I got a kiln burn on my arms right through my cotton sweater.
It was incredibly hot in there, a yellow-white heat, and the pots were glazed all over with runny ash, and finally cone 9 fell in front. The cones were about six feet away, on the first stack, and it was hard to tell what they were doing. Was cone 10 softening? I couldn’t look in there long enough to tell, without burning my beard off my face. (We concluded later that the cones were lying to us – perhaps they got covered in ash and frozen, or were in a cold spot behind other pots, who knows?)

Mark went and cut some green ash and maple logs and brought them up the hill in the truck, but when I went to start the splitter again, it sputtered and died. So there we were with a hungry fire and no way to feed it. We had a big pile of pine, but it needed to get cut and split. And the splitter was dead.

Mark, stoking into the night, Day 6

It was at this admittedly rather depressing moment that Paul Chaleff arrived. We were all sitting around trying to figure out what to do. He looked in the firebox when we stoked, and then at the back of the kiln, and he said “you’re doing fine. You’ve got wood. Just keep going.”
Then he had to go, but he had done his work. We all jumped up and grabbed our axes. And Ben Case called up his friend Kai, who is the man-mountain with the blond hair in the foreground of this picture, who split those big, green rounds like they were nothing. It was a John Henry moment: he actually worked faster than the splitter, and the rest of us cut those big pieces into progressively smaller pieces, while Linden and I fed them into the kiln.

By 9 p.m., everyone was exhausted. Brendan, who had stayed up way too late talking about the nature of existence with Jon Rosen two nights before, said we should continue, but then he practically fell asleep in his chair. We had come almost to the end of the wood, and we were at the end of our strength. It was time to shut it down.

We’ll be opening the kiln a week from Thanksgiving, and then Brendan and I have the Crispina and Friends holiday show in Pittsfield Dec. 5 and 6, a warm up for our big show at the Train Station Dec. 19-24. Stay tuned. 
 

What a great kiln this is! It goes hot, hotter, hottest.. Last night, we stoked it in earnest and went from Cone 08 – 1700F -  to Cone 3 – 2100F, in nine hours. Then we had to go home and sleep. Here I am with my surgically repaired firing glove – this finger has a very rude name which I will not repeat here – but the casting plaster and burlap allow you to touch a hot brick and not burn your finger off. I lost the first one in a side stoke – whoops! – and had to make myself another. (Blurry iPhone photo by Young Ben Case)

By the time we get over there today at 1:00, the kiln should be at or near temperature – cone 10, 2360F, hot enough to turn clay to glass and melt wood ash to glaze. We’ll hold it there for three days. Tonight is philosophers’ night at the wood kiln, with Jon Rosen, a doctoral candidate at UMass, and Matt Wohl, Young Ben’s teacher and mine, too, coming to toss wood. Stay tuned.

We kept the fire outside the kiln for three days, a preheat that lasted longer than the last firing in the train kiln. At midnight last night, we pushed all the coals inside and started stoking through the door. Today should be a day of slow climbing, and by tomorrow evening we should be approaching temperature. Here Brendan Fitzpatrick (nice underpants, Brendan) shovels coals into the kiln as Benjamin Bellow looks on.

Mark and Brendan are working the double shift together until Linden Gray shows up on Saturday. My main man Benjamin Case will be assisting me every night from 4-12, until Sunday. I have Jon Rosen and Matt Wohl coming tomorrow night, and am hoping for Bill Shein and Gregory Haywood Simpson on Saturday. Sunday is still a question mark. If you have never seen a 2500 degree wood fire, it is not to be missed. 

The new kiln is much bigger, but we filled it up with Mark’s bathtub and his giant pots. We stacked it nice and loose, so the flame can find its way to the back. We’re firing much slower this time, on the advice of Paul, who has forgotten more about this kind of thing than most people will ever know. Today is Wednesday, and we’ve been campfiring for three days. Tonight, we’ll put the fire inside the kiln and start heating it up in earnest. I need to call up some friends and start twisting their arms to help crew – when this thing gets hot, it’s going to eat wood like a monster. I can hardly wait.

We tore off the train firebox and brought the front of the kiln out six feet with a cool rowlock arch we did mostly without the arch form, braying each brick into place with the Fitzphallus rubber hammer attachment. 

We built up the back of the kiln, stepping it down one brick every three feet, so we get some more of that Venturi effect as it narrows toward the back. We encased the walls in a steel cage that will hold in the arch. It looks like Mickey and Goofy built it, but it doesn’t move at all.

Finally, we cut down half a dozen ash trees – which you can burn green – and split them into stove wood with a hydraulic splitter, an extremely loud machine. The resulting woodpile fills the new kiln shed extension we built last month.

Now that I’ve got your attention…

We put a new chimney on the kiln yesterday, while it blowed and snowed an early October snowstorm.

The wise Fred Olsen, whose advice we disregard at our peril, tells us that a kiln chimney should be one foot for every three feet of horizontal space and three feet for every one foot the flame has to travel downward. We had a 21 foot kiln with the fire grate four feet above the ground, so we needed a chimney that was 19 feet high. The old chimney was 17 feet high, and it had been built four feet across and two deep.

Our new chimney has a ten foot flue that rises fourteen inches to a stack that is 15 feet high. It is 18 inches square at the exit flue, tapering to a stack that is 18 by 14 at the base, tapering to 14 inches square at the top. The tapering is supposed to create a Venturi effect, named after Italian physicist Giovanni Battista Venturi, (1746–1822). As it says in Wikipedia: The Venturi effect is the reduction in fluid pressure that results when a fluid flows through a constricted section of pipe. The fluid velocity must increase through the constriction to satisfy the equation of continuity, while its pressure must decrease due to conservation of energy: the gain in kinetic energy is balanced by a drop in pressure or a pressure gradient force. An equation for the drop in pressure due to the Venturi effect may be derived from a combination of Bernoulli’s principle and the equation of continuity.

We think our new chimney should honk. But there’s only one way to find out.

Been so busy with the show that I neglected to mention that the last firing in the train kiln was something of a bust, so much so that we have decided we’ve had enough of the whole train kiln theory and we’re turning it back into an anagama. Today, we tore down the chimney – that’s Brendan about to hurl the frame to earth…

The stack, inexplicably large yet surprisingly ineffective, yielded more than 1000 bricks, enough to build a flue channel 10 feet out the back of the kiln to a much narrower stack 15 feet high. We dug a nice deep foundation, 4 feet down. Brendan’s new title with the firm is "Shovelackey."

This new design, according to the formula explained in Fred Olsen’s Kiln Book, will give us the draw we need. We asked Paul Chaleff, and he said Fred was right. The book, a classic that tells you everything you need to know about this stuff, is sadly out of print.

We’re doing away with the train firebox and rebuilding it as a big anagama because a. we think the pots we fired in Joy Brown’s kiln are the best and b. Mark has a commission for a bathtub and as we don’t have the bricks to build a separate kiln, we need to get it in this kiln somehow and the only way to do it is through the front. So there you go.

We called Joy Brown and asked her the measurements of her chimney built on this design, and she told us because she is so cool. (Her latest work is really amazing – check it out) We figure the rebuild should take about a week – we tore the back of the kiln down to the new flue opening, and we will do the same to the firebox. We have about six feet of arch to build or rebuild, and we’ll nearly double the kiln’s capacity.

Next week, the pots on the back shelf from the last firing, which achieved a nice bisque temperature, will be traveling to Cape Cod to be fired in the train kiln at the Castle Hill Art Center for a benefit gala.

Sheffield Pottery, where I get all my materials and supplies, is featuring me in their Ceramics Monthly ad:

The show must go on.

GREAT BARRINGTON, MA. – Nine potters who fire their work together in local wood kilns will have a collective show Columbus Day weekend at the Great Barrington Train Station on Castle Street.
Artists Mark Rowntree, Daniel Bellow, Brendan Fitzpatrick, Linden Gray, John Emerson, Alix Brodeur, Young-Mi Kim, Nancy Magnusson, and Joy Brown will present everything from teacups to monumental sculptures.
The show starts with a reception by the artists from 5-8 p.m. Friday night and continues through Sunday with the gallery open 10-5 each day. The Train Station is on Castle Street – go under the railroad viaduct from the Mahaiwe Theater.
Bellow and Rowntree have fired with Brown in her giant wood-burning anagama kiln in Kent, Connecticut every summer for several years. Meanwhile, they have endeavored to perfect their firing technique in Rowntree’s “Hedgehog” kiln in Hillsdale, which they have rebuilt and modified after every firing.
This fall, they were joined by Magnusson and Cape Cod potter Fitzpatrick, who invited his friends Emerson and Gray to the firing. Kim and Alix Brodeur, a student at Utah State University and a regular on the kiln crew, also participated.
The Train Station, former home of the highly regarded SKH Gallery, is perhaps best known as the site of the Great Barrington Farmers Market. It has been made available through the good will of Dale Culleton, a recovering potter with a studio and several kilns of his own, who also supplied wood for the firings.

The first 24 hours started with a campfire, which got bigger and bigger as the temperature eased up over 200 degrees. We kept it there for a long time, and then started building up the campfire until it got too big and hot to keep on the hearth anymore. Brendan and I took off the front door, and I shoveled the coals inside the kiln, which immediately jumped 70 degrees. We let the remains burn out on the hearth, and we’re planning to make a glaze out of them, mixed with the Sheffield clay we used to stop up the kiln last firing. Brendan, on the midnight shift, was planning to hold it at about 500 degrees for a while, then climb to just below the quartz inversion point.