New Artwork
I’ve been increasing my production of platters and plates as rolling out slabs is faster than making pinch pots. I can make two or three in the time it makes me to create one pinch pot vessel.
Here are new platters / serving dishes / display plates! As a reminder, you can click into any of the images below to see them larger, and can then page through them all in that view as well.
I’ve been making quite a few planters for my own personal usage; it’d be cool to someday have my full plant collection in ceramic planters (rather than plastic)! I have hundreds of plants, so it’s a lofty goal. In addition, there’s always some amount of ceramic planter attrition due to storm/squirrel breakages so I regularly need to make replacements as well.
Here are my newest batch of planters! They all have between 2 to 4 drainage holes in their bases and the diameters range from 2-5”.
I’ve been steadily, slowly making food-safe, high-fire stoneware ceramics as well. Here are some pieces I produced this past year which I hadn’t gotten around to publishing until now!
First we have small plates - I’ve been using them as dessert or appetizer dishes!
Next, I’ve been continuing my landscape vase series! These are “rainy” versions.
As was the case with my last new artwork, I began this painting while in residency at BROTA and the Buenos Aires Botanical Garden but didn’t finish it until now! It’s another painting of the water hyacinth - an attractive plant that due to human spread is now an invasive menace.
My first painting of this plant, Adrift, is intentionally more flat and graphic. It focuses on shape, color, and contour. In this painting, I wanted to add more realism through volume, depth, detail, and light via water reflection. The substrate is another beautiful handmade paper by Ato Menegazzo Papeles in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
This is Incursion, acrylic on artisanal handmade paper, 19.5x15.5”, 2023.
Shelby Prindaville's second painting of a water hyacinth.
Every artist has a few pieces they’ve started but not yet finished… and then time passes. Some of them kick around for months or years before they get picked back up again - if they ever do!
This painting is a piece I began during my 2019 Argentinian artist residency at BROTA and the Buenos Aires Botanical Garden. I got it quite close to being finished at the time, but there were a few touches left to add… and upon my return to the US, I shifted focus to moving houses and beginning the next school year, then COVID hit… and I just never returned to it until recently!
This is a painting of a water hyacinth, which is simultaneously a beautiful tropical aquatic plant native to South America and also a globally invasive scourge. In places where it can withstand the winters, it quickly multiplies until it covers all the available surface area of bodies of water. In doing so, it not only crowds out other, native surface plants and can make surface transportation difficult (for both people and wildlife), but it also shades out the underwater ecosystem. Along with many other territories, it is an invasive plant in the US Southeast, and at one point the US Congress considered but ultimately didn’t pass a bill to introduce hippopotamus to Louisiana to help manage the water hyacinth population.
This is Adrift, acrylic on artisanal handmade paper, 19.25x14.5”, 2023.
"Adrift" water hyacinth painting by artist Shelby Prindaville.
And here’s the last batch of obvara raku ceramics from my recent workshop at Dakota Potters Supply - these are the burnished vases!
This first oblong vase was the only one that I saw and heard crack during the sequential baths. It is still usable decoratively, but it does have that asterisk about it so I likely won’t exhibit or sell it. (Note, I purposely selected photos of it that don’t draw attention to the relatively large crack.)
While at the workshop, I thought that was my only casualty - but when I was applying kitchen wax to the surfaces at home, I noticed this next squat vase has a small hairline crack as well. It’s not nearly as apparent as the above piece’s flaw as it requires close examination to spot. While a crack is never ideal, in a low-fired piece like these which was always going to be decorative (not water-tight nor food-safe), it’s far less problematic than it would be in a piece intended for that kind of usage. I’ll probably keep this one myself!
The rest of the below vases are completely unblemished. This little bud vase is the smallest of the bunch.
Next we have a larger, somewhat soft rectangular vase!
And finally, a somewhat flared cylindrical vase.
I hope you’re as into the obvara pieces as I am. I really like the aesthetics this process produces - but more than that, from a conceptual standpoint I love the organic chaos that creates those aesthetics.
In my previous post, I shared the obvara raku bowls I made on my October 21, 2023 workshop at Dakota Potters Supply. I also made some plates and platters! As always, you can click on any of the photos below to see them larger.
This first burnished plate depicts a bear, and you can’t convince me otherwise.
This next burnished plate is smaller than the first - it’d be good to hold jewelry or other small items.
A small obvara raku plate by artist Shelby Prindaville.
This final piece is the largest - it’s a platter or tray, and it has some light texture on its inside surface.
Here is the first batch of my obvara raku pieces from my Dakota Potters Supply workshop on October 21, 2023 - I made enough that I plan to publish three posts covering the artwork! This post shares my obvara bowls and bowl-like vessels.
Again, as background, obvara is a low-fire scalding-and-sealing process wherein you create a fermented sourdough/beer bath, plunge approximately 980°C naked ceramics fresh out of the kiln into it, wait for them to start to bloom with different tan-to-brown markings, and then arrest the surface carbonization process by rinsing the pieces off in a water bath.
The obvara process itself scalds and somewhat seals the surface of the pottery, but I went ahead and added a thin layer of kitchen wax to these pieces as well for extra protection and sheen unification. All of the below images in each gallery row are of the same artwork from different angles.
This first open bowl has a burnished-smooth surface!
This second piece is another open bowl, but this time the surface has some light texture as well as a more variable form.
This third piece is burnished smooth and a bit more closed, though there’s a quite variable lip. All of the pieces I’ll be showing you are handbuilt, pinch-pot designs.
Next we have another burnished and even more closed vessel! This one was a favorite of my fellow workshop attendees; they loved how the obvara surface turned out.
While you can click into each of the above images to see them larger, I want to close this post out with just one large image of the last burnished bowl I made!
An obvara raku handbuilt bowl by artist Shelby Prindaville.
A photo of a section of a cave wall near where I harvested my pigment - this spot had just a couple of red ochre ribbons, but deeper into the cave there was a bigger deposit.
I started making the substrate for this piece in Athens, but I continued it after my return home and painted it here! The background is special - the substrate is made of white concrete mixed with natural cave pigment I harvested at in an abandoned silver mine tunnel on my friend’s monastery grounds and then processed into powder. I believe it is red ochre, which is one of the original archaic pigments used in ancient cave paintings. I also applied the red ochre to the surface for extra pigmentation.
The subject matter is a wild adult male red fox (Vulpes vulpes) which I got to observe on Mount Lycabettus due to the kindness of my field biologist friend Dimitris! He discovered that this fox shifts dens around 8am when the sun begins to infiltrate his early morning den; the one he moves into a narrow cave tunnel with two openings in a cliff face. Watching him navigate an almost sheer rock wall to get to that second den was witnessing a truly skilled athlete in action.
I like that the substrate and the subject both have caves in common, and though I glazed the whole of the fox irises with gold, a portion of them beneath the glaze are just the raw red ochre. I managed to finish this piece in time to install it in my Materiality show in Eppley Art Gallery, so it’s on display there through October 7th if you’d like to see it in person!
This is Ancient Origins, acrylic, artist-harvested red ochre natural cave pigment, and concrete on recycled wood round, 17.5x17.5x.75”, 2023.
Shelby Prindaville's acrylic painting of a red fox atop artist-harvested natural red ochre cave pigment and concrete on a recycled wood round.
Having that one hoopoe sunbathe in what felt pointedly for me was a genuinely amazing experience, and even though I think the pose is somewhat challenging for viewers, I knew I needed to paint it.
Each time I’d walked past or into olive wood stores, I considered if I wanted to purchase an olive wood slab to use as a substrate. There were a lot of slabs that had been made into cutting boards, complete with runoff depressions and handles, but several stores offered flush slabs (I imagine with the intended usage being cheese and serving boards). One day, I was in another olive wood shop and I decided to sift through all of their flush slabs, and I found one with a really compelling wood grain design that in my mind referenced the hot summer Mount Lycabettus landscape, and I could envision putting the sunbathing hoopoe atop it. It was a smaller slab than I ideally wanted, but then again, whatever I acquired would have to fit in my luggage… and size was important but so was the wood grain design - and this one was pretty perfect. I dithered about it for a little bit, and then decided to take the plunge and get it. Post-purchase, I went into another olive wood store to see if I’d immediately regret my choice by finding a better slab, but they did not have one that positively compared with mine so I took that as a win and stopped second-guessing it.
The hoopoe’s distinctive, high-contrast plumage is particular enough that on this and the previous hoopoe painting I needed to do a full shaded drawing first (rather than merely a contour drawing, which is what I typically can get away with). As I tell my students, time management is crucial to being a productive, well-compensated artist - the faster you can finish a piece while keeping high standards, the sooner you can begin the next. The only other painting in recent memory that I’ve done a full shaded drawing for is Velocity, my painted turtle painting.
The underlying drawing, which I think gives you some insight into the difficulties I faced working atop this high-contrast substrate.
Drawing my sunbathing hoopoe on top of the olive wood was really difficult. Not in terms of making marks - that was fine! - but in terms of accurately putting a competing design on top of the loud wood grain already present. Even the placement and size itself was difficult to determine! Then once I began, sometimes the drawing perfectly aligned with the wood grain, which itself was startling and caused me to second-guess my work, but other times I had to dismiss what the wood grain was doing and superimpose a different line.
The painting was also tedious, in that the smaller-than-desired size of the slab meant the artwork too was a bit smaller than I wanted and I had to use my three smallest brushes to paint the whole piece. I also needed to layer the paint and build it up, as the high-contrast wood grain design bled through my first few layers of paint (particularly the white areas). I’d guess the white areas have at least six applications of white paint to achieve my desired opacity.
After I added the sun, it looked too anemic; a simple gold circle in the olive wood sky blended in too much. I slept on it, and the next day I decided to add a darker gradient halo to the sun. This detail was instrumental; I am really pleased with how much it enhanced the artwork.
I managed to finish this piece just before my show reception, so I snuck it into the show by placing it on a small stand on the gallery display counter. A number of viewers remarked at how natural and easy the piece looks in that it all flows and sits exactly where it should. Given how difficult it was to execute, that was rewarding to hear.
The field biologist who had taken me on a couple Mount Lycabettus hikes and knew I was painting hoopoes arrived and brought with him some sparrowhawk and hoopoe feathers he’d found. One of the wing feathers he brought perfectly aligns with my painting, which is really cool. I toyed with the idea of incorporating it into the painting, but decided not to do so (yet, anyway!).
This is Radiance, acrylic on natural olive wood slab, 7.5x16.5x.75", 2023.
Shelby Prindaville's acrylic on olive wood slab painting of a sunbathing hoopoe.
The wooden spool end before the mosaic and concrete.
I’m always interested in manmade constructions altered by the environment and time, and when I kept finding broken fragments of marble paving stones, concrete pathing, ceramic tiles, and so forth, I started picking them up. After amassing quite a collection, I decided I’d make a mosaic that referenced some of the artifact displays I’d seen in Athenian museums, so I took the angle grinder with a diamond blade to them to cut them down to at or below my desired height.
I then put one unique piece per type into the second recycled wood round from the electrical spool - this one had the upraised interior wooden frame with a circular outside and a square inside. (To block the holes, I had already cut and glued down a piece of masonite to the back - see the image to the left.) Once I found the layout I wanted, I put a smoother white concrete (compared to the previous large-grogged grey type I used in Realms) in and around it. I thought I probably wanted to paint it, but by this point my show installation was the next day so we just installed it in that mid-way state.
Once installed, my show was up until my last day in Athens, so I then took it down and brought it back to the US. Then I began to test out different possible compositions in Photoshop, and I settled on painting a couple rings of color - the inner gold and the outer blue - around the central composition in a design that references the mati aka evil eye charms. The three cool-colored mosaic fragments in the center are intentionally reminiscent of an eye as well.
After I painted the two rings, they looked too new, so I weathered them a little and made the blue border bleed into the white band inside to soften that edge.
This is Pathways, found marble, concrete, and ceramic paver fragments with acrylic and concrete on recycled wood round, 17.5x17.5x.1.3, 2023.
Shelby Prindaville's Greek pathways mosaic relief.
This painting was the third I started… but the seventh to finish! Many people have asked me how long it takes to finish a piece of artwork, and the answer is harder to provide than they might think because I’m usually working on multiple pieces at a time and each one’s process and progress looks different.
The substrate for this is once again papyrus, but for the first time I experimented with using crackle paste. This was particularly experimental in that you’re supposed to use crackle paste only atop rigid surfaces, and papyrus is flexible. This meant that as the crackle paste seized, it actually buckled the papyrus beneath, leading to less dramatic cracking in the paste but creating a very irregular topography and shrinking the overall dimensions of the papyrus. Painting a relatively detailed and representational subject on this surface was really difficult, which led to me fighting with it for weeks. I might’ve even abandoned it, except every visitor to my studio remarked on how much they looked forward to seeing it finished and that it was already a favorite! Eventually, I made peace with it and could see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I am really pleased with how it turned out; my studio guests were right to urge me to complete it! Also from a completionist angle, my Mount Lycabettus tortoise times were always spent with two tortoises - I painted the larger, presumed male tortoise on the antique tiles, and this papryus piece depicts his smaller, presumably female companion. It feels nice to have finished portraits of each of them.
This is a tentative title: Heritage, acrylic and crackle paste on papyrus, 15.5x21.75", 2023.
Shelby Prindaville's acrylic and crackle paste on papyrus painting of a marginated tortoise.
After my sparrowhawk photoshoot the second day with my new field biologist friend, I thought I might want to pay homage to the spotting scope’s field of view by working on a circular composition. Dimitri helpfully found me some wood-and-cardboard spools in the neighborhood trash, and he salvaged them. After taking them apart (they were bolted together), there were two wooden circles on each end. One was flush with holes for the bolts and center, and one had an extra central wooden ledge around the center along with the requisite holes. The Phoenix Athens residency director Dimitri is really into working with concrete, and I like trying new media so I embraced his suggestion to test it out!
I cut down a piece of masonite and glued it to the back, and then put some mesh over the top of the holes to help strengthen the cement’s fill of them. I then mixed up the concrete and added some crushed local snail shells I had collected on Mount Lycabettus as well.
The concrete adhered pretty well, but it wasn’t very level on the surface. I filled in most of the worst of the cavities with matte medium and then went to work drawing and painting atop it! I decided on a composition with three of the Eurasian sparrowhawk chicks, and I added a subtle dark vignette as another nod to the spotting scope.
I confess I am very nervous about how any of these rounds will handle the transit back, as they slightly exceed the width of my largest suitcase; it is flexible, so I can squeeze them in, but I can’t really do anything about their getting hit on those two sides. I can pad out the top and bottom, at least! I’m hoping they’ll be OK, but if they break, I hope they break in such a way that I can try to patch the pieces à la the archaeological fragmented displays I’ve admired in Athenian museums.
This is Realms, acrylic, concrete, and crushed snail shells on recycled wood round, 17.5x17.5x.75”, 2023.
Shelby Prindaville's circular acrylic and concrete on wooden panel painting of three Eurasian sparrowhawk chicks.
When I first conceived of a nine-tile piece (Marginated) and a five-turned-into-four-tile piece due to one of the pieces being destroyed at a sandblasting facility (though then one of the four remaining tiles broke into two during sanding, so it reconverted to five total pieces-and-fragments), I had planned to paint an animal on the larger composition and a plant on the narrower one. I imagined it might be a tortoise and an olive branch, and as time passed and I gathered experiences and reference imagery, both ideas resonated more and more strongly.
Athens is named as such because Athena and Poseidon battled out becoming the city’s patron god through each giving it a gift. Poseidon gave a salt-water sea, while Athena gave the gift of an olive tree atop the Acropolis. The olive tree was deemed the better gift, and so the city was named Athens with the patron of Athena (and was punished with insufficient fresh water by Poseidon). Olive trees are ubiquitous in Athens and Greece, growing in the ground as well as in decorative containers throughout the city. They are easy to identify due to their iconic appearance. Their fruit, oil, and wood are each major industries, and squatters can even gain land rights by planting an olive tree on contested parcels. The olive branch has become a worldwide symbol of peace.
I decided to paint an olive branch with immature olives on it, and atop the roughened glaze sections, I kept its coloration standard while on the raw clay body I converted it into a hot/burnt color palette that bring global warming, fires, and drought to mind (as I did to a lesser degree on Marginated as well).
Once again, this piece can be displayed variably, and/or in combination with Marginated.
Symbolism, acrylic on five partially deglazed 19th century ceramic tiles and tile fragments, variable display dimensions with core dimensions of 17.25x5.5x.25", 2023.
Shelby Prindaville’s acrylic painting of an olive branch on partially deglazed 19th century tiles, displayed in its core composition.
Shelby Prindaville’s acrylic painting of an olive branch on partially deglazed 19th century tiles, displayed in an alternative layout.
I am so happy with how this overall project turned out! The tiles fought hard to keep their slick glass surfaces and people kept trying to persuade me to give up, but after a lot of failed attempts, I eventually prevailed in removing the top-most surface but leaving most of the glaze, crackle, and chip defects (and adding more defects of my own in the process).
From conception, I had planned on a nine-tile ceramic artwork and a five-tile-and-fragment ceramic artwork. One of the whole tiles ended up completely ruined while at the second sandblasting facility, so I was down to nine and four. I was initially pretty sure my nine-tile square artwork was going to be a tortoise, but I tried out a variety of compositions… and confirmed that a tortoise was my favorite option!
This project is exciting in that it is an experimental fusion between ceramics and painting, and it also uses as its substrate antique tiles from the 1840s. The multiple components means that I can display this piece in infinite ways; the “core composition” is of course the most resolved option but irregular spacing and/or scrambling encourages additional viewer appreciation for the artistry of each tile in its own right as well as introduces additional room for conceptual narratives around ecology, encroaching human environments into the natural world, negative space, abstraction, and time.
The subject is the larger, presumably male adult marginated tortoise I met on Mount Lycabettus - at least one group of locals call him Petros. When I was thinking about what to title this piece, I realized that marginated also means “marked or characterized by margins,” such that the word describes both the subject and substrate and therefore seemed to me to be the perfect title.
Marginated, acrylic on nine partially deglazed 19th century ceramic tiles, variable display dimensions with core dimensions of 16x16x.25", 2023.
Shelby Prindaville’s acrylic painting of a marginated tortoise on nine partially deglazed 19th century tiles, displayed in the core dimensions.
Shelby Prindaville’s acrylic painting of a marginated tortoise on nine partially deglazed 19th century tiles, displayed in a more conceptual, open configuration.
This is my first Eurasian hoopoe artwork! It is painted on a natural tree trunk slice which I obtained here in Athens. The central element, the “seed,” is the unaltered center-most part of the wood as well as its hollow. It also subtly references the “mati” or “evil eye” which is a prevalent design in Greece.
I plan to paint at least one, maybe two more hoopoe pieces… though I may not have time to complete them while I’m here in Athens. We’ll see!
The Seed, acrylic on tree trunk slice, 15.25x15.5x1”, 2023.
Shelby Prindaville’s acrylic painting atop a tree trunk slice of two hoopoes on a branch.
Here is my first finished painting completed as an artist in residence at Phoenix Athens in Greece! It depicts a wild sparrowhawk chick in a somewhat stylized nest of branches.
This is Potential, acrylic on papyrus, 24x16.5”, 2023.
Shelby Prindaville’s painting of a wild Eurasian sparrowhawk chick on papryus.
I’m beginning a new artist residency, but I still have some paintings I’d like to do from my summer 2022 artist residency at the Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine so I worked on them before I headed out! Last summer I had begun, but not yet finished, the contour drawing underpinning this painting of two juvenile possums. I worked on the background this past fall, and began to paint it at the beginning of this summer! The background is a chemical stain from the anatomy lab; I’ve had some trouble with the lightfastness of the veterinary stains I’ve tried in the past, which is why I gave this one so much time between setting it down and painting atop it! Both due to the time involved and my research, I have more faith in this particular stain’s staying power. This stain is called orcein and is derived from lichens, and it has been used as a fabric dye in addition to scientific usages.
This is Overlooked, acrylic and orcein stain from the LSU SVM anatomy lab on Aquabord panel, 24x18x1.5”, 2023.
I have a lot of my own ceramic pieces that I love, and there are a number of those that I plan to keep for myself for the foreseeable future! I’m pleased with each of the ceramics that came out of my recent April 2023 raku workshop; that work spans the realm between good to fantastic. One piece I made is my favorite ceramic I’ve made yet, though, which is a hurdle that was relatively easy to pass when I was a beginner back in early 2020, but is now a much rarer event.
This piece, like the others in this series I’ve made, was dipped in three coats of ferric chloride, wrapped in Muehlenbeckia axillaris or Creeping Wire Vine and then aluminum foil, and saggar-fired in a raku kiln. It is finished with kitchen wax.
Ceramic glazing in general is a lottery; there are a lot of variables and some are outside of your control. I think I won that lottery with this vessel!
This is my second post reviewing my April 2023 raku workshop ceramics! This one will cover two of my three “baked potato” aluminum foil saggar-fired ceramics and my clear crackle piece.
Based on my experimentation using plants at my April 2022 raku workshop, I only had real luck with saggar firing Muehlenbeckia axillaris, colloquially known as Creeping Wire Vine. I therefore used it again! Below is a plate that was dipped in three coats of ferric chloride and then wrapped in the vine and then aluminum foil and fired. The Muehlenbeckia axillaris impact is relatively subtle because it mostly went white to medium gray, but the plate overall turned out well. The very first time I did this “baked potato” technique, I used a matte clear acrylic spray. The second time, I went with gloss. I didn’t really love either, so this time, I went with applying a kitchen wax. I really like the way the wax looks, so I think that’ll be the winner moving forward!
Next, I did the same process with a vase - on this piece, I also sprinkled just a little sugar on as well for some small-scale spotting in the design. This one’s interesting as the Muehlenbeckia axillaris is more apparent, and it produced the full value spectrum on the same vase; the top vine piece is white to light grey, while the bottom vine carbonized a lot more and turned medium grey to black.
And finally, I chose to do a clear crackle on a small, necked vase. Handbuilding necked vessels is tricky, and I complicated matters with this piece by leaving my building process evident on the outside to contribute texture (while smoothing it for structure and stability on the inside). This was quite risky; I knew there was a good chance this piece could crack or break with thermal shock due to the thinner seamed areas. However, I was fortunate - it made it through the firing completely unscathed! I wanted to enhance the seams and stress spots that I had intentionally retained, so I painted over each of them and the lip of the vase with wax before glazing with Clear Crackle on the exterior. As I’ve explained before, this means the glaze doesn’t stick to the waxed areas, and the wax burns off in the kiln. The exposed, unglazed clay body then carbon traps the smoke in the post-kiln reduction atmosphere, turning a dark, smoky grey. I finished the piece by putting kitchen wax on the unglazed areas.
Again, none of the “cracks” in the below piece are structural - they are all decorative and this vase is fully sound.
