Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Tea Horse Studio 2017 recap

Or

What The Hell Happened To Cindi? Did She Disappear?

Save The Date!!

I'm baaaaack...
     I looked at some logins the other day across a few social media platforms I belong to and on one of them I noticed I hadn't updated since 2016. At first I figured that was a typo but considering the events of the end of last year and the binging of this year, I realized, nope, that's accurate.
     Let's catch up, shall we?
     I'm still making pottery and have even managed to get some art pieces done. In fact, making all this work is a big part of the reason why I've been so lax in my online social media presence. Pots have been thrown, bisqued and even glaze-fired. Right now there's a back up in the studio because I'm waiting on some wood-firing schedules with the fine folks at Bobtown Arts in Berea so I can get some new wood-fired pieces finished. Additionally, I've been trying to keep the local galleries supplied as best as possible. Currently, I have a whole bunch of glazed ware ready for firing but I still need to push some greenware first to fill a bisque load in the kiln to complete the glaze load! Workable studio space is small so I don't have much room for inventory to sit and hang out. When I run out of space while things are in process, I have to get creative while I work, whole lotta shuffling of... stuff. That tends to stress me out. Anyway, you ask, how did I end up in a cycle where I'm a bit congested and behind the loop?

The Mother Part

     Well, Mother had some heart surgery. Now that Mother is living in a nice cabin on the property directly behind my studio (with a lovely view of the farm scenery, I might add), I split my time working and checking up on her. Last year the extent of her health issues were critical and had to be addressed ASAP. In late January, she went in for what's referred to as a TAVR procedure to replace her aortic valve for severe aortic stenosis. It happens under general anesthesia via an incision in your femoral artery. The valve worked beautifully. However, she had some bleeding, not major but enough that she spent about a week in ICU then onto Telemetry for another few weeks then a couple of weeks in the local nursing home rehab. The whole episode until I started to get into a routine with her care and my work has lasted until about May-June. She's doing great. We can't thank the surgeons, cardiologists and whole medical team enough.

The Me Part

The sun will come out...
     Of course, me being me, beyond trying to keep my pottery and business moving forward, (even if it's only inches at a time), my brain gets sapped dealing with multiple crises at once. In case you haven't discovered this yourself, multi-tasking is bullshit. A sapped brain coupled with the current existential political reality in the USA exacerbated the usual seasonal depression in the winter months that I encounter so recovering out of that has taken its toll, sending me into a sticky depressive state for longer than I'm used to. I'm not a pill person when dealing with my depressive moments. I prefer a diet/therapy/exercise/meditative approach. It's much slower to come out of but it works for me. So I'm slowly getting things back on track. YAY FOR ME!

Tea Horse Studio Specific News

Item #1

     I still have work stocked at the Berea Arts Council in Berea, KY, DamselFly Gallery in Midway, KY and Silo Mill Gift Shop in Irvine, KY. If you're in the area, go see those peeps!

Item #2

     Starting at the beginning of this year, I was lucky to get some clay samples from my local supplier, Kentucky Mudworks. They've expanded to a location in Louisville and there they have embarked on producing their own line of moist clays, right now, mid-range and high fire clays. I've messed around with the mid-range clays with test tiles, thrown and hand-built items, carved, slips, underglazes, various glaze combinations. Some of the results are promising and I'll be putting up a write-up of my results shortly. The high fire tests will be fired off-site at Bobtown Arts and perhaps another soda kiln in Lawrenceburg, KY. One day, (maybe next year?) I'll get my own wood-fired soda kiln built on-site but until then, I'm limited to the mid-range electric fired clays.

Now listed at on my Etsy site!

Item #3

     ETSY!! Guess who has new listings? Yup and some of them are even the new clays! Peruse the page and pick yer faves. 

Item #4

     Believe it or not, I had Open Studio hours this summer but as I have done ZERO publicizing, the studio was rather subdued. Open visits are back for the month of September, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 10-4pm. Hopefully, I'll adjust the FB page notice accordingly. Due to all the Mother-related activities, I have missed my goals to apply to some outdoor shows so if you want to see me, come out in September or...

Item #5 

FALL STUDIO SALE!!

Yup. One day ONLY.
Saturday, October 28 from 9-5 pm
10% off all items, some selected items up to 30% off.
Get the jump on Christmas, help me reduce my local inventory.
Mark those calendars.

Until next time...


So that's the gist of it. 

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Bobtown Arts Wood Firing Dec. 2016



     So we did this on the weekend of December 9-10 and let me tell you it was COLD. I have yet to organize these on Etsy but if you're signed up for my newsletter (link on the sidebar) you can get all the info if you're looking to purchase. A plethora of photos to follow...
Some odd pitchers. For reference, they should comfortably hold about a quart to half gallon of milk.
They're thrown and assembled from two parts. $90 each.

Sun mugs! Yay!

These run $36



A lovely arrangement... 
Inside mugs and coffee cups. The glaze is a chun rimmed with  a darker blue.

Chuns can run from an ivory or white to a pale blue depending on the firing. Most of the insides of my mugs and cups become a speckled light blue

Two smaller coffee cups with horse motif. $26 each. 

Wheee!


Saturday, November 26, 2016

Holiday season


Okie doke. I've finally managed to put aside a few pots from my firings to list on Etsy. Most of them are soap dishes under $20. Most of the time I make pots as fast as I can and they end up getting dispersed to local galleries. By the time I finish making deliveries, I have little to list on Etsy. Particularly horse pottery. This time I managed to put a few pieces aside of the latest batch of farm animals themed pieces including goats, cats, dogs, pigs and roosters and chickens.

If you sign up for my newsletter – and I highly suggest you do – you get a promo code for check out that knocks a few pennies off the price for the holiday season.

I'm shipping Priority Mail until December 12, after which I won't feel comfortable that the pots will arrive before Dec. 25th.

So enjoy, enjoy. Hope your holiday season gets off to a great start!

Friday, October 28, 2016

Studio Sale Autumn 2016

     Okie dokie. I've been making and bisque-firing and under glazing like a madwoman. Things are finally starting to come out of the kiln. This Saturday I will be having a studio sale from 10-5pm at the farm in Irvine. All pots will be 15% off the marked price. Anything not sold after Saturday will be dispersed to local galleries and listed on the Etsy site. If you sign up for my newsletter, you can get the coupon code for additional savings on all my Etsy listings up until December 12. I'll be selling and shipping Christmas pots off the Etsy site until then. Afterwards I just don't feel comfortable that Christmas shipments will get out in time.
     One other thing, I have a bumpy, rutted gravel driveway so drive slowly if you're coming out. Look for the yellow balloons on the mailbox!









Saturday, September 10, 2016

The Undead Father

Funny story.

So Dad passed away in early 2015. He was 90. He was in a nursing home for the last year-and-a-half of his life which wasn't the way I would have liked to see things go but he had a bit of dementia and had many issues physically which made it impossible for my 87-year-old mother to care for him. Additionally, all of us kids were either dead or too far away to assist. He needed care before we could make other arrangements after he fell and broke his hip and voila, once you're in the system, there's no coming out until you're dead, practically speaking in our situation.

And he was buried. My older sister, older brother, and I missed the funeral because the three of us live over 500 miles from New York. At the time of dad's death, it was February, my brother was in Seattle and it had snowed over 18" here in Kentucky. The three of us opted to trek back the following month to get together at the apartment that my mother was living in and drop by the cemetery to visit the gravesite with mom. It was cold, cold, cold when we went a month after dad's death, the mound of dirt still sitting by the graveside that had been dug only weeks before.

We led mom over the spongy grass to Dad's grave. There were patches of snow on the ground but for the most part, things were winter-bare and brown. I think it was my brother or sister who walked mom over to the headstone. I started to walk ahead of them because immediately upon getting out of the car and facing the site, I noticed something on the ground just past the mound of dirt past the headstone. Something that I couldn't recognize. And yet... yet... instinctively, I knew exactly what it was except... my conscious, present, self didn't want to make the connection. It was a rather large, off-white, almost grey rock sitting on the grass at the bottom of the dirt pile next to the sunken ground where dad's casket had been covered. Alarm bells were quietly ringing in my head, unconsciously pulling me toward investigating this smooth, not-quite-spherical stone before my mother arrived at the gravesite. As we got in front of the headstone and the sunken rectangle of dirt, I sidled over to the rock and tried to lean over without bringing any attention to myself just in case this was, well, no rock. I didn't want to announce what I was doing so as not to make a scene. Just in case there was no reason for a scene.

You know when you have that moment of recognition, that instantaneous flooding of information when it all clicks into place and your brain not only names what it's seeing but suddenly, you're also overwhelmed with all the ramifications and consequences that come with being fully aware? Like enlightenment? But more... macabre?
I bent down to glance at the rock just to the left of my ankles and saw them, the squiggly lines, the seams, three fine, black threads like meadering lazy rivers, tiny grooves that met in the middle. There's a name for them. Cranial sutures. Yes, it was a skull. A human skull. On the ground. Next to the fresh mound of dirt that had been excavated for my father's remains weeks earlier. That meant, in all likelihood, it was... one of my relatives. Just the head. Just the bony, top half of the skull. No jaw. No hair. No flesh. Just bone. Just sitting there. On the ground. As my mother and brother and sister stood paying their respects to my father's recently interred remains.
Oh, it's amazing how many simultaneous thoughts you can actually have running through your head at one time when things come together.

Holy shit, that's a skull. Holy shit, that's the skull of one of my father's side of the family. Holy shit, no one else has seen this. Holy shit, I literally just got here and haven't even begun to feel for the significance of the moment. Holy shit –block everyone's view– can they see? 

WE MUST GET MOM OUT OF HERE. NOW.

said the loud voice in my head above all the other chaotic thoughts.

I stared across the group of us, trying to strategically place my body in mom's line of vision should she look towards me and away from where dad had been recently buried. At the same time, I stared hard and beamed the concern of emergency to my brother, silently, and I hoped, discreetly. You know the look, the widening eyes, pursed lips and small jerky head movements that should have clearly communicated, "Don't look now but Grandma's head is at 11 o'clock!" My brother, sensing I was acting a bit odd, leaned over to me and mouthed, "What?" without making a sound.

"Don't make it obvious," I said, low under my breath, "but go over to that "rock" and and just see if you see what I see."

He slowly switched places with me as I stepped closer to mom. My sister could tell some kind of conspiratorial conversation was happening and slid over to follow my brother, me taking her place at mom's side between us and Poor Yorick. I hooked my arm through my mother's and we silently stood looking at dad's gravesite, contemplating dad's end of life...

Well, not really. Look, realistically, mom may have been assessing all the details of the past few weeks, months, the last year-and-a-half, her lifetime with my dad and marriage of sixty-five years. I, on the other hand, was rolling over obsessive thoughts in my head like an automatic rifle.

 "Are you kidding me? The second we get here? I cannot believe this is happening. Wait, yes. Yes, I can! Of course. Of course this is happening. Why not? Why should I be able to grieve like a normal person? This is just par for the course for this weird family. Why wouldn't there be a human skull on the ground? Who is filming this? Someone must be filming this. We have to go now!"

"So," I turned to mom, "you want to head to the Piper's Kilt for lunch?"

"Yeah," she said, "Let's go."

And with that I turned her away from the spectacle at the edge of the gravesite and walked her back to the car. Behind me as I looked over my shoulder, I could see the shock and surprise in the faces of my siblings as my brother took photos of, presumably, one of the Cusicks. They arrived back at the car as mom was getting in. We all settled in the car seats, adjusted our seat belts and conducted ourselves as if nothing had happened. Because of course we did. For mom's benefit. I was driving. As we started to pull away and my sister was conversing with mom, keeping her distracted, I turned to my brother and exclaimed under my breath words to the effect of "You have got to be kidding me."

ACT NATURAL.

We went to lunch and had to endure another hour of sad, reflective Dad memories, comforting mom while shooting looks of "What the fuck?!"over her head to each other when she wasn't aware. For an hour. I don't remember eating.

Now, let me point out that although some might find this experience unnerving, unsettling, shocking, traumatic, worthy of drama and freaking out, crying, lamenting or what have you, I come from an odd family of second generation immigrants, an Irish, German and Lithuanian mix, lower middle class to middle class upbringing, depression-era sensibilities passed down from my folks and their extended families, lots of drinking with all the co-dependency and dysfunction-ality that comes with it. We descend from people who have gone through struggle and hard times but use humor, dark humor, to get through all the shit. So the moment I knew what I was looking at (and I want to say it was when I leaned over in my discreet yoga-stretch lean for my close inspection but looking back, there was a part of me that knew the instant I stepped out of the car), that moment, although some might have been traumatized, I was struck with shocked amusement and had to work hard not to burst out laughing. Could this be a more bizarre, absurd episode? I could hear the snorting laugh of my late brother in my head if he could have been there. I couldn't stop wishing if only, if only my younger brother had been here, too. What a moment! What a defining Cusick moment! It was absolutely perfect. You cannot make this shit up! While others can wax poetic about losing a loved father, sympathy and grief and tears, I'm franticly trying to usher my mother away from human remains. My god, that meant it would have been there when the funeral at the graveside happened! How did no one see? How did it get above ground? Then I remembered the patches of melted snow. Chances are it was all covered in snow weeks earlier and had only been exposed over the course of the later weeks. Didn't the gravediggers notice it rolling across the ground? Did they lose sight of it in the snow?
We finally got back to the apartment after lunch and the three of us furiously speculated how it all happened and just which relative was that? We surmised because it was a bleached skull, it would have had to have been remains that were in the ground a long time and in a decomposable casket that could have been disturbed by a backhoe as opposed to a metal casket. Based the marked dates on the headstone, that meant Grandma or dad's sister were the likeliest candidates, but dad's sister died in infancy and this was a full grown skull. Grandma, it is!

Leaving mom to nap in the apartment and walking down the street a bit later, still discussing this, we fell silent. Finally, one of us said, "Well, who can we call? We can't just leave it there!" Visions of strangers showing up at the cemetery and absconding with a skull passed through my thoughts. Teens playing football with it. That kind of thing. Why? Well, to be frank, when I bent over to look at it, had my siblings not been there, had mom not been there, you're god-damned right I would have picked it up. Hell, I might have even taken it home. After all, it was one of us! (One of us, one of us) The urge was strong to touch it when I saw it. I mean, how often does one get the opportunity?

Back at the apartment, my sister found out who managed the cemetery. My brother was elected to call the parish although he insisted on making the call not in our presence so as not to listen to our wisecracks in the background. The conversation on his end sounded like this:

"Yes, my family and I were just at the gravesite of my recently passed father, and there seems to be a skull on the ground that was disinterred and is just sitting next to the headstone... A skull... Yes, a skull... Yes, I know... Yes, next to the headstone... Well, we were just worried that someone else might come by and see it...Yes, of course, thank you." 

They immediately dispatched Fr. So-and-so to reinter the remains. My brother had to call back and ask that they not call the home phone number if they had questions, ya know, in case mom picked up the phone and found out what we'd been trying to keep from her.

She still doesn't know what happened. I suppose we could tell her now that she's settled in her cabin and she's acclimated to dad being gone. One day. And we'll show her the pictures. After a few beers, though.

Thinking about it, it's fitting that this happened. For me, the journey of my parents getting older and dying has routinely drifted into territory of the odd, bizarre, frustrating, and absurd. It's not over, either. Not only because mom's still alive and kicking, spending her days on her Kentucky porch, enjoying her puzzles and beer, but also because the DMV in New York keeps sending letters to my father warning him of his car registration suspension even though the car was re-registered to mom almost two years ago. Even though the car was then sold and re-registered in Kentucky about six months ago. Even though the man is dead. And just the other day we received a call inquiring about the apartment that mom vacated back in Scarsdale. Did we know that someone was still paying the rent on it? I'm sorry, say again? Is this a joke? Nope, rental company says someone in the family is still paying rent on the apartment.

Dad... is that you????


Thursday, September 8, 2016

Tea Horse Studio Newsletter Sign-up


Click this link http://eepurl.com/KHZ3L to sign up for the Tea Horse Studio Newsletter courtesy of Mail Chimp. Comes with a confirmation email – just to make sure you really mean itThis email list is strictly for my purposes to help me promote my pottery, jewelry and artwork and will not be distributed in any way to any other party. If I die or close the studio, this list disappears so your info is safe with me.  It arrives via the teahorsenews@teahorsestudio.com address. 

Wot up

I require large blocks of uninterrupted time. I've learned this over and over agin. I forget it. Then I learn it again. It's a fact of my persona, my psyche, internalize it, dear darling. 

Things need to shift. 

I was taking my mother out on some errands today in town. She was reflecting about her early childhood, more specifically, that lately she was remembering earlier and earlier memories. She mentioned that she felt that she grew up in the best era, being born in the mid-twenties, growing up with the advent of the car, the telephone, refrigeration, all kinds of life changing inventions and so on. It was "the best time to live" according to her. Because that's mom and she sees the world from her perspective only. Anyway, she asked if I wondered and imagined what kinds of sea changes would I be seeing in my lifetime? Now putting aside the fact that I'm in my mid-fifties and I've already "grown up" and am kinda coasting on the downhill side (bless her heart, she's utterly clueless about me sometimes), I did mention the internet and wireless communications. What would that mean, she wondered, what that would mean for humanity? I said that I felt that basic human behavior is pretty constant and in my opinion, any one invention has a period of time that follows where people adjust to the new technology until they get back into their basic rhythm. People want to imagine that things change to be either all apocalyptic or all utopian and neither is true as far as I'm concerned.

It got me to thinking about my adjustment to the phenom of "social media." BACK IN THE DAY, when the internet was wee and I was communicating via bulletin boards and text only, I was still in the throes of what I call "long thought," the ability to think through an idea, let it gestate, not hurried, evolve, sit, come back to it a few days later, explore, and so on. But now, there's been a rush since then, a social media explosion, that I feel we're still in the beginnings of, that's akin to a rapid infection, or a flush of growth, a spreading of spores, etc. So "long thought" has taken a back seat to "short thought", the Twitter/Facebook post effect. People's lives, people's daily communication, has been cut into short bursts, short meaningless bursts, barroom one-liners. Facebook has become the Keurig cup of human thought, short, empty, disposable commentary that has a shelf-life of however long it takes you to scroll past it, filling up the landfill of daily human experience with meaningless, plastic trash. I can read and read and click and click and there's always another link, another thread, another photo, where I can "go deeper" into the story, idea, phenomena but... not really. These days it seems the links loop back on themselves or back to the same five sources, the same six conspiracy sites, the same circular logic, and you learn nothing. And days later, weeks later, the cycle repeats. All hail the algorithm, the magical math that stunts organic growth. Entropy, entropy, oxygen starved entropy. No surprises, just a tightening spiral.

Ok, so obviously that's my take on it and just my opinion. I shouldn't even need to state that but it seems necessary. Having said that, the Keurig cup-ization of my thoughts and work and writing and public discourse or interaction with people increasingly has made me uncomfortable. I'm interrupted regularly with flashes, tenuous neuron-firings of time perception changes. Short thought has begotten perception of time passing much more quickly than it really is. I think. Subsequently, I've begun to measure my "success," productivity, satisfaction with daily living, based on how many different things have I crammed into one day. Why? Why when I distinctly recall pleasurable moments and activities related to long thought? You know, things like getting lost in one's work, a day long hike, reading a good book, a paper book, full concerts, movies, sunsets, blocks of time without the anxiety that I've wasted it. With the advent of short thought social media, taking time to do long thought things comes with feelings that time is being wasted. At least for me.

Time for things to shift. For me. If banging your head on the wall hurts, stop doing it. Facebook has become a tightening spiral. I ignore this blog to do what? Waste time hitting the "Like" button? The Tea Horse Studio page is now a method for Facebook to extract money out of me and force people to look at "sponsored" posts of my work. Flooding the social media waves with posting after posting is nonsense to me so I'm embarking on more direct, less amphetamine-like communication. I've decided to slowly build a mailing list for the studio ( http://eepurl.com/KHZ3L) and publish a newsletter for Tea Horse Studio and Pottery to announce kiln openings, local sales and galleries, discounts and so on, to revisit long thought via this blog, to post images via Instagram(@teahorsestudioky), to get rid of the Twitter account, and just fucking relax a little.

Oh my god the eye twitch just fucking stop already.

Here are some of my latest pots to be distributed locally in the Irvine/Lexington, Ky area first and then onto Etsy.