Oh Elizabeth!! These are spectacularly beautiful! Oh you must feel so proud of the outcome of so much hard work. Well done E! xo

I love the hummer with the blue flowers, and how you rendered the tendrils in the plant...exquisite

These are gorgeous, Elizabeth! I love them all, but especially the orange gentians and hummingbird. Nice to see the pieces start to finish - thanks!

Priddy, I believe your juices of inspiration, fermenting here at OS these past months, have taken your work to a new level. Awesome work, friend-girl!

I love the blue crab.

Ah the goldfish.. yes I covet the goldfish. Skillful, expressive and freely executed - like a gesture drawing

brings memories of China

I'm loving the goldfish too.

Wonderful.
Beautiful and distinctive.

Kinda lean toward liking the crab best.

Nice! The blue crab is also my favorite.

This is a treat to get to see your gentle artistic side. I love the mute colors, the greens and the blues. And the blue crab is also my favorite. Even though I'm not hungry, looking at the bowl makes me famished!

I have no idea of how this is done..I'd love to see sometime...

OMG, Elizabeth, these are amazing. I paint (canvas, not pots), but I've never been able to do this type of delicate brushwork. Very, very impressive.

Although I have to say, every time you write POTZ! I read PLOTZ! and think you're blogging about falling down. :D

That is some gorgeous work, Elizabeth. I don't think I could pick out a favorite, I like them all.

Awesome. :-D

Really beautiful pots, Elizabeth. I'm glad you're showing your series, because individual pieces (and even an individual series) aren't enough to showcase your breadth.

Thanks to everyone! I unloaded the first batch of painted finished work last night and these wer photographed hot. I haven't made any real quantity of work in 4 years and I feared that I had lost my touch. But I didn't 20 years of riding that bicycle makes it easier to get back on it and ride after a long hiatus.

My son is finally in Preschool and I get to get bac to work.

Your feedback was very helpful to me, as I have about 200 more pots to paint. Knowing which ones resonate and a little bit of why helps me figure out which ones to keep hammering away at and which ones to just take a hammer to!

It is the grody side of making pretty things, but it is a metric: the best sellers ever were the crabs. No matter where I was selling, crab rich environment or no. The goldfish bowls also do well.

I am my own worst critic on hummingbirds. I like the Gentian one the best, but I will paint a few more on plates to get my examples.

I teach how to do this and making pots. So Saturday, during the 8 hour workshop, I will need to be ready to demo anything they want to see. It is like an art version of "stump the chump". So I have to be able to paint anything, my metric not theirs.

Off to paint squirrels and mice and lizards and bugs and flowers, the menu for today. more pictures tomorrow.

Any comments on these are helpful, from kudos to "why are your fish purple?"

If you want to know, somebody on Saturday will ask. So feel free to ask anything you would like to know about them. You can help me come up with a good answer!

And thank you again. Artists tend to be way insecure about what they are doing at the moment. A little distance and you can feel secure, but as I said, these were warm when I took these pictures. you all have got me excited about the rest out in the studio waiting for their 'Clothes'.

These just took my breath away, and you know I was already one of your biggest fans. The first one, the gentian and hummingbird, is just truly spectacular. Your loose lines, the way the whole thing feels breezy, is what really does it for me. It isn't sloppy, the way it would be if so many people tried to do that.

I'm not surprised the crabs are best sellers (if you really want to just turn clay into cash, think angels.) They are beautiful and wonderfully colored. But I thought the goldfish swimming around the inside of the bowl was way cool.

I want all of them :)

Argh. I mispoke. It is the purple flowered one that had the loose lines, not the gentian.

Gorgeous! Love the crab bowl. I'd buy it in a heartbeat - please reserve for me if you ever have another OS sale. I want it. I need it.

I think the goldfish one is just so inspired (okay, that sounded lame, but I mean it) - but my fav is the crab.

Elizabeth, what really works for me is how you incorporate the shape of the bowl with the shapes of the paintings. So the birds wings draw our eyes upward into the curve of the bowl side, and the goldfish tail draws us downward. Just stunning. And the layering of the paint - they're like watercolors in their luminosity. This is really fine work.

Thank you again, it is kinda scary getting back to it after 4 years. I haven't been that nervous about opening a kiln since I was a novice firing for the first time.

These pots' coating is actually a glaze sandwich.

All those POTZ! from before were fired to bisque.

Then glazed with a coating of white which feels like rice aper to the brush.

Then painted with ceramic grade pigments.

Then coated/sealed with a layer of clear glaze, which has a tendency to destroy the painting if you are not really careful about how much water lands with the glaze. You can actually have the painting float off the surface and onto your brush, meaning you wash it all off and start over. ( maybe cry a little if it was good)

The hardest part is leaving enough breathing room for the little paintings and positioning the composition. you spend a good bit of your time sitting there looking at it, then paint for about 4-5 minutes, then look, then do the calligraphy, the little linework.

I love working. Even just 7 hours a day while the boy is in preschool is awesome.

*Disclaimer: do not eat glaze sandwich.

If I mailed myself to you, could you give me a pretty tattoo?

Lovely work.... I am a total amateur pot painter (at one of those do-it-yourself'ers)... not nearly so skilled, but I find it soothing. Yours are quite nice... bravo.

Thank you, Thomas. I appreciate the warm gesture. If I can ever assist with questions you might have on painting pots, just ask. I will gladly help you out.

Freaky,
If you came in the mail, I would tattoo a caricatured graphic of barry on your leftist buttock cheek!

It would help you in the election, the biker vote!

Elizabeth - do some dolphins! Or orcas! I bet they'd give the crabs some competition :)

the problem with Dolphin is that they are grey and don't read very well on pots. They have a perspective problem in that if you show enough of it to tell what it is, it is too far away for detail, and if it is up close, they can be kind of scary with that toothy grin. I will leave that in the subconscious hopper and see if anything bubbles up.

Similar problems with Orcas.

The spaces to paint are small, like 6 inches by 8 inches, except for exceptionally large platters, and they are a risk because they can be hard to sell locally and don't ship very well.

But I am making a note of it. Shorebirds are tomorrow's work, terns, herons, egrets, ...

I forgot snails. I have to go paint some snails for my reference work.

back after a while. I come in and read OS when I am working like this because there is a really specific muscle in my right shoulder that stiffens up and I have to rest it before I can get back at it.

back to the studio...

I really, really would like to see that

I've never commented before on your 'potz' but today I just couldn't resist...WONDERFUL!!!

Egrets!! Egrets!! I want something of yours with an egret on it. My wonderful boyfriend would buy it for me for Christmas or Thanksgiving or the beginning of Autumn or something :)

The crab reminds me of Maryland blues.

I think a placid egret chillin in a marsh would be a perfect end of hurricane season gift....

And those are indeed blue crabs....

You do beautiful work. If I had to choose a favorite I would be one of the goldfish fanciers. The bowl would be so nice filled with some wonderful Japanese noodles.

I really do love to eat soup out of my own bowls. I find the "goldfish bowls" a laugh riot, but I am easily amused.

Sometimes I paint leaping frogs with crazy bugged out eyes leaping on the outside of a bowl and a small dragonfly at just the right spot on the inside to be what he's going for.

Kind of like an adult version of the happy clownface bowls you use to make toddlers finish their oatmeal.

Now that's some fine art!

Sorry about that last comment.

Potters are the bastard children of the fine arts. We are often not taken seriously because people "use" the things we make.

I make flat things to sit around as well, but for this upcoming workshop, I am teaching other potters how to add color and illustration to make their pots sell better.

So I have to have all kind of styles of drawing and painting to use as examples.

I will post more as it comes out of hte kiln. And one all the way through the process. It might be interesting to people who do not make pots.

The resonators?

the hummingbird with gentians, seaweed & goldfish, the crab

dragonflies would be welcome, too.

The POTZ are absolutely gorgeous!

I just noticed these...they're really stunning!

I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a Priddy Bowl today :) Or whenever the Egrets "hatch."

I know what you mean about pottery as a sort of "craft" rather than "art." I have been collecting local pottery since high school. I don't care what other people call it, to me it is Art, as much as any other medium is art.

“Potters are the bastard children of the fine arts.” Ha. If your things survive long enough, they might end up in a museum. The Louvre has pottery, though a lot of it is from ancient Egypt…

I think that useful things are even more beautiful than “fine” arts. Its beauty comes from its form AND its utility. But I am an architect, and we are sort of the step children of the fine arts.

If you would like to read eloquent arguments about the beauty of crafts see-
Octavio Paz Convergences and Yanagi The unknown craftsmen
I would put down some great quotes, but these books flooded.

For your bowls - my favorite is the goldfish. (I also like the dragonfly idea.)

Just no actual clowns. Clowns are creepy.

And - Re; “Potters are the bastard children of the fine arts.”

True sometimes, and I find this to be an annoying condescension. I say don't pigeonhole and call it all art

I worked for several years for the African Art Museum at the Smithsonian. Many visitors didn't realize is that African "Art" isn't technically art at all. Historically, Africans made what the museums classify as "objects of use"; bowls, stools, textiles and even the figural sculptures had a function in the culture, like the very cool nikisi "dolls", which were the precursors to voodoo. There are some contemporary pieces of fine art in the collection,(paintings, etc.) but these are almost all in storage, and to be honest with you for a good reason since most are rather ugly.

I always liked the "objects of use" better.

But - the "African Objects of Use Museum" just doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

I'm all distracted by the thought of Freaky mailing herself? himself? itself? all over. Maybe a stop with each OSer, and guest posting from our blogs.

Love, love, LOVE them! The blue crab is my fave; I'd also like to see a horseshoe crab. Are they around any more? I am VERY impressed.

Not bad for post-four-year absence work ;-)

You are my very favorite potter in the entire universe.

What about painting some bowls with dogs and some with cats? I bet you could sell a bunch to pet owners for water and food bowls.

Just a thought.