Gawd, I love making jacks!
It's a terrible addiction, really. I'm sure there are folks out there who have been following my blog for a while and are wondering when, exactly, I'll move on to something different. While that's a valid question, my answer is, at this time, "Yeah. No. Probably not going to happen."
I do love sculpture. I have roughly a million ideas for different fine art sculptures and various forms of functional pottery and oh! SO MANY, MANY THINGS! But those jacks, with their smiles and their snarls and grimaces and frowns and most of all, the knowledge that a candle put in their hollow bodies will make those faces come alive... They entrance me. They captivate me. They call to me and beg to be made, to be given life. To be given to others who see their faces and are instantly hooked.
I don't know what it is about the addition of that live flame makes me so happy, so engaged, while I'm carving the faces they tell me they want to wear. I look at each jack-o'-lantern as I would a fall pumpkin, turning it round and round to find the right spot for the face. A place where the stem I made sits just so and becomes an extension of his visage, adds a kind of animation and expression to the face, itself.
Maybe it makes our jack look wistful, or comical. But I think ahead to the finished little guy, all glazed and fired and sanded and ready to go to his new home, and I take that one extra moment to think of the light he'll have inside and how he'll look when he's all lit up. I have to imagine how that light will look coming out of mismatched eyes and a huge mouth. Or the flickering from a tiny mouth with enormous and watchful eyes.
And the ones I've included here, fresh from being carved, but still with their original clay color, will be fired and then I'll Raku fire them for their glaze firing, because I love what the crackle does to their surfaces, carbon lightning stabbing through white or aqua or red glazes. They're even more special!In other news, the Etsy strike has come and gone without any kind of acknowledgement from the company, which is what I anticipated. A friend of mine commented that Etsy has become "Wish" for hipsters, and I have to say, I can see their point.
That and the numbers have made me decide to leave the platform after twelve years. It's just not sustainable for me, and it's time for me to have my own website. So I'm building it through Square, since Square is already my point of sale and they have basic website-building tools. It's been an expensive year for me, si unfortunately, I can't afford to pay someone to do it for me, but I feel like I can cobble something functional together and pay someone at a later date to upgrade or overhaul as necessary.
I'll let you know when the launch will be!
And lastly, Midsummer Scream is on its way at the end of July in Long Beach, California! Remember to buy your tickets in advance and use my code at checkout for a discount!
Can't wait for you to see the jacks, all finished and ready for you!
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