Christmas Tart

For about the last 8 years or so, my family and I have traded hosting Christmas morning breakfast with dear friends of ours. We met over 15 years before our friend's children were even born and when our daughter was very young. We are very close, the kind of friends who feel more like extended family, especially at Christmas. My husband's name is Al, and it's always made us smile, that he was and still is referred to as Uncle "Owl", a mispronunciation coined when the girls, Siobhan and Sophia, were little. Wether their mom and dad, Shawn and Kevin are hosting, or if the festivities are at my house, Shawn has been pretty consistent each year with making a version of her french toast casserole as part of pur yearly tradition. My daughter's very favorite version involves cream cheese between two slices of thick french toast, baked in the oven and served with fruit compote and whipped cream. YUM!

For my part, I usually provide the savory portion of our grand Christmas brunch. I like to switch it up so some years it  has been a sausage casserole, sometimes quiche or something else involving eggs. Last year, my daughter took over for both Shawn and I, making chicken and waffles that left us all licking our fingers and wanting more. More YUM!

    

This year, I wanted to make something in one of my pretty new poppy tart plates. Interestingly enough, I don't make a lot of pottery to use for myself as I am too busy making for the market. I only kept this one because it developed an s crack in the bottom of it.  I wasn't too sad about it though because they're so pretty, I really wanted to keep one anyway. 

Being a huge fan of roasted vegetables, I came up with a recipe for a savory vegetable tart. I am the kind of cook that either goes completely off the cuff or gets ideas from existing recipes and edits them according to what I think would be good or what I have on hand. 

My Roasted Vegetable Tart is a product of the latter approach and was very well recieved. It was not only really tasty but is very easy to make. Some roasted vegetables, a store bought pie crust, some goat cheese, and you're good to go! 

Roll out the pie crust over your tart pan. Fold the edges level with the top of the pan and crimp. Partially prebake the pie crust according to package directions. I took it out slightly early since it had to bake again with the filling in it and I didn't want it to possibly burn on the edges. Be sure to use a fork to poke holes in the bottom of the crust to prevent it from puffing up. If you have pie weight,s or dry kidney beans available, you can also fill the crust with those. If you are a potter like me and can't find either of those things, find tiny houses out in your studio and use those (LOL) 

  

For the filling, I had a couple of heads of cauliflower and broccoli that I need to use up, so I chopped them into small florets with some onion and mixed them together in a big bowl. I drizzle all the vegetables with some olive oil, (about 2 Tbs.) and sprinkled with one of my favorite spices, Traders Joe's 21 Seasoning Salute. Stir them all around to distribute the seasoning evenly and spread onto a sheet pan sprayed with oil. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast in the oven at 400 degrees until soft and slightly charred. 

      

Next, fill your prebaked pie shell with the veggies distributing them evenly. Top with about 1/4- 1/2 cup crumbled goat cheese and bake again at around 350 degrees for about 20 minutes or until goat cheese is melted. That's it!  Slice it up and enjoy! Merry Christmas and warm wishes for a very blessed New Year!

   

THE HAHN'S

 

THE HULL'S

---

ROASTED VEGETABLE TART

Filling:

1 head fresh cauliflower 

2 -3 broccoli crowns

1 large sweet onion

2 Tbs. Oil

1- 1 1/2 Tsp. Trader Joe's 21 Seasoning Salute

1 oz. Honey Goat Cheese

1 pre-made pie crust

Follow directions above.

My long summer hiatus

As a creative person I tend to have very fertile times and sometimes a long lasting dry spells. I seem to be in one of the latter this summer. I've been enjoying gardening, finally getting to those nagging projects around my house which been ignored for a very long time in an effort to be in the studio and I've done a lot of traveling starting with our annual week in Rehoboth Beach,  Delaware. I wish that I could say that it was a really great week but we had pretty nasty weather for four out of the seven days that we were there. The best part of it was being with my family particularly my daughter Jo and her boyfriend Ben. Here's Ben and I out enjoying first time oysters and shots of Jamisons while Jo and her dad had a special Fathers Day dinner together. 

Artistically, I did nothing except to visit the Rehoboth Art League. There was a very interesting exhibit there by photographer Annaliese Tassano featuring her photos of live models dressed as mermaids and submerged into a huge water tank. They were very beautiful and mysterious, though they also conveyed an overwhelming feeling of confinement which made me a bit uncomfortable.

In this one, a "manmaid"joins the mermaid in the tank

July took me back home to Lockport, New York to visit friends and attend my high school reunion. I didn't have time in my whirlwind trip to visit any museums or galleries. Most sadly, I didn't get to  the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo which is home to a world-class modern art collection. I did  have time though to ride past and appreciate with new eyes the beautiful architecture in Lockport and in Buffalo where I also used to live. I found a new appreciation for the stunning mansions lining streets in both cities and for the vast array of beautiful Victorian painted ladies that had made little impression on me in my youth.

I lived in the upstairs apartment and yes, I painted in the turret!
It is unbelievably the same color that it was when I left 26 years ago!

The following weekend, I jetted off to Houston for a wedding  and visited a few museums and an Outsider Art attraction. That will be part two of this post as there is a lot to tell. As I post this it is early August and though I tried to go back to black and white painting last week with some new materials that I have never used before (water soluble oils and clay board), I still haven't found my mojo. I wish there was a pill for that... but hopefully, my motivation will return soon on it's own. :0)

How to make a mini clay figure from one coil

Mother's Day- Artist as Mom

(In a nod to Mother's Day, this is a repost of a previous writing. To bring you up to date, my daughter is now going to be 23 in a couple of weeks and preparing to go off to Thailand with her boyfriend for a summer of teaching English and adventure. I'm so proud of her and her fearless spirit and miss her terribly at the same time....)


My life is never seperated from my work and I have created a plethora of paintings around mothering as I journey along in one of the greatest adventures of my life.  I thought I would continue with this subject in this month when mothers are celebrated. 

Most of my paintings come from a very personal place. Even some of my cow paintings tell stories about what's going on in my life, such as in "Eat Your Broccoli" which depicts a momma cow and her  calf in a surreal field of raining broccoli. (A nod to Magritte) This painting was inspired by my Kayla who wouldn't eat broccoli as a little girl.

Before I even knew I was pregnant, I painted "My neighborhood", which depicts myself, my husband (in between the two houses) and our neighbors on their respective porches. There I am talking on the porch, very preggers, while my husband looks on.

 When I was actually pregnant, I painted this one, "Pregnant Artist." I have to laugh when I recall my pre-teen girl begging me to take it off the wall so her friends wouldn't see it. So much for being sophistcated about a little artistic nudity even though I tried to not actually show much :0) Note the Van Gogh calendar in the background and the rooster in the window. Van Gogh is my favorite and the rooster is symbolic of my husband whose last name in German means "rooster".

Sometimes I run into women who tell me that they were artists until their kids were born and then they stopped. I would just as much have stopped breathing. I don't know how they could do that, maybe they were less driven than me, but I never stopped. It helped that she was such a good, easy baby. I used to get up around 4:30 in the morning before she woke so I could paint a little, or sometimes she would sit and watch me in her little bouncy chair. At 19 months, she had her own plastic easel, paint and tam. She too created very colorful works, though she was an abstract expressionist at that time :0)..

As wonderful a baby as she was, just the shock of becoming parents can be overwhelming. The shift that takes place in your life from self centered to other-centered, and the responsibility of it all is all encompassing. I have depicted these feelings in the painting "New Baby", where the beautiful little diapered one is a giant in the space, overtaking the picture and the lives of the Mommy whom she holds in the palm of her hand and her Daddy by a string.

Having a child also was bringing up a lot of stuff for me as she grew. It was like she was holding up a mirror that reflected my life, causing me to worry and wonder about if I could make her life bettter than my upbringing had been. In this painting "Toddler" she is a hybrid of herself and me. She stands, again overwhelming the picture, but she is standing off the curb in a street between two houses, representative of the New Jersey street where I grew up. (Boy, did I have fun painting that bunny)

I painted her many more times as she has grown up, less as she approached her pre- teen and teen years when I could barely get her to be near me or smile, until this one (Flying through Life) which I painted last year, when she was leaving to go to college. It was so hard to let her go and I couldn't believe that that she was leaving already.

She and I are depicted flying through the air in our matching Mommy-Daughter dresses that I had made, through a world of things that I had taught her about or that we had discovered together.

 As I write this I am tearing up again......I know there are plenty more paintings to paint and the journey with her is not over. I just miss my baby.

Decorating with underglaze inlay and wax resist

Using Mishima technique to illustrate on pottery surfaces

Video Kiln Opening-New pieces fresh from the kiln!

What the kiln gods brought me this week....

Look for these new pieces to be available on my website and in my etsy shop soon!

On being Irish and an artist.

Think of a famous Irish painter or sculptor. Is it hard? That's because when we think of famous Irish people and their talents, the names that come up are people whose talents tend to lean more to the gift of word or song. Writers and poets like, James Joyce, Bram Stoker, Frank McCourt, Oscar Wild, Maeve Binchy. Musicians like Sinead O'Connor, Van Morrison,  Bono and Enya to name a few.

The Irish also tend to make their mark in acting. It's not to hard to think of any number of Irish actors- Michael Fassbender, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Farrell,  and Peter O'Toole. The list goes on. Unlike the Italians or French or Spanish, it's rather difficult to conjure up the names of famous Irish visual artists like painters or sculptors. Certainly there are a few in history like John Butler Yates (I'd never heard of him, I  looked it up)

Not to say that there are no great Irish artists. I'm sure there are many working today.  But those names are not on the tips of our tongues like Picasso and Michelangelo and Monet etc. It kind of makes you wonder why the history of visual arts tends to center in the European continent while in Ireland, the concentration of artistic expression is in writing and poetry and play writing and acting and song.

Perhaps it is in part because of the poverty that the Irish suffered. I suppose that if you have no money for food, you definitely have no money available for art supplies. But you do have your words and you do have good stories to tell and you have thoughts to be expressed and those don't cost anything.

The Irish possess a certain melancholy and tendency towards drinking inherent in the bloodline (in case you didn't know) perhaps due to that history of poverty. But they also possess a wild sense of humor and witticism that shows up in all forms of their artistic expression.

I grew up in an Irish Catholic household. (My fathers side) No one in my family made art except for what you could call a creative streak in my mother, which she discovered later in life when she learned to crochet and macrame and then proceeded to macrame everything in sight in the 1970s.

Not my mother but you get the idea 

My early creative life in painting began with personal paintings that expressed some of the more sinister undertones of my upbringing in an alcoholic Irish family and my own melancholy.

Somewhere along the line, I stopped looking back, and began to express that wild humor and witticism that is also inherent in my genes, thanks to my Irish ancestors. Like many children of alcoholics, you don't get to have a childhood, and I think that my current work- the bright, colorful, whimsical stuff that should be the fabric of every child's world, has been called forth in me to express and share so that other's inner child will be called forth too.

I don't know where I got the talent for painting and pottery. Perhaps it is because I grew up in America and had more available to me. I'm also French and German and Czech. So maybe it came from there. I don't know. All I know is that I'm lucky to be an artist.  (yes, Irish lucky).

Etsy 101

I am a potter, a painter, a children's book author and illustrator and also a teacher. While I am primarily self taught as a painter, I have my degree in Art Education from Buffalo State College. I spent a few years teaching art to children in public and private schools and might still be teaching part time if the last private school that I worked at didn't close for lack of enrollment.

 I quickly lost my enthusiasm for teaching in public school due to the endless politics and ridiculous demands put on an art teacher, for example, being responsible for 400 or more students in a semester. (not kidding).

So I never pursued another teaching job after the private school closed and rather turned my attention to working in my own studio making art to sell.

 I began selling my art on Etsy in 2008. Not knowing much about it, I just put my stuff up there and basically expected it to sell itself while I explored other avenues.

Well, if you're an Etsy seller, you know that didn't happen. Since then, my concentration with Etsy has been on selling my pottery (shop name -risingstarpottery1) rather than my art. I have found that overall, selling functional art is way easier than selling wall art, especially online.

 I sell both my art and pottery through other channels, particularly my website, which is where I prefer to make my work available, thus cutting out the middle man. Subscribing to my newsletter and purchasing through my website is the only way to take advantage of sales or discounts on my work, (so if you like my stuff, there it is :0). But I digress.

Etsy has changed in many ways over the years and like other platforms they  continually will in an effort to keep both sellers, buyers and stockholders happy. Well, you can't please all the  people all the time, myself included, and some of the Etsy changes have affected the sales in my retail shop in not so positive ways. I have just started selling wholesale through Etsy's new wholesale platform, so we'll see how that goes.

Anyhoo, in the years since 2008, I have learned a great deal and been asked to pass my knowledge on to a classroom of women at the library in Bear, Delaware. I have done it twice now and can't say enough how much I enjoyed it. The library offers the class for free so I have a packed house (and a waiting list) of women  eager to learn how they might be able to start a small business on Etsy or generate some extra income.

 I don't offer any delusions of it being easy, but feel like I am really helping them to understand the possibilities and encourage them to go on and give it a whirl. The feedback has been so positive that we have added an Etsy 102 class where I will be able to get into more details about setting up a shop, like writing descriptions, taking photographs etc. Amazingly, the first class, though 2 hrs long, was only enough to skim the surface!

 At some point, if I can find enough time from my other projects, perhaps I will put together a small book on how to get started. If you are someone who is interested in selling on etsy and might be interested in such a publication, please leave me a comment. I am also available to consult by telephone if you are a new seller and want an evaluation and some guidance now. Just shoot me an email through my website for info.

How I Create Dimensional Painting with Underglazes on Clay

First I sart with a sketch on the greenware that compliments the body of the vessel

Working from the outer edges in, I  lay 3 washes of color glaze, lightest to darkest, leaving white in the center and shortening the length of the overlay from the outer edges toward to center

Next, I surround  the image with a complimentary or lighter color that will cause the main color to pop!

Next I add in the flat black spots

Then the really fun part. Using a very thin liner brush, I outline all edges and use crosshatching strokes beginning tightly at the outer edges and spreading as they go out.  Lastly, I did a little sgraffito around the edges of the black spots but I forgot to take an "in process" photo of that . You can see the effect on the finished piece below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                            Available on my website. Just click on the image.

Here's another one, Sadly, it didn't survive the kiln. It had a big "S" crack in the bottom.

 

Here is how potters feel when they find a piece comes out of the kiln with an "S" crack in it! :