Wiseman Ceramics

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Workshop Preparation

First I would like to welcome you to this crystal glazing workshop. If you have never made any crystalline pots, you will be behind most of the other people, but you will learn enough to be able to set up your own studio and begin making crystalline pots on your own.

What should you bring to this workshop besides an open mind and willingness to share what you know? Well you should understand that a workshop is not a place to fire loads of pots. Each pot will hopefully be an experiment which you will take home as an example of one of the techniques we will show, and hopefully by studying that pot, you will be inspired. But don’t think that you will end up with thousands of dollars of crystalline pots, and then be disappointed when they don’t materialize. We will be using kilns and materials that are new and so it will be amazing if we are able to really get masterpieces.

It is best that you bring several small pots which are taller than they are wide, and that you have pedestals that fit the bottom of them and a catcher to catch the running glaze. When we did a workshop in Palm Springs a couple of years ago, Diane Creber brought about 25 pots which were somewhere around 3 x 3 x 3 to 4 x 4 x 4. All of them got fired because they fit in around other, larger pots. You don’t have to bring pots that small, but realize that there is only so much kiln space, and large pots are likely to go unfired. Also bowls take up an inordinate amount of space so it would be good to not bring them. We are trying to fire the kilns with the least amount of kiln furniture possible and bowls add kiln furniture.

Small pots are also good because we will be cooling the kiln at a rate that we might not in our own studios. Meaning faster. We only have 2 days so we have to get the pots out early Sunday morning for our post fire reduction on Sunday afternoon.

If you don’t understand the concept of gluing a pedestal to the bottom of the pot and then placing it in a catcher, then it would be useful for you to do some reading before you come. Here are some of the books that I find useful. If you are going to commit to being a crystal potter you will need at least the first three of these books and they are all good.

Macro Crystalline Glazes by Peter Ilsley

Crystalline Glazes by Diane Creber

The Art of Crystalline Glazing by Jon and Leroy Price

The Complete Guide to High Fire Glazes by John Britt

Contemporary Porcelain by Peter Lane

Contemporary Studio Porcelain 2nd Edition by Peter Lane

The Art and Craft of Crystals by Don Holloway (Self Published)

Contemporary Ceramic Formulas by John Conrad

Ceramic Glazes — The Complete Compendium by John Conrad

Glazes for Special Effects by Herbert Sanders (Out of Print)

Nature as Designer by Bertel Bager

We are going to cover several techniques in this workshop which are beyond the beginner’s phase. Again, if you are a beginner that is OK. We will cover the basics too.

We will be doing some post fire reduction so if you have some small crystalline pots which have copper or manganese based glazes, you may bring them for post fire reduction. Hopefully we will do a firing on Saturday night which will give us pots for post fire reduction on Sunday, so you don’t absolutely need pots when you come. But if you have some of those pots we can do a post fire on Saturday too. Pots glazed with small percentages of copper and manganese glazes change dramatically in post fire reduction — some of the coppers can go bright red from green.

We are also going to try to use some encapsulated stains in a slip which we will put under a crystalline glaze to obtain colors that are impossible to get any other way. One of the masters of this style is Denis Caraty. See for some examples of his work. Denis feels like putting the slip on a greenware pot and then glazing without bisquing is the best way to do these so if you have some dry greenware pots and pedestals, please bring them. I am working with Denis’ method at headquarters here in Alachua, but there are other ways to do these. The final products have beautiful crystals on bright red, orange, and yellow backgrounds and they are impressive, to say the least. Jan Anthony has done some very successful works with this technique and she will be sharing her methods too. I’ve also talked to Jamie Koslowski about his ideas too and he makes some of the best.

I hope to be able to fire some matte crystalline glazes too. At the very least I will bring some matte crystalline glaze that we can use. I’d like to be able to do these with American frits so that you could work with them after the workshop, but I do not have that yet. We also have a glaze called Roy’s Spotted Matte which is matte in oxidation and quite different from the matte crystallines that I am currently working on.

I am very much looking forward to this and to being with you again.

John