Paul Chenoweth

A few years ago, I was invited to attend a gala dinner event for Hope House International, a non-profit organization that does incredible work with orphans in Ukraine. As part of the event, there is an art show that features paintings from children in Ukraine and others from area artists. My host friends were talking about this one day and we bounced around a few ideas of how some of my clay work might end up in that show. Well, here we are, about 6 weeks away and I am frantically wrapping up the pieces to be fired, glazed, and prepared for this event.

I have my own orphanage story from Ukraine. It isn’t one associated with Hope House, but it remains fresh in my memory as I work in the clay that ultimately turns into something (no pun intended) that will have some small impact at Hope House. In 2004, I traveled with the Belmont University Sports Evangelism team to Ukraine to work with a local church In Zhitomir. One of our adventures took us to a nearby orphanage where I met Aleksandr and a couple of his friends. The three boys played with my camera/video gear while I watched nervously, and although I understood nothing of the words spoken, we had a good time. I thought little of it until our leader stopped me a while later to say that I had no idea how special that time was for those boys. That time with the boys and the comment from my team leader stay with me even today, several years later…knowing always that there is still much to be done to bring hope to the many children who find themselves in Ukranian orphanages.

I continue my support of Hope House International and am happy to be a part of this year’s gala event. I would like to say Thank You for the quick turnaround (and solid advice) for the custom clay stamp from Joel Socwell at 4clay.com.

The initial CityScape project  that consumed much of my free time in December was well received at York & Friends Gallery…so much so, that I am scrambling to get a few more pieces ready to show.  Having a bad case of hail-storm-damage-life-interruption hasn’t helped much but there may be a silver lining.  It is one of those, “while you are at it” doing repairs, replacing roof and windows,  how about let’s get this studio conversion completed as part of the process.  So it goes. One more iron in the fire and much to get accomplished in a short period of time.

These bottles are fun to build. The taller ones are wheel-thrown in two sections and then carefully joined.  Once joined, the finished spout is collared-in and pulled to its finished form back on the wheel.  The result is a fairly light weight, thin-walled bottle.  I have been asked a couple of times to show that exercise on video but keep forgetting to take a camera into the studio. Yes, that’s what I need…yet another project.

What you see here is the impatient stage. The bottles are tightly covered for a week or two and allowed to get leather hard.  From the leather-hard stage, there is a considerable amount of carving, sculpting and texture work to accomplish before the first, bisque firing. Those images will have to wait for another day.  More CityScapes are coming, even if coming slowly.

When I proposed a thirteen bottle, sculptural piece as my initial clay project for this semester, I was thinking that a couple of hours on each bottle would get the job done. As it turns out, 5 to 6 hours of throwing, carving, and texturing to this point translates into the fact that not even the first, test bottle has been fired or glazed. All that to say, I need to get some images online for everyone to see the work in progress. It indeed has turned out to be a bunch of work!