28.Portrait Ceramics

In the ceramics studio at LIl Poggio there were some small circular metal platforms which you could turn when you were working on a pot or vase and I discovered that they were perfect for building a ceramic portrait head on.

I know now that these devices are called banding wheels on sculpture stands. They spin and make it easy to look at the totality of anything in clay you are working on--like a full-sized portrait head, for example. 


That's what I started using them for and it was good fun.

I got people to sit for me while I made portrait heads of them in clay.


The biggest problem, of course, was that the heads had to be hollow so they wouldn't explode in the kiln but I licked this problem by making a kind of honeycomb structure beneath the final head.

Another problem was controlling the drying of the portrait--if it was not done carefully, the clay would crack. 


I learned to do this by judiciously keeping the head covered with a plastic bag except for short periods of time when I was in the studio to monitor the drying process.


These things took a longish time to make so I only finished about six in the several months I stayed at Il Poggio--some only bisque fired and some of them color glazed fired.


Tilo, Elisabetta's grown son, posed for me so I had the opportunity of making a life-sized portrait of him--a sensitive, handsome young man with lots of long wavy hair which I enjoyed making by layering thinner slabs of clay. This portrait was bisque-fired but not colored since it was effective as a work of art as plain reddish stoneware.

I found later, after I had left Il Poggio, that stoneware masks and portrait heads were made here in Tuscany long, long ago--so I was following, without knowing it, a very old tradition.

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