I've just finished an altered book.  This one started as a British book about important events in the 20th century, published in the 1970s.  Only a little of the book's content survives now, though.  I chose the book in a thrift shop in Santa Fe (NM) because I liked the quality of the paper, and it has a sewn binding.  It's a nice big book - about 12 inches tall when closed.

I had a couple of compositional themes with this book.  First, there are large, mostly original drawings that often float off the left or right edge of a page spread.  Second, I used portions of printmaking plates, cut up and glued in as collage elements.  The plates are from monotypes, and I worked them on vellum.  The original printing medium was water based.  I liked how the translucency of the vellum allowed the plate portions to nestle down into the matrix of the gouache mixtures I had already applied to the paper.

The imagery is - various.  Plants and animals, sometimes in microscopic views, my clay vessels and sculpture, landscape photos - and a few other things.  Snakes are notable - I used my stash of photos of snakes from a teapot project I did several years ago for the Year of the Snake.  As usual in my two-dimensional work, objects are presented in kind of a primordial soup of contexts.  

I love the way the base of a bald cypress tree will widen out when it grows in a very damp area.  This one is standing in Butler Creek at the Phinizy Swamp.  The drawing is mostly about my enjoyment of the dark and light interlocking patterns of the cypress tree base and the lush growth around it.

The water is tea-colored because of the presence of tannin compounds from decomposing plants - it's not pollution.  

​I was looking at a bright green plant with large leaves that was growing directly out of the forest floor near the Butler Creek trail.  The light was beautiful, and the leaves were especially 3-dimensional.  I added dots to the background - it's part of of my interest in patterns and the idea of a network that everything in nature is part of.
​

These fascinating green balls are the cones of the bald cypress tree.  The surface structure is very subtle - I had to do a lot of image enhancement to even get it to show in this photo.

​In the background of the drawing I added a pattern used in lacemaking.

These are photos of the temporary, small installation that I designed for a family camping event at the Phinizy Swamp.  Several kids and a mom helped me.  We selected a tree just off the boardwalk at the Raingarden trail, we spread swamp clay around the base of the tree, then we gathered and placed 2 kinds of leaves around the tree.  At the end we put in a circle of unripe blackberries.  The whole thing should biodegrade quickly on its own.

​I was looking at a lovely wildflower (weed?) out at the swamp, and was amazed by its delicate structure.

I used some color in this drawing to try to show the structure of the flower.

I've started a new drawing project with the Phinizy Center for Water Sciences - the Phinizy Swamp Nature Park.  It's pretty simple:  I take a walk out there, notice something, draw it.  Then the Phinizy Center posts the drawing and a photo on their Facebook page.  These entries have been appearing for a couple of months now.  I thought I would also show them here.

I saw a puffball mushroom on the entrance to the Butler Creek Trail.  At first glance it looked like a round white puff with a slightly cracked surface.  Looking closer, I saw that the surface was covered with what looked like little mountains with beaked peaks.

​This is the drawing that I made:

2017 is the year of the Rooster.  The element is Fire, so this year's rooster is extra-feisty, and is best cooled down with a bit of Earth.  These small porcelain teapots are made entirely by hand, individually.  I had fun with suggesting the Rooster through a lid that looks a bit like a rooster's comb, plus some feather painting on the body of the teapot.  The earth element comes in through the use of a soft yellow-brown base glaze.  The teapots are 4 inches or less in height.

I've just finished a pair of cups that will go to The Art of the Cup, an invitational exhibition at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans.  I threw these cups from porcelain, dotted them with overlapping layers of underglaze, and fired them to cone 6 in an electric kiln.  These cups are big - even after the final firing, they hold 16 ounces of liquid each.

I've just finished another altered book/sketchbook.  I use these to experiment and think about ideas.  This one is really a souped-up sketchbook.  To make it, I started with a commercially available cork-bound sketchbook that had acid free pages and a sewn binding.  I used watercolor to make colored patterns on the pages, and then I tipped in charcoal drawings I had made of various things - mostly plant parts.