Crazy for Octopi, That’s Me
Surfacing again now that the Big Annual Art Show is over and so is the academic quarter. I have about 2 weeks of relative free time until the next quarter begins. Somehow I decided to teach two courses instead of my usual one. I may well be sorry about that once things get underway, but I’ve been working on an attitude adjustment that includes not letting the school stuff get under my skin. It worked pretty well for last quarter but then I had a great group of students who remained engaged and involved even though the course was online-only.
I only teach online these days- told the admins at the college I would keep on with teaching as long as I could do that, and apparently they aren’t ready to let me go yet. Past COVID I know they are trying to bring students back on campus as much as possible, but many are still enjoying the freedom that asynchronous online courses offer- they can keep their jobs and take care of their families and “go to school” on their own schedules. Heck, some of my students even take my classes from elsewhere in the country or other parts of the world. It’s pretty wonderful.
I haven’t been painting hardly at all. I finished one painting earlier this year, another flower, you may have seen it here. The next painting I started after that one ended up getting scraped down. Every painting I do goes through the “I HATE it” phase, but usually I get past that and finish. This one did not. It’s fine. All just part of the process.
Instead of painting, over the last few months, I’ve spent every spare studio minute making clay things and learning how different clays and glazes respond to my amateur manipulations. So far so good. Lots of failure, of course, and the future archeology site in the woods behind our house has many bits of unsuccessful clay experiments resting their final sleep in a small pit. (FYI, all the clays and glazes I use are completely lead-free and contain no elements that could be harmful to the soil or the many animals and plants that populate our shy acre.)
I’m on an octopus kick. This started last year but it’s become a “thing” now, and people seem to like them. They sell better than my paintings! And I really like making them. Below are more of the latest pieces to come out of my kiln. They will all be heading to the gallery for April.
03/25/2023 @ 10:15 am
Here’s an octopus flashback for you:
03/25/2023 @ 11:32 am
Hi Ron,
I remember this well!
03/29/2023 @ 11:55 am
The musician in me wants to shout Hey! Ringo sings that!
03/25/2023 @ 10:20 am
Rose, these are so playful and fun. I’m imagining one filled with spaghetti. All fun until whoever had to wash it afterwards. Have you seen the vids of how some octopi punch other octopi, even fish? Will leave one below….
Good to hear that your class went better this semester. I’ve kinda had it with remote teaching. One of my students was in covid lockdown in Beijing last fall and it was a three a.m. class start time for her. She keep her camera off, and I’m pretty sure just went to sleep. We had to be careful about what we said, the college’s admonition, concerned that the govt. monitored classes taken in the US.
Your shard pile sounds full of treasures. A friend built an off the grid house and created a heat safe wall behind his wood stove made of old bottles and broken pottery. Light comes through the bottles and the broken pottery is laid out in colors and shapes in between, kind of a gorgeous hippie confection. They got most of the shards from their ceramicist neighbor.
Haven’t been on IG as much lately, may have missed some of your posts. It’s become so ad riddled and doesn’t seem to show me posts from people I follow. Or maybe they’ve stopped posting too. Some days I don’t go online at all, and just love it, but am concerned that if I stay offline too much, that’s when I’ll become old.
P.S. Have you watched ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’? It’s about Nan Goldin and her fight against the Sackler family. It’ll make you proud to be an artist 🙂
03/25/2023 @ 11:46 am
Hi Suzanne,
Yeah they are SO much fun to make. I had to figure out how to put together a tiny octopus so it wouldn’t dry out and crack as I was working. Once I got that, it was a much faster process.
During COVID I did teach online classes where they class had to meet via zoom at specific times. I hated it. I couldn’t require that people keep their video on, and it was like talking into the void.
After the first couple of quarters, I asked for the asynchronous format, which meant that there were no required meetings and no zoom. Much more relaxed.
Instead, I keep in touch with the students by email and text and I do offer one-on-one conferencing via FaceTime if they want, and sometimes they do.
I actually took a course through my college last spring on how to maximize the online experience for students and discovered that I was already meeting (and mostly exceeding) all the points necessary. And they paid me for it! Hah.
03/25/2023 @ 10:21 am
03/25/2023 @ 11:37 am
I have seen this before and don’t really know what to make of it, except that apparently these critters sometimes wake up on the wrong side of the seabed and just can’t resist taking it out on those smaller than them. It’s disconcerting to say the least!
HOWEVER, to counter that view of the octopus, I absolutely loved the movie My Octopus Teacher. If you haven’t seen it, you should. It’s on Netflix.
03/25/2023 @ 2:07 pm
You managed to fit all eight legs on the little guys, an accomplishment right there. I did see the octopus movie, also read Sy Montgomery’s book, Soul of an Octopus. They are incredibly smart and incredibly short-lived critters, also big time loners, so maybe all that fosters the punching desire. It’s also possible that some fish are just jerks!
I am envious of you being paid to professionally improve. Faculty have been ordered to take a six part cyber security course this semester, and I didn’t reply to the scheduling email, hoping no one would notice. They noticed, and have sent progressively more terse daily notices. I’m tempted to see just how far this will go. Maybe I should ask for a hundred bucks?
03/25/2023 @ 2:44 pm
I have no doubt that the jerky fish can be incredibly annoying to such smart and touch creatures. Plenty of times it crosses my mind that I would like to punch folks in the supermarket just for getting inside my aura (which was always fucking huge- and even bigger since COVID- and I already hate crowds) but I do manage to control myself. Except for when you are behind me in line at the register trying to stuff your stupid purchases on the counter while I’m STILL doing mine. Then I will say something and I will use my cranky face. 🙂
The trick to making tiny tentacles turned out to be forming the basic pointy cylinder shapes and laying them on a wet paper towel so they stay pliable long enough for me to curl them up without cracking. I am careful to attach the body to the dish well and I don’t worry about attaching the tentacles to the surface. Glaze reinforces the connection on the second firing.
My school is pretty good about offering and paying for PD, but for the new online standards course, those who took it early got paid. Everyone else is now required to take it because all courses, including in-person courses, are now required to have an online presence. The reimbursement is now minimal.
YES you should ask for at least $100 for your time and effort. Or whatever your hourly rate computes to, x the number of hours it takes you. I think that’s only fair.
03/25/2023 @ 10:24 am
Ooops Ron posted when I was…morning, Ron!
03/25/2023 @ 3:33 pm
Backatcha!
03/25/2023 @ 3:36 pm
Oops! Right message, wrong day!
03/25/2023 @ 5:33 pm
Ron, LOL, good afternoon! This is exactly how my brain has begun working too.
Are you excited for a Trump indictment next week? Since the early days of the Mueller report, I’ve had a bet with a friend. He bet twenty bucks we would (eventually) see T go to jail. I bet twenty bucks that he never ever in his blubber lifetime would. Last week, friend asked if I wanted to double our bet. I did. When I win, I’ll take him out for a nice meal. But this will be interesting to watch!
03/25/2023 @ 5:25 pm
“Except for when you are behind me in line at the register trying to stuff your stupid purchases on the counter while I’m STILL doing mine”
I want to get out of the supermarket as fast as anybody, but have never understood how people think this annoying tactic will expedite things. It would be nice to have a punching octopus under your arm then. I’ve been shopping at Trader Joe’s since the pandemic because they open early and their checkout process only lets one customer through at a time, the cashier unloads your cart. They are also a lot less expensive than the supermarket.
Octopi seem to be enjoying hot critter status right now–you could prolly sell out a whole line of octopi ceramics. Octopi are also a favorite subject in drawing class. Deer seem to be slipping out of favor, along with rabbits and crows. Possums and hedgehogs on the rise, apparently.
Old C down in Tech Central would crack up laughing if I asked for a hundred dollars to enlist in the mandatory cyber security series. If they paid me a hundred dollars, they’d have to give every faculty and staff member a hundred dollars…maybe I should start a Norma Rae thing? In the early weeks of covid remote teaching, they made us watch hours of tutorials that a RISD prof had put together–surely she got paid. No one knew what they were doing then, and her vids were as effective as making it up yourself. Art is enough of a challenge to teach face to face, and a drudge to teach through a laptop screen. Our students can still opt for it and if they do, we have to comply. Your system sounds MUCH better!
03/25/2023 @ 9:12 pm
Suzanne;
Unless you think of house arrest or wearing an ankle GPS device as ‘jail’ Trump won’t spend a moment behind bars of any sort anywhere….
Re the NY matter, if indicted:
At arraignment, he most likely will be required to surrender his passport and be released on his own recognizance….
It saddens me to say that Trump will never be incarcerated for his criminal behavior even when found guilty…
03/26/2023 @ 10:20 am
Want in on the bet? I can ask 🙂
If he even gets an ankle bracelet, we’ll be extraordinarily lucky.
It will be interesting to watch multiple cases unfold, with possible indictments, in a relatively short period of time, given how long we’ve already waited. Yet he wakes up every morning and just makes more crimes, a mobius strip of never ending crimes. Hopefully they will not take his passport. He’ll fly away to Saudi Arabia and we’ll not have to hear about him again!
03/29/2023 @ 12:00 pm
He’s not going behind bars. Hell, according to the head of his COVID response team he’s personally responsible for 30-40% of American COVID deaths by recommending against masks and distancing and no one even bothers talking about that. Weaker talking about over a quarter of a million deaths on his head and Nothing.
03/28/2023 @ 1:47 pm
Octopi eye and heart brain {search: Central Time U$A 12:27pm}
AI artificial intellect AI defined at last?
‘The giant Pacific octopus has three hearts, nine brains and blue blood, making reality stranger than fiction. A central brain controls the nervous system. In addition, there is a small brain in each of their eight arms — a cluster of nerve cells that biologists say controls movement.’
Perhaps there’s no gravity. Sorry. Somewhere an apple boinks {…}
03/28/2023 @ 4:59 pm
Thanks for stopping by, JP. Always appreciated. 🙂
03/29/2023 @ 2:11 am
These are wonderful. Vibrant!
Bonus that they’re selling well, too.
Very fun to see the varying mediums and interests that have captured your attention and time over the years…
03/29/2023 @ 11:50 am
Hi Anna, and thanks!
Next up for me is learning Japanese method woodblock printing. We have an artist with the gallery who does that and is going to teach a workshop. I’ve done linoleum, soft-block, and gelli-plate printing but haven’t done woodblock since college. I’m psyched!
03/29/2023 @ 12:40 pm
Oooh, I look forward to seeing!
I’ve never done woodblock printing although about 3 hours north of me there was a great workshop on Japanese block printing I looked into! as I’ve done lino printing as well, for years, and years ago. I decided not to do that one as the commute over mountain passes in winter is less than appealing, and so opted for a more local screenprinting workshop, specifically for the photo emulsion technique to take my photography into a more creative realm. It starts today, I’m nervous and excited for it. Nervous only as I’m always nervous before walking into a room of strangers. It disappears quickly. Usually : ) There will be other printing options, as well. I’m into making screenprints that are not the clearcut, sharp lines screenprinting is known for, rather photoging old quilts I have and patterns with rough edges, making other stencil versions with ripped paper, etc., then printing. We’ll see how it goes!
Would love one of your octi bowls, btw!
03/29/2023 @ 1:20 pm
Oh that workshop sounds great! I hope you have a lot of fun with it. Post pics!!!
Sure, we can talk about an octo bowl for you! Let me know what you’d like. 🙂
03/29/2023 @ 11:56 am
These are way cool and look difficult
03/29/2023 @ 1:17 pm
Hi Kosh! Not too difficult, just fiddly really. Patience is the required virtue when constructing them.
03/29/2023 @ 4:00 pm
One big SHOW in-nit🎭?
Now if Joe DiMaggio would call home!