Whew, up and off once more. Went to the Cabot's Pueblo Museum display of Mata Ortiz pottery, one of the more prominent pottery villages of Chihuahua State in Mexico. Their pots are made totally by hand, coil pots out of clay, fine, thin pottery, and then burnished smooth, and later painted in the most finely intricate way, all by hand. Lastly I believe they are put in the kiln to fire.
Their village has about 400 potters in it now, and the work is so fine it's nearly unbelievable. One of the artists is Diego, and I was speaking with him. He's a trained engineer but now makes his living making pots. He is really branching out and making lovely modern art form carved pots, way out there in style and shape. It is so interesting to watch him work, and listen to his explanations about the techniques. He was burnishing or polishing his pot with a rock that appeared to be a highly polished agate. That way they achieve a high polish on the outside of the pot, before it's fired.
Another man is incorporating bird carvings into his pots, kind of carving them right into the clay, but the birds are sort of in relief, raised a bit from the surface of the pot. Very impressive and beautiful.
There seem to be many different styles of decoration, and lots of different shapes, the color I love is bright onyx black, highly burnished on the outside, with very intricate finely detailed painting, black on black, so this year I bought a wee pot for myself.
I spoke with a young American woman who has an online art gallery, and she travels quite frequently down there to the village, and seems to know some 100 of the potters herself. She appeared quite knowledgeable about the work, and told me there is a couple who do the style of black fine pots that so appeal to me.
Some of them are rounded on the bottom, so you get a little "donut" for it to stand on when you purchase it.
I bumped into two people I knew, one was Greg H, another flutie we have met at Annie's, he was playing his flute music there and entertaining for the event, and we had a chance to chat a bit. It was quite windy so the potters couldn't do the firing that is so fascinating, all by hand with a wood fire as a kiln. They build a kind of beehive of wood chunks all around the fire that has the pot in it, and it fires inside the 'burning beehive'. But not successfully on a windy day.
Then inside I met Buff B, an old high school friend, we both admired the pottery a lot, she is a potter who lives in Williams Lake, BC now. A retired teacher, we have some mutual friends, and she is staying for a while near us here in DHS with a friend of hers from our school days.
Later we zoomed downtown to Palm Springs for the art show in Frances Stevens Park, and enjoyed a lovely warm day there, surrounded by beautiful works of art, and with great artistic vibes in the air. We met a lovely metal work artist, Laura Knight, her work is so pretty and delicate, yet so very tough in fact. We chatted with her for quite a while, she was such a sweetie.
Then off to the El Paseo District in Palm Desert, for the Greek Festival held at the Greek church there on Larrea Street, it's a wonderful annual event. There is a tented marketplace with lots of things Greek and otherwise, singing, music and dancing, with another area for food. And what food it is, sweet pastries of course, salads, stuffed vine leaves, gyros, Greek salads, Greek coffee, fried goat cheese or saganaki, and tons of other yummy things to explore, sniff, and try.
We had a nice green salad, some stuffed vine leaves, some cheese in phyllo pastry, and some sweet little things like donut holes, but covered with honey and crushed almonds I think it was. And retsina to go with it all. Yum yum. Found more goodies in the marketplace, too. Hooray.
As we were coming home, it had been quite hot during the middle of the day, high 70s or so, but the skies were filling with heavy cloud, the wind was whipping up, and the dust was just flying everywhere.
The weather is changing for a day or so. A new storm system is blowing in now, bringing cooler temps for a while.
There is extensive highway construction on I-10 at the moment, most of the major overpasses into Palm Springs and the neighbouring cities are getting remodeled and widened, so that the dust and ground has been disturbed and disrupted, and the wind kicks up dust and the air turns thick with brown grit and brown clouds of flying dust everywhere around the base of Mt San Jacinto.
About Me
- Di and Lary
- Di and Lary are both retired, Lary was in the Canadian Armed Forces as an Air Navigator, 32 years, and Di did many things, but the most fulfilling was teaching, for 3 years on an Indian Reserve in Central BC and later 7 years teaching ESL, both in Canada and in Europe, in Spain and later Germany.