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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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Thirty-two easy pieces
I've been up for a couple of hours now after a late-ish night at the studio where I began handbuilding a chess set--well, the pieces anyway. I'm still stumped on the board. I'm building with a stoneware clay that is as similar as you can get without going into porcelain (which is highfire). If you're a clayhead, it's the stuff Laguna sells as B-mix (which, in a recent round of clay gossip, I heard that the recipe for which had been given to Laguna as a means of debt payment by the director of my studio who owed them a buttload of money). So, anyway, I handbuilt two queens who are torsos, naked from the waist up, looking a bit like early fertility goddesses, but very determined in the face. Actually, one looks determined, the other looks very calculating and has an arched eyebrow. The rooks are all shoulders and jaws, like jarheads (and, in fact, I left the tops of their heads open in homage to the traditional chess pieces); the bishops are sort of slanted, also shoulders, neck, and heads, but very angular, looking over their shoulders accross at you. The knights--well, I had a hard time with the knights. I thought about making them belly dancers, because of the way they move, which to me has always been very unpredictable...But this wasn't in keeping with what I had built so far, so I wandered around the studio a bit, looking at other people's work, looking in my big book for pictures of horses, etc. Then I sat down and grabbed a piece of clay and in playing with it, out came a seahorse. So, I made another one, more carefully, and took it to Max, who was throwing pots and who loved it. So, four seahorses later, I had my knights. They don't quite reflect the way I think about knights when I'm playing chess, but I think they are whimsical, and I like that. The kings were also all shoulders, neck and heads. I made them have very thin, stooped shoulders, long necks, and sunken cheeks and downturned eyes. I also left them very wrinkled. I was looking for elegant but weary, I guess, sort of like went to prepschool but have seen too much of the world for my own good. I was stumped again on the pawns. I tried several options, but I think I have finally settled on gravestones with two different symbols on them: one a cross, one a double cross. I very much like the idea of a game begun with that kind of death in mind; as if the lives you were playing with were real.
More lies:
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