My second year as a university art student (1996-ish), a ceramics/mold making class with the fabulous Mark Burns.
Assignment:
Make a set of four mugs by hand.
Try to make them as close to identical to each other as possible.
Draw from a bag the name of an artist/painting that will inspire your work.
My artist/painting drawn from the bag: El Greco/St. Sebastian c.1612 (see image below text)
I created these mugs, with a bonus pitcher. The “bonus pitcher” was actually the first "mug" I made but the next one was significantly smaller. By the time I started on my third piece I realized the first needed to be either discarded or repurposed. A “pitcher”, it became.
When I presented my mug set for critique I had also made a wall-mount board with arrow-end hooks (made from real bow & arrow arrows) that the mugs hung on. That was my attempt to tie it all together with the painting. It worked out pretty well.
I lost the wall-mount piece in one of my moves at some point in time.
The purpose of the exercise was to help us really appreciate the mold-making process by demonstrating how difficult it is to replicate something exactly, over and over again. It was an awesome exercise and by the time we got to the mold making process, I was indeed grateful. We got to create some really great stuff through mold making, but hand-building things with clay is always a really neat process. Ceramics in general, always made me feel like I’d made something of useful value instead of just a bunch of junk.
I tried to use these mugs a couple times but apparently there were bubbles in the glaze deep down in the inside, and they popped open during the firing process, thus when I added hot beverage, the bubble residue flaked off into my drink. Multiple times. Pretty gross. So, they're decorative mugs, don’t use them. I like that I made them, and that they’re a little weird. They make for good conversation pieces when they’re spotted in the little kitchen window.
St. Sebastian by El Greco. Oil on canvas.
image source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/el-greco/st-sebastian-2?utm_source=returned&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=referral