Screaming Faces, Mugs, and Thinking About Eyes

2020, the facial expression

In the summers, I like to take a complete break from my teaching and my school work so that I can come back to it in September (or August) refreshed and energized. Most summers, I like to spend this  summer studio time working in my studio. Last summer my family and I traveled a lot instead. I also took several weeks at the end of the summer to prepare my three online classes for the year, since I anticipated a lot of union work, especially in the Spring.

The trouble with faces on the bulbs is that they are not face shaped, so there's some work to do in figuring out whether and how to stretch or squish the features

As we all know, that extra summer work turned out to be a good plan, not just because of my union commitments, but because the academic landscape was unrecognizable as of March 13. I ended up needing to redo some of my summer prep when the timing of the quarter changed, but I was still breathing all kinds of sighs of relief that I had gotten the bulk of the work organized and done ahead of time. Since so much of my other (union) job changed in March and kept changing in April and May and June and July, I was glad that I had come into both the online teaching and the union work as well prepared as I could have been.

I want to, eventually, see these screaming mugs hung on a wall, like my bulbs. I originally thought of these faces alongside ones with a more specific political message, but now I'm thinking that simply screaming may capture the mood more broadly.

I was quite looking forward to a summer of quiet solitude and deep work in my beautiful new studio this summer. I even had a plan to focus on these political mugs that I had started back in 2019. As well as a few other odds and ends I wanted to finish.

When I first start on these faces, the features are simply roughed in by squishing, cutting, or adding clay.

2020 makes its own choices, and thus my plans have shifted again. Because I still cannot teach my classes on campus, I need to prepare alternate classes this summer. There have actually been at least 3 different plans for my fall schedule in play since the start of June, but it now appears I will be teaching Art Appreciation in the fall (well, I mean, probably, there is a now doubt in everything we do.). I've taught Art Appreciation many times, but I believe the last time was in 2014.  I've also taught online before, but that was one time, in Winter 2008, and I was teaching in a different LMS, with a screaming infant in arms, and a walloping case of undiagnosed Pospartum Depression (probably, or maybe babies /online classes are just difficult). Now that I write this out, I realize that I may be a little afraid of teaching Art Appreciation online for reasons not entirely related to teaching Art Appreciation online.

I like that I can add these tongues inside the bulbs (hard to do with a functional mug). The toughs are actually supported on little internal pedestals.

Anywho, I am trying to reconcile myself to the fact that I will need to prep some new classes before fall and this, along with some surprise union work that has needed to happen this summer, is taking up more of my studio time than anticipated. (Added to this, of course, is the serious budget fears/concerns in the state and the permanent, disorienting sense of uncertainty surrounding, COVID, K-12 schools, risk in daily activities, the economy, the election, police violence, racism, our deranged president, masks, and basically every single thing on the news.).  I have gotten into the studio a few times a week for the past few weeks. I made some lemon squeezers which are in the kiln now, and I've been working on the mugs and bulbs pictured here that, I think, capture the general sentiment in the country this year.

The first mug I did this summer, clearly without actually looking at anyone's real eyes!

I particularly want to share the progress on some of these face mugs. Remember that my time and attention has been divided and short. The mug above is the first one I did this summer. I did it from memory, though my daughter made this shape with her mouth for me for about 40 seconds before she left. I worked on it, then set it aside and worked on the next one. It wasn't until the third day, when I came back to work on the second one in progress, that I pulled back the plastic and realized how bad the first mug was. 

The mugs as I first put in the features look ridiculous and messy.

All the faces look terrible when I begin. I rough in the features and I usually add the eyeballs before the eye lids. The mouth is a ring and the features are really wonky and stupid looking at this stage. I kind of love taking pictures at this point because they sorta don't look salvageable at this point. Then, I spend more time on them. Since the first one, I have a batch of printed pictures of screaming faces in my studio for reference. And the four or five faces I've done since the first one all are working more or less how I want them to. 

After a while, though, if I'm looking at a face or a picture, it can start to look a little more convincing.

The first one, though, is interesting from a teaching and developmental perspective. We all know what eyes look like. And I know, in theory, how they are supposed to be built, but having not actually looked at eyes while making them, mine look flat and strange. If I'm ever allowed to teaching clay classes again, I'm hoping I might be able to use this flat and amateur looking mug face, along with a more sophisticated version, as a teaching aid to help students see or recognize what they might miss the first time around.

Elf Sculpture by Kascha Love, Winter 2020

I usually have students make portraits twice a year. These three are from this past winter, when I had a fairly strong class of students who mostly spend a good amount of time on their projects. In Kasha's sculpture above, she opted to choose a subject from fantasy, which is a way of working around the complications of real facial features. This elf has slightly protuberant eyes and no wrinkles, which may be what elf faces look like. Kasha has crafted the eyes such that they look like eyeballs inside of skin, but these would look strange if we didn't have other clues that the subject was not human.

Bacchus sculpture by Sean Wilkinson, Winter 2020

In Sean's sculpture, we can see that he has the eyeballs far enough back into the head so that both the brow and cheekbone are further out. This can be a challenging concept to get right in sculpture, especially when students are starting out. In looking at people for non-art purposes, so much information is conveyed in the eyes, that we tend to think of them as being both larger and more forward than they actually are. It can be difficult to prioritize the bone structure in crafting a sculptural representation of a face, because our ideas of faces interfere. I believe Sean redid these eyes several times to get them right.

Brother sculpture by Zanity Contreras, Winter 2020

I sometimes have students who never get their head around how the eyes fit inside the eye sockets. Earlier this year, I think in the fall, I struggled and struggled with a student who kept making a flat face with holes for eyes. It was frustrating for both of us, I think, because I could see that she wasn't understanding what I was trying to show her about the curve of the eye socket and the slope of the cheeks and I couldn't understand how to change my approach to reach her. Zanity, in the Winter, has a similar, though less pronounced issue with her flattened face, but in Zanity's case there were some timing issues that didn't allow her to spend the time. I suspect that given another day or two, the proportions and angles of this face would have shifted. On the other hand, the piece is interesting for its formal qualities, with the three wide ovals of the mouth and eyes and the long straight nose.