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10/09/2022

One of the highlights of my trip to the Brooklyn Museum yesterday was seeing a work by one of my favorite ceramicists, Jun Nishida (西田潤), in person. Jun was around the same age as me, but he tragically died at only 28 years old while pursuing his passion: Working with Javanese artisans in Indonesia to help them preserve their pottery traditions.

Despite leaving us at such a young age, Jun left behind an amazing body of work that explores the glaze-clay continuum and the very nature of ceramics. He described his work "as examples of nature, and are essentially copies of natural forms. It's similar to how Mother Earth makes stones." If you've never seen Jun's work, I hope you'll search for him online.

Where Glaze Ends, and Clay Begins, A Journey Into the World of Nishida Jun
http://www.e-yakimono.net/html/jcn-14.html

Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jun_Nishida

Images from the Brooklyn Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, & Joan B Mirviss, Ltd.

Untitled sculpture, 2002
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/222089

Finality No. 5, 2001
https://collections.artsmia.org/art/108693/finality-no-5-nishida-jun

Various works
https://www.mirviss.com/exhibitions/nishida-jun-1977-2005

07/24/2022

Glazy now available in Ukrainian!

Very special thanks to .ceramics who helped translate thousands of materials, glaze types, and user interface messages!

And thanks to all the amazing people who contributed translations over the years! Glazy is now available in: Dansk, Deutsch, English, Español, Français, Hrvatski, Italiano, 日本語, 한국어, Nederlands, Portugues, Svenska, Русский, ภาษาไทย, 中文, and Українська.

07/15/2022

"A photo of a ceramic vase made by space aliens from an advanced civilization displayed in a gallery with white walls."

My exploration of the vase form using GAN’s was fun, but ultimately a little disappointing because generated images are limited to the combination of possibilities within a strictly-defined dataset, for example photos of vases. After training a StyleGAN model on vases I could generate more images of vases. So what?

Creating “hybrid” images via transfer learning on disparate datasets (like cross-pollinating vases with beetles) resulted in strange and interesting new possibilities, but the process is labor intensive and also slightly disappointing. Vases mixed with beetles, so what?

It wasn’t until the advent of text-to-image generators like DALL·E that my mind was truly blown. Now, one could simply write a text prompt describing the desired image, and results would magically appear. One was no longer limited to specialized datasets, now we were dealing with ALL the images.

So far, my primary interest in image generators has been to explore new forms of ceramic objects, primarily vases. I’ve been through many versions of prompts. “A contemporary procelain vase that has never been seen before.” “A ceramic vase that represents a mathematical concept.” “A modern vase with a drippy glaze.” But none of these prompts produced what I felt were interesting or new forms. As a sci-fi lover, I naturally began asking for vases made by aliens, and my prompts gradually began producing novel forms. Excited to have just been given access to OpenaAI DALL·E 2 (), I iterated on the theme and settled on the prompt above.

I've posted more results on my blog, "This vessel does not exist." (Link in bio)

All images copyright OpenAI.

06/26/2022

Target & Solve Update: Ignore Oxides

The most common reason I see with Target & Solve not working for people is that materials sometimes contain trace amounts of oxides like TiO2, CdO, and PbO. If the "target" analysis doesn't contain these oxides, no solution will be found.

Now, you can choose to ignore oxides when solving for an analysis. For example, a recipe with 20% Grolleg Kaolin might be difficult to solve using EPK Kaolin because EPK contains significant amounts of TiO2 while Grolleg does not. Now you can simply uncheck the box for TiO2, and solve should be able to find a solution for you.

Target & Solve is a Patron-only feature. Please consider supporting the ever-increasing server costs and on-going development of Glazy by becoming a Patron!

06/21/2022

An incredible mid-fire oxidation Jun celadon!

Perhaps like many of you, my first forays into glaze chemistry were devoted to producing blue celadons.  My copies of Robert Tichane's "Celadon Blues" and Nigel Wood's "Chinese Glazes" became dog-eared and grimy with smudges of iron oxide.

One crucial requirement for producing those blue celadons had nothing to do with the glaze materials but rather the firing and, crucially, the lack of oxygen in the firing atmosphere.  Reduction firing can be somewhat of an artform in itself, and countless kiln loads (going all the way back to ancient China) have been ruined by under-reducing or over-reducing, too early-reducing or too late-reducing.  How big would the waste pile of broken shards from those centuries of kilns be?

As early as the 1950's, articles were appearing in Ceramics Monthly about Silicon Carbide (SiC) reduced glazes.  Tom Turner did some great work on copper reds around 2012.  Somehow these glazes never seem to have caught on, though.  Lately there's been a bunch of research and testing posted to Glazy by the likes of , and .  I've posted some of my own tests in this account and on Glazy.

David Tsabar () in particular has done incredible work, not only with pale-blue celadons but also copper reds and Chun/Jun blue celadons.  And yesterday he posted a revised Jun glaze that blew me away.

Not many of us can afford to build a gas kiln, let alone the land that you need to build it on.  But David's recipes point to a future where all we need to produce stunning reduction effects is a simple mid-fire electric kiln.

Thank you David!

This recipe: https://glazy.org/materials/202506
David's Glazy page: https://glazy.org/u/davidtsabar/recipes

06/15/2022

"Paintings" of the Philadelphia Art Museum.

These paintings of the museum were created by Boris Dayma's awesome DALL·E mini, which is accessible to anyone with a web browser:  https://huggingface.co/spaces/dalle-mini/dalle-mini (link in bio)  Dalle mini is a great way to explore ideas, and it demonstrates how machine learning can be used not as a replacement for artists, but as another tool to aid our artistic process.

To generate these images, I used prompts like "picasso style painting depicting philadelphia art museum building".  Represented here are "works" by Chagall, Monet, Cezanne, and Matisse.  Can you tell which one is which?

Landing in Philly, I somehow lucked into a job at the amazing , and I'm now a proud member of the first wall-to-wall union in a major US museum, .  I really miss being in the ceramics studio, but I love working with a bunch of passionate art people.  I've learned a ton.  We're doing really cool stuff with technology, and the museum just opened a machine learning based exhibition, Martine Syms’s Neural Swamp.

06/12/2022

New Feature: "Quick Search"

This is a new server service that allows for quickly searching through Glazy's content including Posts, Recipes, Materials, Analyses, Posts, Users, Recipe Comments & Post Comments.

Like Firing Chart Diagrams, Quick Search is available to all users regardless of Patron status. If would like to support the ongoing development of features like these, please consider becoming a Patron!

Some features:
Enter words OR a numeric Recipe/Post ID
One or two misspellings are allowed depending upon the length of the word
Certain common keywords like "the" are removed from the search
Searching two or more words should show results with any of the words. However, results with all of the words should display first.
This is just an "alpha" version. Future improvements will include indexing image titles & descriptions, and integration with other search areas like Posts.

I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback.

05/15/2022

A small feature, but I'm pretty excited about these firing schedule charts.

Firing charts include three common markers for firing: Quartz Inversion, Orton Cone 04, and Orton Cone 10.
Similar to the use of the Stull Diagram in recipe charts, these markers serve as handy guides for comparing schedules.

Note:
1) Cone temperatures are for regular Orton Cones fired at Heating Rate ̊60C/hour (last 100 ̊C of firing) and Heating Rate ̊108F/hour (last 200 ̊F of firing).
2) Although Quartz Inversion is marked as a line at 573C, the process is continuously occurring especially for the 50 degrees around that temperature.

Future improvements will include the ability to specify your own markers (specific cone type for firing rate, burnout, other notes), atmosphere (e.g. heavy/light reduction), and sharing/commenting features already found in recipes and posts.

04/15/2022

Paintings and pots!

Alternate title: "Feet and pots!"

I'm infatuated with and Barnes' "ensembles". The experience is overwhelming and incredibly intimate, at times mysterious and perplexing, and often imbued with a joy not unlike discovering a hidden gem in a vintage knickknack shop. As a ceramicist my favorite juxtaposition is these folk pots, mostly by unknown artists, fairly unremarkable in the grand history of ceramics, sitting quietly at the feet of masterpieces.

04/10/2022

I was lucky to have landed in Philadelphia just as "Kōgei: Art Craft Japan" opened at . Here are some of the beautiful surfaces from those works. I included a wonderful detail of Jun Kaneko's "Untitled Dango", still on display at the museum.

I love looking at work and asking myself, "How did they do that?" How do you think they did it?

Selected works by:
Shomura Ken
Sasaki Atsushi
Kimura Yoshiro
Jun Kaneko
Okada Kenzō
Sakiyama Takayuki
Hoshino Satoru

03/19/2022

Lasse Östman generously shared his deep knowledge of glazes on his website and social media. The Glazy community has been working to re-create Lasse's glazes, and two recent results from and are just too wonderful not to post. It's amazing to see people around the world sharing their knowledge like this!

Lasse Östman Golden Glaze: https://glazy.org/recipes/126620

Lasse Östman's Website: http://www.stoneware.net
Lasse Östman's Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VansbroStengods/

Special thanks to and for their amazing work!

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2025 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy
Philadelphia, PA
19130

Website

https://glazy.org/

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