Crows of February 2021
We are now in the third wave. We have been in our most recent lockdown since just after Christmas and finally the COVID infection rate has reduced and vaccinations have started. Despite my good intentions it has been more than 3 months since my last post so it’s about time to start another post!
I got a lovely commission a while ago to make a Blue Jay for a customer. Blue jays are native to the USA, but In Ireland we have Jays too. Irish jays are wonderful but quite shy, with browns and blues in their colouring. In our garden, we have two Jays that visit in the morning when the garden is quiet. This winter our garden Jays took to eating the crab apples from the crab apple tree in the back garden. I think they waited until the red crab apples were quite fermented and they would eat one or two boozy apples every Sunday morning (at least that’s my theory!) until thee tree was completely stripped. A Jay boozy brunch. However, I digress. The Blue Jay commission was a wonderful one and one that I enjoyed tremendously. We used to live in Arizona and we would see Blue Jays when we visited California and New Mexico. They are very curious birds and would steal your lunch in a blink but Im not sure if they are as boozy as our Irish back garden Jays !.
I spent a few weeks in January making a Blue Jays out of my Raku clay. Jays are Corvids, members of the crow family and I have to say that I have quite a fondness for crows. They are all such clever birds, very social and great problem solvers. After the Blue Jays I made a few more crows, larger and more intricate. I made them with Rooks in mind, with a little artistic licence. I fired two the other day in the raku kiln and am delighted with the results. I used a copper black glaze with one, and the firing was so reduced (low in oxygen) that the metallic of the copper was very prominent. The other glaze was a copper matt and is quite wonderful, very tactile. I have more in various stages of construction too so I think the Corvid phase might continue. I wait to see if anyone else shares my Corvid passion, as my daughter said ‘Im not sure everyone loves crows in the same way you do, Mummy’. I mean to convert the unimpressed, and maybe try some of our local Jays too.
The Crows in the raku kiln before firing. The greenish one is the Copper matt glaze.