Flashback

Before I got into painting seriously, I had access to a ceramics studio in Seattle, and I would make these little "tiles" though they were more like boxes that could hang on a nail. They varied in size; the smallest was about an inch wide, up to 5 or 6 inches wide. Those pictured above are about 3 inches wide.

I think this was around the year 2000, and I swear at the time I thought I was the inventor of this design, but now I realize that was pretty dorky of me. (People like to think they came up with an idea "first" but nothing truly is an original idea.) Off course, since then I've seen millions of incarnations of this concept all over the place.

I built each tile individually out of slabs of earthenware clay (it would have been so much easier to just make some molds,) and created the drawings using scraffito and underglazes. The sides are glazed with terra sigillata. My partner at the time was a production potter and we took these to some trade shows, and I actually picked up several accounts nationally.

I would say I probably made about 500 of these little things in total. I sometimes wonder where they landed. How many are still out there in the world? How many have broken, or been scooted under a couch, or tucked away into a junk drawer?