I worked the Business Research at Kodak Japan. Yes, I used to wear a suit and tie. Kodak just announced another layoff, 1300 people locally, in Rochester, NY. Twenty two years ago, when I first came to Rochester, people told me that if you throw a stone, you hit a person related to Kodak. Employed about 50 thousand people in Rochester. Now it is down to 8 thousand people. You could blame on the digital conversion from the film as one reason. Probably true. When the old-school type business ; loyal to employees (no worker’s union), honest business, academically-technology driven rather than market driven (if you have a real good product, people will buy them.) since the establishment of company by George Eastman, faced the world competition, it was too slow to react to the increasing changing market. Fuji Film had always been afraid of waking up the sleeping giant. That giant never waked up. Last several years of Kodak has been painful, the corporate outsiders selling the assets just to look good on the paper (survive) . It is sad to see the company who brought me to Rochester, vanishing.
Have you heard or seen the book, “500 BOWLS” by the Lark books? I was fortunate enough that my bowl is in this book. This books features many great bowls. This bowl has a connection to Kodak. I use the Kodak film container for my circle decoration. If I remember correctly, I first saw this technique from the book, Warren MacKenzie: American Potter, that influenced my pottery greatly, that another story, and thought to use the Kodak film container as a sign of ex-Kodak potter. Kodak’s container is black, not the semi-transparent film container.
After throwing the pottery, you hold the film container outside the bowl, and push the clay toward outside in circular motion from inside with a finger. If you thrown the shape of bowl right, this makes very nice complement to the bowl. After making these circles, I turn the wheel and reshape the edge of bowl with a chamois to reshape to be round.
Birds need some food in this frigid weather. Thanks to grain hoppers, they scored big today.
The bisques are unloaded, and the next batch is loaded today.
Let’s try something new. Video of me throwing fluted bowl. I use about 1 lb of clay. I do not weight the clay, instead measure the length of pugged clay, 2.5 inch long. Width of thrown bowl is 21.5cm (8.5”). I grew up with the metric system, and am still not able to use the inch very well, especially smaller than inch (1/8, ¼). Just confusing.
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