Is making art and distraction or a concentration? Is it both? Is obsessively making art in the circumstances I find myself in at school (which aren’t nice, it has to be said. Closure of school in seven weeks.) distracting myself from the main event here or am I doing the right thing? I did catch myself wondering that and it slowed me up for a while. It all looked a bit cracked.

Today it looks sort of incredible and sort of all right. I am preparing for a job interview tomorrow and there isn’t much more I can do, certainly not at school. There were four rolled out plates in the moulds form Friday when I hadn’t been able to finish anything off at all. I have been asked to put some work into a little charity show nearby and I thought one of the main project weird plates might not do so I toyed with a De Waal pottery book last night and the idea of making some Decoratively Abstract ones. I liked the plates by Katsue Ibata in the book I did a drawing of it in the sketchbook. I made a version of this on the first plate and then another one. Then I copied a drawing of a gas mask that I did in the Norwich Regimental Museum last Thursday onto another one and then did a bad style mouse saying ‘Hit Me in the Face’, a message of frustration from The Social Network. And I finished off with big Japanese style mark making with an overlay of a roughly done blue border in the manner of the Lowestoft porcelain teapot that David had proudly shown me on Friday.

Whilst the plates look odd what and the meanings are pretty impacted into them what I like about them is the range of reference going on here. The themes of childhood fascination from the gas mask drawing, the interest in mark making in the Japanese potter’s work, the childish drawing style in the mouse cartoon and the final mash up of Japanese marks and restrained decoration. Highly satisfactory. Very briskly done during lunchtime and in odd moments this afternoon when the children were doing their study drawings for their Stepping Stone project.

Emptied the kiln too and a couple of failures and some disappointments. The heavily oxided ones didn’t fuse on as I had thought. And one of them had failed completely.