Annibale Carracci was an Italian painter and instructor, active in Bologna and later in Rome. Along with his brother and cousin, Annibale was one of the progenitors, if not founders of a leading strand of the Baroque style, borrowing from styles from both north and south of their native city, and aspiring for a return to classical monumentality, but adding a more vital dynamism. Painters working under Annibale at the gallery of the Palazzo Farnese would be highly influential in Roman painting for decades.

Years ago, nearly a decade ago in fact, my wife enrolled in a pottery class at our local community college. We planted a shrub while she was enrolled, dug up some clay in the process, and her professor let her make something with it and fire it. To everyone's surprise, it went smoothly.

Enter kids, increasing work responsibilities, etc. A decade passes. Along the way we discovered our yard is 2-3" of top soil followed by nearly 100% gray clay. There's no marbeling, basically no sediment, nothing. Just slightly sandy/gritty gray clay.

I recently buried a gutter downspout and added a French drain in our yard, so I trenched my way through a ton of clay. I set some aside, since our oldest kid is now messaging with clay at our community center.

Here's the quick rundown of how I processed it:

1. Manually remove the topsoil layer
2. Toss clay into a 5 gallon bucket
3. Cover in water, let sit a day or so
4. Mix with a grout/thinset/cement mixing paddle attached to a drill to break up the chunks
5. Sive for coarse material, like roots. I used some burlap as a screen and poured between buckets
6. After you've screened the clay, remove the excess water. You can just let the bucket(s) sit and wait for evaporation to do its thing, you can wait a day or two for some water to separate and pour it off, you can use some fabric you don't care about much as a cheesecloth, etc
7. Once the clay is the appropriate consistency, make something!

I made was a ceramic fish following the instructions of our oldest, who had just made something similar at the community center. The one pictured was meant to be the ugly sacrificial test piece before the "nice" one got fired, but our youngest broke the nice one into pieces, so I guess the ugly one is the nice one now.

I left the fish under our porch for a few weeks to dry out. After that, I put them into our fire pit, lit a small fire to warm them up somewhat gradually, and then built the fire up over a half hour or so.

Burningaton:

Post burn:

From the museum:

Warhol created the Vesuvius series in 1985 for Lucio Amelio, an Italian art dealer and curator. Amelio commissioned the works for display at the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, which was better known for displaying masterworks by Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, and Caravaggio. The corresponding exhibition catalogue included the statement from Warhol: "I painted each Vesuvius by hand, always using different colors so that they can give the impression of having been painted just one minute after the eruption." This version, entirely black and white, highlights Warhol's return to painting with its expressive brush strokes. It is a rare example of Warhol capturing motion in his two-dimensional works. Vesuvius, a volcano notorious for its destruction of Pompeii in 79 CE, and continued eruptions since, has been memorialized by artists throughout history including Albert Bierstadt, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and J.M. W. Turner to name a few.