Wednesday, January 11, 2012

WHAT ARE THE ODDS?


Your average potter, full time potter, in general, makes a lot of pots over their lifetime. Even those who leave us too soon, can leave a large number of pots behind, maybe thousands or more.
I realize that pictures of various pots show up in exhibition catalogue, catalogues of particular potters, for museum shows and books, but still, the chances of seeing  a particular pot in print, is very slim. Really, what are the odds?

Enter an interested party, a person who is following my blog, he spies a pot and curiously asks if it is the same one as in the picture he sends me. Low and behold it is. The picture is of the Tokoname potter, Osako Mikio seated in front of three of his tsubo he has fired and is preparing for an exhibition. The photo dates to 1982/83 and at the far right is the tsubo I had posted on my blog a while back. Besides the long odds of a pot popping up in a book, the fascinating aspect is it really gives a sense of the volume of the pot. Dimensions alone rarely convey the full impact of a pots volume, but a picture of the pot in this context, certainly does (and as the say, is worth a thousand words).

Here is a link to the Osako Mikio Tokoname tsubo;