I am not sure why, but for me, the incised
decoration and Oribe seem to go hand in hand. The way the glaze first breaks to
a much lighter color only to fill that incised channel with a dark river of
Oribe makes the technique very appealing. Though the idea of the incised line
goes way back in pottery history, it is the work of Kohyama Yasuhisa, Koie
Ryoji, Charles Counts and Aaron Bohrod that have been of the greatest
inspiration and influence in what I do with the cut line. The technique is both
primal and expressive, literal and obtuse and allows a potter direct access to
the clay, cutting in to the surface and moving material as you go along. The
other appeal is that spontaneity goes hand in hand with the directness of the
technique, like ink on a fresh piece of paper, there is no going back, the line
cut is the line that one lives with and there is a fair share of cast always
and wasters along the route. Using a sharpened piece of bamboo as a tool, it
takes practice to get gentle curves and small detail, but like all things worth
the effort, it is only the first 10,000 hours that serve to get you where you
are going.
Illustrated is a thrown stoneware bottle,
tokkuri with an decoration loosely based on the orbit in some far off incised interstellar
intersection of stars. In a way this decoration is an offshoot of my
"landscapeman" design but it owes as much to the blackboards of science
fiction scientists in old B movies as anything else. The Oribe glaze works well
over the incised decoration and though not quite apparent in the photo, the
surface has a slight iridescence to it. I have only one question, how is it
possible that no one in the US is mining ceramic grade lepidolite?
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