SINGLED IN

Recently a fellow collector sent me a link to a Tsukigata Nahiko piece as he thought it may be of interest though he suggested I may already have too many pieces by this potter.  Of course I thanked him for the link but I also added, what is too many pieces? The truth is that we actually don't own many Tsukigata pots, most of the photos I have shared come from other people's collection or are photos I find in old book or on the internet here and there. However, I keep coming back to the question, what is too many pots by a single potter and my mind goes to collectors and collections built around a single individual from Picasso to Utagawa Kuniyoshi, from the sculpture of Gaston Lachaise to the pottery of Warren MacKenzie or the etchings of Albrecht Durer. It would seem that collecting an "individual" or more succinctly an individual's work is rather common and makes for an in-depth and the broadest understanding of the artist possible. I suspect the fellow collector may have in part been a bit sarcastic (in a good way) knowing a bit about my temperament but I have concluded when dealing with potters like Kumano, Furutani Michio, Tsukigata Nahiko and a few others, when can you have too many pieces, as long as each work is unique, doesn't duplicate a piece in the collection and makes its own bold and empowered statement than I am all for bringing another pot in the house.

Illustrated is a detail shot of a Tsukigata Nahiko mizusashi that I handled somewhat recently. Enclosed in its original box entitled; Oni-Shino Mizusashi with its fitted silk shifuku, this pot is as far afield from what one normally thinks of as Oni-Shino with areas of thick ash, deep, rich iron and thick feldspar plains. This particular rmizusashi is enclosed in a coat of thick Shino with ash covering the surface creating areas of translucent green over the white base adding tones of blue-grey and ash crystals across the entire piece. Interspersed about the pot are fissures created by the tension and weight of the glaze which allows the rich accumulated ash to paint these crevices to maximum affect and further activating the pot for the fullest dramatic presentation that a thick, viscous white glaze can muster. Given the serene and austere nature of this surface who would pass up such a pot simply because they already have a mizusashi or even ten.