C&C2

I handled a rather nice Seto-Guro recently that had a lot going for it; a nice surface, nice clay, nice form and very practical to use and hold but I kept thinking, it is just missing something. In the conversation with the chawan I couldn't help but be drawn back to a chawan a handled a few years back, a Seto-Guro chawan by Arakawa Toyozo where surface, form, kodai and presence all elevated the piece to a different level. The Arakawa as one might expect was potted excellently, the clay itself is just great but there is something about the bowl, the casual nature and honestly of the form, it appears to have been created without any contrived elements, in other words, from a lump of clay sprung the framework of a chawan. It is easy to say that the bowl embodies a no-fuss, no-muss attitude by Arakawa toiled on from his youth to his later years striving to create pottery that combined a certain naiveté with a practiced sense of subtle dynamics. I think as you look at what may a rather simple Seto-Guro chawan  it doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to envision all the effort of a lifetime of dedication poured in to a single piece,  day by day, pot by pot.

I decided to put up this static photo of the Arakawa Toyozo chawan because admittedly the video of this piece I put up years ago isn't my best effort. I hope it gives more of a sense of the chawan than the video does. I should also mention the Seto-Guro chawan I was just handling is in fact a very nice bowl but there is a reason Arakawa is one of the greats.

"Where there is much light, the shadow is deep." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe