NAME THAT TUNE

I have a friend that now and again sends me close-up or detail photos of pots he has either collected or recently handled, sort of a Name That Tune kind of things only in this case, who made the pot. I will be honest, I usually do fairly well, perhaps I get 90% or so right though when it comes to detail shots of the various wood fired traditions or things like sometsuke ware it can get a bit difficult. Prior to this photo I was sent a picture that showed the very top of an abstract mountain rendered in underglaze blue which was obviously  a student of Kondo Yuzo so I jumped right to Kondo Hiroshi except it was actually painted by Shinoda Gi'ichi and there were clues I ignored.

That brings me to this unusual detail shot which was actually quite easy as I had actually only recently seen this very piece made by Morino Kako, a master of glazes and father of Morino Taimei. The bottle has this rather unusual red, iron base glaze with areas of transparent green crazed glaze and where the two meet it creates these brilliant boundaries of black, gold and other iridescent effects which I can say I have only seen on Kako's pottery. In looking though several catalogues on Morino Kako, the majority of pieces glazed in this fashion were made later in life and some of the forms are quite playful in there geometry with this piece being a simple, small rectangular henko though punctuated with these brilliant, cosmic storms around the pot surface making for a much larger scale than the dimensions may necessarily imply.