TWICE ENCOUNTERED

I first encountered this chawan quite a few years back, perhaps the very early 90s at the home of Dr. Fred Baekeland where it was part of about 20 pieces that he had pulled out for us to look at and possibly buy. Since Shino was one of our first true loves, when we left we ended up with a slide and Polaroid of the chawan and thought about it on and off for some time but never seemed to be at the right place and time to acquire it. Fast forward to the burgeoning age of the internet and a  second chance encounter with the very same chawan almost a decade later and astronomically less expensive, needless to say that we purchased it. I should say that Dr. Baekeland's original stamp of approval certainly helped and what we knew at the time that it was purchased out of an exhibition in Gifu the same year that we say it so it really didn't take a lot of convincing to bid.

Made by Mino traditional potter, Kawai Takehiko (b.1940) this chawan is a simple exercise in putting together a Momoyama ideal with a fresh and honest dose of a potter's vision where the straight sided form is interrupted by vivid and animated throwing lines that is a perfect foil for its glaze texture and coloration.  Though not a chawan you may classify as adventurous or necessarily breaking from tradition, this bowl has that sense of being a distillation of all the invaluable and difficult work of the 20th century pioneers that brought Shino back to its rightful place in the hierarchy of chadogu and modern pottery in general. Big, bold, practical and functional best describe this chawan in hand where despite its simplicity or perhaps because of it, this piece sits well in the hand and with the eye, it is so pleasing because it doesn't try too hard and gets all the fundamentals just about right and I think that is about all you can ask for out of two pounds of clay, a few ounces of glaze materials and a few thousand degrees of temperature.