SOME CLAY, SOME SLIP AND AN IDEAL

My first encounter with the work of Ochiai Miyoko dates back to the Kikuchi Collection exhibition and the wave of simplicity and subtlety is immediate, a dialogue of potter, some clay, some slip and an ideal. Learning much of her craft and perhaps some of her sensibility in clay from Suzuki Osamu (Kyoto), Ochiai made her way to creating Chinese T'su chou inspired slipware at which she excels. Using very few materials and most times sparse and simplified decorations the work is alive with white, black and shades in between that seem spirited and alive on the clay canvas. Flowers, butterfly, birds and even cats are stripped down to the barest essentials and are in flight, moving and even manipulated by the wind though the curves of the pots has something to do with it as well. I am really not sure that I have seen such simple pots that say as much with so little as does the work of Ochiai Miyoko.     

Illustrated is a B&W picture of an eminently simple Ochiai Miyoko meiping influenced vase in the T'su chou style casting its shadow in the late afternoon. The vase is seductive and the lines unfettered creating a rather graceful visage that is as much about purity of form and curves as anything else. The body of the buff white stoneware is first dipped in a rather pure white slip, you can see her finger marks at the base of the piece and then she brushes on deep, black slip which is carved to define the decoration and then fired with a thin clear glaze over. The results seem to spring right out of a different time, perchance the Sung Dynasty though all of the work says as much about modern times as it does of antiquity and that is certainly a rather good thing.         

"The subtlest of subtleties, this is the gateway to all mysteries." Lao Tsu