A SECOND VIEW

I ended up getting ahead of myself a bit and started glazing on Sunday, so I loaded Monday afternoon and  fired on Tuesday. Schedules are flexible and when my wife goes in to work on Sunday, I slipped off to the studio to get things started. I unloaded the glaze this afternoon and was pleasantly surprised not a single piece had glaze running off the pot, no stuck feet, no stuck lids, in many ways an ideal firing. The only drawback to a firing that is predominantly one glaze combo is the sameness. Once I started moving pots away from each other and looking at them out in the sunlight, the character of each pot was far more apparent than on two tables filled with saffron and iron red surfaces.

The overglazes, the saffron yellow iron and the iron red are both made from the same base glaze, the only difference is the use of yellow iron oxide in the one and Spanish red iron oxide in the other. However once placed on the alkaline clear and my temmoku, it is obvious how much different they are from each other. Out of the firing, the double gourd vases came out rather well and considering I haven't thrown this form since my arrival in the Mohawk Valley, I think they came out strong with a nice curved rise from the foot. All in all, not a bad firing, lost one test cup and one teabowl out of the entire firing, in baseball this would be batting .990!

Illustrated is the same group, now fired that I used last Friday while they were all still bisque. There is too much light streaming into the studio windows, making for a terrible photo, but I think you get the idea.

"What we anticipate seldom occurs, what we least expected generally happens."

                                                                             Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)

PAPER, PLASTIC OR JUTE

This past weekend, I was set a task to find something which has been packed away since a good number of moves ago. We have moved a number of times since 1998, principally for my wife's job, after all, what potter would move over and over again by choice. In the search, an item at the top of one of the totes, brought me back, quite a few years. Folded, neatly on the top was a jute, environmentally friendly,  shopping bag I had designed back in 2001/2002. I was approached by the Show Of Hands shops of the ODC (Ohio Designer Craftsman) to design a bag using one of my It's Still Life designs for the assignment.

At this point, I had been represented by the ODC/SOH stores in North Olmstead, Columbus and Cincinnati for nearly a decade and my It's Still Life and the Black & White slip trailed work were my best selling pottery at the time. The restrictions were simple, a basically square design and the limited to the use of six colors. Illustrated is the bag that they produced from my original design, It's Still Life, the actual design is call; " I Am Still Waiting". It was a good deal of fun to see the project from sketch to product and I must admit, even more satisfying was seeing people carrying the bag at the mall and at the craft shows that the ODC sponsored around Ohio.

THE PLANNED CHAOS

I unloaded a bisque this morning, filled with some serving pieces as orders, covered jars, gourd vases, spice jars (chaire?) and the ubiquitous teabowls. I spent time cleaning the bisque and then glazed and waxed the feet and lips/lids readying the pots for glazing. This group will revolve around the saffron yellow iron glaze, temmoku and red iron and a few odds and ends including the "Jun" glaze I am still working on. Part of the fun that goes along with a glaze firing is the necessity to make up glazes as well. This time around I needed to make up 1000gramms of the Jun and 5000 gramms of the temmoku and alkaline clear glazes. Just part of getting everything ready to go.

My intentions are to start glazing on Monday and finish up with secondary glaze coats, cleaning and kiln loading on Tuesday and firing the glaze kiln on Weds. This will be the first time I have fired any pots with the saffron glaze that were of any size and I am hoping the glaze doesn't just run entirely off the pots. Each of the covered jars and gourd vases will be fired on pieces of old shelf to minimize the catastrophe that is ever present with untried glaze combinations. Illustrated is a group of the bisque ready to be waxed/glazed, the tallest jar in the back is just under 15" tall. The bisque nearly covers two 8' tables, I have a fair amount of work ahead of me.

FINISHING TOUCH

“Delicious food requires plates of a comparable level of beauty; without them it is incomplete. And so I came naturally to a critical interest in chinaware and lacquerware for table use.”

This comment by Kitaoji Rosanjin (1883-1959) is in my mind what best highlights his talents.  In a conversation I had with a major curator of a major museum, he admitted that he was just unclear as to why Rosanjin was considered so highly and his pots were fetching such high prices, this was in the early 1990s. If you think about it, deciding his actual place in art history can be debated. Was Rosanjin a great designer, potter, chef, calligrapher/painter, literati philosopher or arbiter of taste or truly, all of these? The answer to this question is above my paygrade, but I can say that by looking at Rosanjin’s works, it is certain he understood and appreciated what had come before as his work taps into that sense of timelessness. It is neither old nor new.

Having seen quite a few Rosanjin pots over the years in private and public collections, as well in numerous catalogues and books, the real brilliance of his work is his ability to conceive of the pieces in situ, in use for food, varying ritual punctuations, tea ceremony, flower arrangement, etc. as the finishing touch to his works. Rosanjin had the nearly unique ability to envision his creations as they would be used, in places where they would fulfill specific functions as most pots are meant to do. If you think of a Rosanjin Bizen mallet vase, though timeless and subtle in its beauty, if you add a floral arrangement to the piece, acting almost as a visual prop, it is transfixed into a myriad of altered aesthetics depending on season, arrangement and arranger, but at its core, it seems complete. Though many critics consider his versatility and originality his real gifts, from my perspective it is the fact that few, if any other potter can live up to Rosanjin’s unique ability to create a pot that is finalized by the addition of what is “missing” and that is how he conceived the piece. In an odd way, it is like the negative space that highlights many great painting masterpieces of the Muromachi and Momoyama periods.  It would seem that Rosanjin was seeing the big picture long before that was an essential part of our modern lives.

“There is nothing so delicious as freshness.”   Kitaoji Rosanjin

A NEW SPARK

A while back, I posted a stellar  tsubo by Tokoname legend, Osaka Mikio and then a bit later amother post of the same pot, with a photo from a book showcasing the potter. Now comes another pot, made at the very same time as the tsubo, 1982, though made in an entirely different method. Illustrated is a large Tokoname platter by Osako that has an evocative ash glaze poured onto the surface which is further enhanced by the wood firing process. The surface palette runs from a milky emerald color to a rich bidoro style deep green around crevices helping frame the plate in glassy accents. What is so unusual about this piece is that the potter, first threw a thick disk of clay, let it firm up a bit and then literally "carved" the plate out of the disk, certainly a new spark for a long standing tradition. The marks left by cutting away the rough clay, narrates the adventure of the pot and makes for wonderful variations in the surfaces where glaze and ash were allowed to build up. This plate shows why Osako Mikio was so highly regarded for adding something new to Tokoname ware that dates back many centuries.

(Used with the permission of a private collector)

CASUAL EXPRESSION

"My work began in England, learned much in Okinawa and matured in Mashiko......"            Hamada Shoji

Illustrated is a mizusashi by Mashiko legend, Hamada Shoji. The full form has a perpetually wet appearance and the striking underglaze sugar cane motif appears to have only just to have brushed onto the pot in the blink of an eye. The ash based clear glaze has created Hagi like areas of blushed spotting running from beige to pink most noticeable around the underglaze decoration. There is a palpable tension in the form and profile of the pot that almost appears to be contained by the fluid and casual expression of the  brushwork of the potter, who had painted the same design, many thousands of times before. I don't doubt there are better pots by Hamada, but few have the unrestrained sense of fullness and animation that this water pot contains.

OUT OF MY GOURD

Everyone is quick these days to use the phrase; "you need to think outside the box", but from my perspective, every time I start a new cycle, it is just as important to think inside the box. In this case, the box is the space and volume of the kiln and how do I fill it to maximize its potential. Obviously, it is important to first plan out any orders or commissions, next comes the fill in the blank portion of planning a kiln load. In this cycle, I threw a group of large covered jars where they are widest at about the top 1/3 of the form, so I planned out a group of vases that would be at their widest at the bottom 1/3 of the pot to fit a vase between each pair of jars.

This particular time I decided to throw double gourd form bottles which I had not thrown in quite a while. Illustrated is a picture of four of the bottle/vases, the tallest just under 14", the two with hakeme slip will be glazed in the iron yellow saffron glaze and the other two will be glazed in my temmoku and iron red glazes. The one plain white slipped bottle was simply about giving me some flexibility in decoration and glazing, even though I am likely to use the temmoku/iron red combo none the less. Good to keep your options open when thinking inside of the box while being a bit out of my gourd as another week commences full tilt.

ANOTHER SIMPLE BOWL

Illustrated are two views of a "simple" chawan by legendary Mashiko potter; Shimaoka Tatsuzo (1919-2007).  The eye is immediately drawn to the ash covered lip and drawn into the bowl to be overwhelmed by the ash flow and thick pool of glass at the bottom of the bowl. Though the bowl would seem simple in design and execution, it was masterfully created and fired, to accentuate and animate the pot. The ridge that circles the chawan at mid-point, collects the ash as it runs down from the lip creating a line of deeply colored glass formed from the natural ash inside the kiln with the ridges of the foot also collecting ash to distinctly distinguish it from the body of the bowl. It speaks to the mastery of clay and fire, that a potter could understand how the chawan would transform, once it was fired. It would seem that any idea that can be done, can be stripped to the barest of essentials and made pure in its simplicity and this chawan is just such a pot. That so simple a pot could have some much energy to share with the viewer is truly a testament to any potter.

INKBLOT II

Illustrated is another teabowl form that had a rich black slip poured over a white slip in a somewhat controlled, yet chaotic manner. The bowl was then glazed in my medieval green glaze and as it is sometimes prone to do, there surface has a tortoiseshell style appearance. I wish I could control this anomaly, but it seems to happen by pure happenstance. As with the previous Inkblot bowl, this one was thrown and then manipulated, just a bit ovoid and the foot was cut with a bamboo knife to better accompany the form and lip. This style of bowl owes its origin to older Raku archetypical forms known such as tsutsu-gata and gokezoke-gata and though hand thrown, the body of the bowl was also pinched to get to the form I was after.

"I think I think; therefore I think I am."  Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913)

CHICKEN OR EGG 鶏か卵

I have always been fascinated by form, going back to my youth watching countless hours of cartoons to the appreciation of form and function in the real world. It really doesn't matter the material; clay, metal, glass, stone, form is king. Knowing this, a friend sent me a catalogue, years ago called; FROM SILVER TO CERAMICS from the Ashmolean Museum. The basic premise is the investigation of the relationship (and origins) between ceramic and metal forms, around the globe. The idea sprung from an exhibit in which ancient Greek pottery and metalwork where examined and the questions of which came first were analyized. Some thought that the ceramic forms sprung from metal and vice versa, the penultimate example of the chicken and the egg. The catalogue takes up forms from Greece, Rome, China, Japan and Islam and is a fascinating look at form in two materials.

Illustrated is a gin-chawan, a silver chawan, beaten from a thick sheet of silver  with an applied foot ring (kodai). The slightly waisted form is accentuated by a myriad of hand hammered marks, giving the bowl a tremendous sensory appeal to the eye as well as the hand. Made in the 20th century in the style of a classical raku chawan, silver and gold, lacquer, wood and glass chawan can be seen all the way back to the early Edo Period (1600-1868). In fact, there is a 12 piece tea set created at the instruction of Tokugawa Ieyasu (the first Tokugawa Shogun) made out of pure gold and used for entertaining very high ranking individuals. What ever the case may have been in ancient Greece, it is safe to say, this silver chawan is a copy of its ceramic antecedant, so we can say with some certainty, it is the egg that comes first. I guess I have solved one of the great mysteries of the universe!

"To be absolutely certain of something, one must know everything or nothing about it."          Olin Miller