WHAT'S THE HOLD UP

What’s the hold up, well the last two days were crazy days with workman here and then waiting on them to return, what should have taken a couple of hours became two days in a blink of an eye. To that end, pictured are the last holdouts, the last three pieces needed to fill the kiln and get on with the glaze firing. Though the two ring jars look glazed the same, they are not, one will be my saffron glaze with black iron accents, a total of three glazes, the other is Kuro-Oribe, three glazes and two washes in total. The bowl on the banding wheel is soda blue over combed slip with some accents that should show up nicely one fired, fingers crossed. The real slow going for a lot of my glazing is needing to wait a day after putting on the first base glaze, as you can imagine adding a day with a service interruption just adds more time and with me sort of dispossessed from my studio space and material to even carry out my list of glaze tests has dragged this firing off longer than expected. With any luck the weather will now cooperate and the temperatures steering clear of the 90s and I can get this fired and an order out the door.

Classic, medieval Ko-Iga style hanaire vase form by veteran potter, Kojima Kenji. Clearly based on some Iga archetype this sturdy vase was thrown and slightly manipulated to give the form a nice sense of gesture before adding thick and purposeful lugs and adding marks across the surface to further define the landscape of the piece. The front, entire shoulder and mouth are covered in ash from a dark ominous area where the vase sat in a charcoal bed to the green opaque glass that creates a distinct landscape reminiscent of medieval pottery masking its actual age. This was made and fired to recapture the feudal appearance of Ko-Iga ware at which it has clearly succeeded.  You can see more of this pot over on my Trocadero marketplace; 

https://www.trocadero.com/stores/albedo3studio/items/1506348/MEDIEVAL-KO-IGA-HANAIRE-BY-KOJIMA-KENJI-KK-MKIH9 

The FOURTH

Happy Fourth of July to all, cherish all of your freedoms, from the simplest to those that make us who we are.

CANNOLI COUNTRY

My wife was on a business trip recently which brought her smack-dab in the heart of cannoli country so she made her way to one of our favorite North-Eastern bakeries. Situated near Madison, CT is home of the cannoli truck and Meriano’s Bakery and no visit to the area is complete without bringing home at least a few special indulgences. Illustrated is the perfect ration of goodies, two chocolate covered cannoli with traditional filling along with a flakey and tasty lobster tails also with the standard cannoli filling and to finish things off two very rich and rewarding strawberry and cheese croissants. The group is displayed nicely on one of my terra cotta black and white slipped plates, roughly 14” across. No sooner are the pastries gone than I am already plotting another excuse to be in the area of Meriano’s, where the flavor never wanes and in fact I think may be better each and every visit.

QUICK REVISIT

This is just a quick revisit, a fly-by of a recent Seiji guinomi by Ono Kotaro. It is likely just me but this photo shows off the lines, furrows, curves and shadows that defines this little pot, crafted and conceived through years of experience and practice. It took me some time but I have learned there is as many ways to look at a pot as there are pots or maybe even stars in the sky.

BROWN

I made this short video slideshow a number of years ago of a rather large, over 16” tall sake bottle by Ningen Kokuho, Fujiwara Kei. This video shows off a rich array of details that all come together to make for a rather intriguing and memorable (brown) Bizen pot. Enjoy the slideshow. 

HOPE & TESTING II

Every now and again I will throw a group of small footed bowls or cups for anticipated testing and this is just such a piece, no frills, bells or whistle rather singularly about seeing results. I keep trying to figure out what to do with my Hagi white glaze that on its own is a bit lackluster. I was a bit surprised by the sheer amount of color saturation that I got with the simple addition of a black glaze composed of manganese dioxide, iron oxide and cobalt, the glaze just melted into the surface and more or less maintained the decoration which I figured would just melt into an unrecognizable mess. I guess the bigger question now is will this continue to work and where do I go from here though I suspect the next surface may be horizontal and a bit less vertical. We will see and yet I am always mindful of my testing and glazing strategy; “Sperare optima, Parare pessimal, Expectare inexpectata”

CREATIVE BLEND

Emerging from the shadows, the skin of this lobed melon style Oribe vase highlighted by our Sun clearly shows off the clay texture and marks of the pottery without even a hint of ambiguity. This Oribe pot was made by Tsukamoto Haruhiko who I have written about before and like in previous examples, his works are a creative blend of whimsy, volume, form, surface and exploration. There is volume and movement at play where the form is animated, alive and filled with gesture and playfulness based on centuries of Oribe archetypes where those features are sought after and hard won by generation after generation in pursuit of the tradition. Though not terribly large in scale, the fullness of the form partially narrated by the marks of the potter are concluded with a casual and free-spirited neck and mouth that serve as a perfect conclusion to the piece where scale is relative. Tsukamoto has managed to pull together a wide array of features, details, form and surface to create a perfect addition to the Oribe tradition where I am constantly reminded, it isn’t always easy being green.

ALL THAT JAZZ

So, I am rather sure that this will not be what everyone sees in this pot but when I first saw this Oribe vase, it reminded me of a scene of the Bob Fosse story, ALL THAT JAZZ. The posture and attitude of this hanaire by Sone Yoshiyuki has that vibe of confidence and surety wrapped up in a form casually thrown and then skillfully manipulated, marked and slightly beaten before it had lugs slapped to either side of the vase adding a bit of definition to the pot. As you can see the rough, almost torn throwing marks, caused likely by a piece of rough wood or a rib has filled with the Oribe glaze making for a real sense of rhythm circumnavigating the form while the area on the face that looks to have been pushed in just a bit with long vertical marks has a pale, amber hue contrasting rather poetically against the deep green. Though I suspect all of these considerations, marks and alterations happened in mere minutes, it is the practiced hand of years, even decades of work that make for the rather casual and spontaneous appearance that creates such a simple and often duplicated vessel. What I see in this vase is a vocabulary of the old tradition of Oribe, ushered in by Furuta Oribe intermingled with that modern touch which Sone Yoshiyuki has plied to the clay, glazing and firing of his highly individual work. 

WAY BACK WHEN

On a recent phone conversation, a fellow collector was talking about Matsuzaki Ken and his Yohen-Shino at which point I mentioned that way back when I had done a fair amount of experimenting and had also come up with a Yohen Shino glaze back in the very early 90s while working at Cleveland State University. In point of fact, after coming back from seeing a group of majolica and faience pots I decided I wanted to create a luster Shino and started making up  tests in Jan 1992 and by Feb 1992 I had hit upon my first successful glaze surface, ST212/2/92y (Shino test #212, 2/92) that you can see illustrated in the pictures of a teabowl from the first large batch of this group of Yohen-Shino. Having taken some cues from Alan Caiger Smith I was able to, firing in a rather healthy reduction atmosphere to create a surface that had a rather lustrous, iridescent surface which was the first time I had ever seen this effect on contemporary pottery*.      

To be clear, I am not saying I invented this but rather I had never physically encountered it before nor had I seen it any magazine or publication (this did pre-date the internet by quite a few years). What I can say about this surface is that I did not decide to carry out this testing based on something I had seen but rather something else, arts and crafts pottery and reduction lusters on majolica triggered this whole line of inquiry. Before I seemed to move on from this technique, I had also started firing small pieces in saggers that had pulverized charcoal and sometimes oxides mixed in and spread around the base of the enclosures to further effect the surface. Honestly like much of my testing over the years this was highly enjoyable having an idea and being able to put it into practice and reality to make this wonky "new" Shino come to life. 

(*As sure as the earth spins around the Sun,  am sure that someone out there is going to pre-date my testing and use of this glaze)