KAKUREZAKI RYUICHI

There has been much written about Kakurezaki Ryuichi (b. 1950), so I will skip most of the details. He studied with Isezaki Jun, current Juyo Mukei Bunkazai for Bizen-yaki and set off to establish his own kiln in 1985. Many consider this move to have ushered in what is now referred to as Heisei Bizen (the Heisei era started in 1989). Though Kakurezaki’s pottery is decidedly Bizen in tradition, style and firing, his works are unlike any other Bizen potter. His works challenge the concepts of classical and traditional form and it is really not easy to put Kakurezaki’s work within the Bizen tradition.

By looking at this chawan, it would seem that Kakurezaki has an intuitive geometrical formula running through his being. Many of his forms, this chawan included, shows a wonderful sense of proportion and planes and angles that work so well with how he fires his kiln. His works play with visual geometry and challenge the concepts of classical and traditional form. When you combine his constructed vocabulary with his unique approach to firing, it is easy to see why his works can easily be picked out of a crowd.

The illustrated chawan is an excellent example of his intense and successful firing technique together with his broad planes that are accentuated by the running ash. The kodai is cleverly cut to address the issue of geometry and in this case, mimics the form of the bowl. No matter how you look at it, this is a cutting edge and dynamic chawan.

BEFORE & AFTER

In the continued effort to become a multi-media conglomerate under the I,POTTER Ltd umbrella, I shot this short video a couple weeks back while throwing a few teabowls and other smalls for the last firing. In the video, I am throwing a take-gata form teabowl off the hump.


As for the way I throw, I am a natural left hander, despite 12 years of parochial school dis-education. Despite being a left hander, which I use for writing and eating, nearly everything else is done with my right hand from using a hammer to throwing a football. I have Sister Paulette to thank for this quirk. Long before I started to make pots, any potter I had seen was right handed, so when I started throwing, everyone around was also right handed, so the technique I picked up was a mixture of predominantly right handed throwing with some left handed tendencies thrown in. This may explain why I throw the way I do.


The teabowl thrown in the video is also illustrated in its finished state. The bowl was stamped while still wet and then later glazed in my temmoku and tetsu partridge feather glaze.

IRON IN THE FIRE

I fired the BK, my big kiln last week and this is my second firing with my new partridge feather glaze(PF) on some of the pots. As I was waiting on the pots to dry and bisque, I was reminded of comments made by Tsukigata Nahiko about controlling the iron as a means to controlling a glaze surface. This got me thinking and I altered the PF glaze a bit as well as using it just a bit thinner.

Against all sane judgment, I used the new batch of glaze on a group of pots and the results were fairly different than the original PF surface. Though related, the second version shows a remarkable amount of iron variations in the running/streaking as well showing a large number of what appear to be red iron and pyrite specks across the surface. I am wondering if I can control these by trying to slow down the cooling. I guess one thing leads to another………

IPTV; KOIE RYOJI THROWING A SLAB

A while back I posted about a thrown slab technique, I learned from a demo by Koie Ryoji. My plates were a group of 5 Oribe small footed plates that were thrown on the wheel and cut to 5 equal parts. In looking around, I found a video of Koie demonstrating that technique at the V&A in England and thought to share it. It really is a versatile technique and the potential and possibilities are limitless.



(Many thanks to the original poster of this video.)

PROPRIETARY TECHNOLOGY

Since I started making pottery, I have always been curious about how potters feel about sharing their formulas. Some potters share freely and most generously, others a bit begrudgingly so and certainly others not at all. I have always been fairly generous with glaze and clay recipes, though there are always some I hold back. Over the years, I have developed 15 to 20 glazes that I consider my own from start to finish. They didn’t originate from known formulas or are so far removed from the origin, that I consider them originals. These are the formulas I am most “secretive” with, though I have probably shared more than half of these with friends or have traded them away for other interesting glazes.

A few years back there was this novice potter who hounded me on a regular basis to share with her a glaze and firing technique I was using. The glaze was a really pretty candy apple red glaze that I was actually fine tuning and trying to figure out how best to use it. In time, I relented in my very own and peculiar way. I asked her if she would like me to throw the pots, decorate them, bisque and glaze them and then call her to come over and sign them, “Okay” she said. I was dumb-founded.

Not too long ago, I was working in a friend’s studio. I had brought a handful of porcelain teabowls and some stoneware covered jars and a few teapots. Bringing these, I sort of wrote them off as I would be using her glazes, though I brought my best black glaze, BBV3-92, which has a tendency to oilspot over some glazes. Before I started glazing, she told me she was going to fire for an almost entirely red glazes kiln. I figured in for a penny, in for a pound and decided I would glaze in the one of the red glazes and my black glaze. During the middle of the firing, she was called into work and asks if I can finish firing the kiln. “No problem” says I and I proceed to reduce the bejezzus out of the 80cft down draft.

I show up a week or so later and I see my pots on the table and they came out rather nice. I asked her for the “red” formula and she just smirked, went over to her notes, wrote down the formula and then, picking up a large black magic marker, redacted the materials, leaving only the percentages. I asked her if she worked for the CIA and another smirk, I take the formula to the window and there you can see the entire formula, much to her chagrin. In return, she asked for my black glaze formula, again, “No problem”. I mailed it to her the next day, properly redacted; sure she would not be able to read the materials, just the percentages. Later on, way later on, I sent her the formula.

Illustrated is a porcelain teabowl glazed in the Chun Red and my BBV3-93 and a closeup of the same glaze combo on a stoneware teapot.

AN ENSO CHAWAN

Illustrated is a dramatic Hagi chawan with an eccentric enso painted on the front. The vivid Hagi keshiki makes a wonderful ground for the elliptical format enso painted by Buddhist priest Shimizu Kosho (1911-1999). The chawan was made by legendary Hagi potter, Tahara Tobei XII (1925-1991) who has left an exceptional body of work, this certainly being a highlight.

Shimizu Kosho was prolific and diverse artist, known for his wonderful calligraphies and paintings; he also made sculpture in various medium and painted on a large number of pottery, many made by master potters of the day as in this example. Shimizu was for a short while the abbot of the Todai-ji in Nara (1975-1981). This chawan is a typical and masterful collaboration between two artists who have transcended their art and materials. The dark enso against the multi-toned Hagi glaze makes for a lyrical and majestic piece.

RUNNY PROSPECTS

I really like the period of time after I develop a new glaze to work with that fits my visual interests and the forms I am working with. It starts out slow, I test the glaze by itself and with other glazes from pod, to yunomi to teabowl and on to larger pieces. As I get feedback from the firings, I adjust the glaze and decide what works and what doesn’t and keep as many notes as possible together with digital images.

For the partridge feather glaze, since it is fairly refractory on its own, the best combination so far is over the temmoku glaze, though it is interesting over an oatmeal matt, a clear glaze and an amber glaze as well. I have been playing with varying thicknesses of the glaze and am finding that I can alter the length of the feathering depending on how thick the glaze is applied. Recently, I have tried applying the glaze fairly thin over wax resisted patterns and am finding that, that makes for an interesting surface as well.

The illustrated bowl was from my last firing a couple of weeks ago and shows the thinned version of the glaze and the pattern on a teabowl. I have been throwing towards another glaze firing and will hopefully bisque by the middle of next week. The pieces were thrown to try out more pieces in the temmoku and partridge feather combo along with some other glazes. There are several pieces thrown specifically as tests for these glazes and I am looking forward to the result. I always like this period of time, it almost makes you think the possibilities are nearly endless.

IPTV; KOHYAMA & MENTORI

Here is a rather short, but interesting video of Kohyama Yasuhisa faceting (mentori) one of his “wind“ (kaze) objects in his Iori-gama studio near Shigaraki. As you can see, he is rather well versed at doing this, his cuts are intuitive and direct. The outcome is wonderful and creates a great keshiki after they are fired.

(This video is not of the highest quality as it was converted from VHS video to a digital video file by me. It was originally taken in the spring of 1993 while I was working with Kohyama-sensei.)

TRADITION

“Respect old things. Experience those old things. But take the old outer shell away and create something new from it. This is the nature of ‘traditions’.”

Kato Takuo

A SHADOW SET

I was in the midst of making pieces for a special order when I was finishing my tests with the new partridge feather glaze. As the set was not even bisqued yet, the customer asked if I could use the new glaze on the pieces instead of my haiyu glaze. As a common practice, I sometimes make a “shadow set” of an order and that is what I did for this set. I made two mizusashi and two chawan. Once they were fired I let the client know they could have their pick of the pieces and I would sell the other set.

This set of “matched” chawan and mizusashi are based on the same form with impressed decoration and are glazed in a temmoku glaze with the partridge glaze over. I made two lids for the mizusashi to create two varying looks, one just temmoku and the other temmoku and the with partridge feather accents. Both pieces exhibit a fluid running pattern with varying golden, copper and iron tones about the surface. The impressed marks seem to have run more than the rest of the surface and are nice focal points that break up the surface. The set was intended to have a 50’s kind of visage and looking at them now, I think they hit the mark.

More pictures of the set can be seen on my Trocadero marketplace;
http://www.trocadero.com/albedo3studio/items/1058476/item1058476store.html#item