THE FORTH

Hope everyone is enjoying another wonderful Forth Of July including our friends the Brits, after all breaking up is always hard to do. In the spirit of the Forth with fireworks, family, picinics and BBQs what could be more essential then hotdogs and mustard?

EGARATSU

With the perfect pigment and brush and a well practiced hand, the decoration on this Egaratsu chawan seems tailor made for this pot, creating motion and both accentuating the horizontal natural of the form and adding wispy hints to allude to the vertical. Made by Maruta Munehiko (b.1961) this chawan sums up what Egaratsu is about with this pot easily identifiable as that style. Maruta grew up around clay as his father, Maruta Masami was a famous folk potter before going on to study with Hamada Atsuya, third son of Hamada Shoji before returning home to Karatsu to set up his own studio. Using a number of local clays and in various Karatsu styles, Maruta create a rich and diverse array of pottery of which the Egaratsu is among my favorite. Even in a field, crowded by a number of potters and pots it would be hard to just walk by this bowl without having the feeling that it needs to be picked up and brought home with all due haste.

"In the brush doing what its doing, it will stumbles on what one couldn't do by oneself."  Robert Motherwell

HAIYU

Illustrated is a rather simple form with a lurid, almost lyrical incised decoration running around the piece creating a sense of perpetual motion. The pot was glazed in a rich Mashiko ash glaze (haiyu) and then was wood fired by the potter, Matsuzaki Ken with the results being framed in ash over ash making for a rather rustic chawan. The incised decoration has filled with the glaze and natural ash from the firing to fill the channels and present a rich and dark decoration which moves freely about the pot. This combination makes for a wonderful blend of the formal and the common while adding to the tactile experience the piece has to offer. It never ceases to amaze me that the confluence of a lump of clay, a simple wood tool and a few materials mixed with water can combine to create such a pleasant vessel with just the slight help of a good potter.

CROSS CULTURAL

Years ago I saw this Paleo-Indian stone axe at the Natural History Museum and I was struck by the form and it almost sculptural elements. The form was conical and about 2/3 of the way down the form was this highly polished channel that ran around the axe where the handle was secured and though I didn't know it at the time, the form and particularly the indented area was to have a large influence on my making pots. Starting some time in the early 90's I began making this serving bowls and bowls of all type with a rounded profile interrupted by a concave channel running around the bowl and for the serving pieces I applied small handles that went over the indents to echoes the overall roundness of the forms. The teabowl pictured is one of those typical forms where the fullness of the form is broken with the recessed channel which serves to visually break up the surface as well as to play in to various glaze activities, with runny glazes benefiting the most. The ash glaze over the temmoku is made from ash that I got from my sister-in-law and once screened but not washed, this is the end result. As anyone who works with ash can tell you, each and every batch yields varying properties and results depending on the source and combination of woods not to mention contaminants that went into the general mixture. I tend to test each batch of ash that I receive for any unsatisfactory anomalies but quite frankly it is the constant diversity that I find quite pleasing and it allows a single glaze combination to morph from time to time and create a new look with each new batch.

志野茶碗

Looking like a thin, fresh coating of snow allowing the earth to peek through, this Shino chawan  paints a elegant picture in tones of pure white, rich iron red and fiery orange on a buff  mogusa clay. Made by long time veteran and rennaissance potter, Kishimoto Kennin, this chawan has all the tell tale signs of his work from strong and purposeful form, well addressed lip and kodai to a glaze that is a blend of the Momoyama ideal with elements of his modernism. The milky quality of the Shino glaze with areas that allow the iron painted underglaze to show through remind me of simple Momoyama ink painting (suiboku-ga) and grab my attention while the tapered form with the inward curve at the lip asks to be picked up and handled a bit. Among all pottery it is this intimate connection that makes the chawan so appealing and though I certainly appreciate large pots and sculptural ceramics, is there anything more elemental than the feel of a good bowl in the hand?

GAME PLAN

Most times I have a good solid game plan for what I am doing in the studio; throwing, tooling, glazing, test making or packing up orders, it is all part of each cycle. Though it is good to have a plan I do leave room for just doing something that springs to mind but I rarely sit at the wheel without knowing what I am going to make or at least attempt. If you have read or watched DUNE there is the semi-cheesy line, "fear is the mind killer" to me sitting at the wheel has the same sensibility, an unscripted project usually leads to disaster. I am certainly not saying this is the case for everyone, what I am saying is that looking back over a long period of throwing nearly ever incidence of just sitting and throwing has lead to either undefined or ambiguous forms or pots that either don't make it to the bisque or meet the hammer down the road, in the end it is all about the preparation. I have seen potters just sit at the wheel and create magic as a spontaneous act but that just doesn't work for me. I come in to the studio with a little slip of "to do(s)" and I am off to the races.

"You hit home runs not by chance but by preparation." Roger Maris (1934-1985)

VIRIDITATEM

I put together a short video slideshow of a Ko-Iga style chawan by Kojima Kenji that a fellow collector sent my way and that is currently up on my Trocadero marketplace. It is a large and very pleasing piece that was thrown, tooled and fired with little manipulation or alterations to the bowl from wet to hardened clay. I like a bowl that maintains the freshness and directness from the wheel head and this particular pot has captured that essence. Enjoy and let me know what you think.

You can see more of this chawan over at my Trocadero marketplace;
http://www.trocadero.com/stores/albedo3studio/items/1334852/item1334852store.html

C+S = H

I know there is a tendency to want decorated pots by Hamada Shoji, especially those with sugar cane motifs or wispy and casual overglaze enamels but over the years I have seen a number of unadorned pieces that have as much or more to say with so much less. I came across this pot recently and was struck by the utter elemental grace of the bowl. The slight undulation of the form is echoed in the lip and waisted line filled to the brim with deep brown ameyu amber spilling over the cut line to flow freely down the face of the chawan and mirrored again in the edge of the kodai. It will sound cliché but only a master could make a bowl in such an unconscious, nonchalant manner  with a less is more approach and end up with a chawan that can communicate across cultures and time. In a thousand years people will look back at pots just like this, free of clutter and the superfluous elements of virtuosity and reason that clarity plus simplicity equals Hamada Shoji.

KUMO

I made a short video slideshow of another Shino chawan by Sakai Kobu. Glazed in a nice array of colors, the bowl is bisected by a waspy, drifting area of pure white like a rolling cloud bank drifting in front of a dark mountain range. Sakai well known for his patented "Sakai Shino" has a wonderful gift for creating chawan (and other pots) that have the sense of having been painted as much as they have been glazed and this kumo, cloud chawan is a good example of just that.

"a good omen
in the west, deep red
billowing clouds"  Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828)

MASHIKO, OHIO

It may come as no surprise that I am a bit restless when it comes to making pottery. Though I work in disciplined cycles and often use pre-existing designs, forms and glazes, I find that I like to try to make something new happen with each firing. This is the ongoing challenge that pushes me, hence the on going testing and working out of new forms, surfaces and decoration that ultimately keeps me from getting bored. I have been making plates and tray forms off of hump molds since all the way back to Cleveland State, the original genesis had a lot to do with the molded wares of Hamada Shoji but truth be told, I owe quite a bit to the Schneiders at CSU, the Mashiko/Ohio connection. Though the perspective is a bit skewed, this plate form is mostly square with a new-ish plant design in the center and in each of the four borders which I am referring to as the scimitar grass. I first used this design last fall carving through black slip on white porcelain to good effect and have now added the design to terra cotta as well as on stoneware and porcelain using wax resist, etched and inlaid designs. As you can see, I rough sketch the design out using ink prior to carving and then wait until the pot is just right to carve and this is the result, now waiting to dry, bique and glaze fire.