It’s been a while since I’d tried doing some coil and paddle vases, mostly because the last couple of times have been pretty disastrous with regards to design. For some reason the balance in vases gives me fits. Sometimes one really clicks but it seems to be more of a fluke than anything else.

One thing that helps with vases and other vessels with lugs is if I think of the lugs as arms, such as the arms hanging off of humans, giving various expressions with their varied positions. The Japanese word for these is ‘mimi’ or ears. That doesn’t do it for me, or maybe I’ve just not met enough people with unique and expressive ears.

I started with a couple of taller forms, the first more formal, and squared off, resembles one of my teacher’s pieces. For the second one, I flipped through an old Nakazato Shigetoshi exhibition catalog, and tried mimicking one of his. He makes the most wonderful vases, very rounded and soft, and wilted looking (in a good way). I wasn’t thrilled with the arms on this one (the left), somehow it looks like it’s scolding the viewer, not to mention being a little too ‘muscular’. The glaze usually soften things up quite a bit, it’ll be interesting to see how this one changes.

It occurred to me that these two were a little tall, so I tried a few more like the one on the left, except with the middle section removed, and without the bottom treatment.

I was much happier with these, there seems to be a sort of cute stubbiness to them. Turning over and rolling the rim gives it a soft look, and collaring it in resulted in the undulations that don’t end up looking as contrived as they do when I alter the rim by hand as I usually do. Tried the arms in three positions, perhaps the center is my favorite. All of these are about 23cm tall. The first two are probably closer to 35cm.