I found this sickle blade on a walk last year, and it’s been laying around ever since waiting for me to get off of my butt and do something with it.

Seemed like it might be good for some kind of rough trimming, but without a handle was impossible, and pretty dangerous to work with. Finally found a good short handle and put it on:

Being a regular one handed sickle, it didn’t have any curve in it, so I got out a small anvil and ball peen hammer and gave it some curve by hammering the concave side.

After the first hammering, there wasn’t enough curve, so I hammered it some more.

 Here it is on the floor so you can see how much curve was added.

Next I cut some slabs and used the sickle blade to ‘trim’ them. It leaves a very slightly curved depression, rather than a flat cut and I’m hoping this will behave interestingly with the glazes. Also the surface of the clay get somewhat roughed up and showing some texture.

The first slab was trimmed after the first hammering of the sickle blade, the slab below was trimmed after the second hammering. It has slightly more pronounced marks.

I’ll post more pictures of these plates after they dry and I can finish the edges.

Lately, this concept has been popping up in various parts of my life, having been largely set aside since my Karatedo days back in my teens and 20s. The definition below calls it a martial arts term, but I am not so sure that it didn’t originate with some other discipline. Regardless, it is a very useful concept for pottery as well as just about anything else you decide to pursue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuhari

Shu       /    Ha    /     Ri
Protect / Detach / Transcend

The reason for bringing it up today is a combination my own struggle to find ‘my’ work, and a recent email thread in which standards for potters and pots are being proposed and refuted.

As stated previously, I first encountered shuhari in my Karate practice. Later, I found it equally applicable to my bonsai practice, and now ceramics. In all three of these endeavors, however, I’ve found a fundamental difference between the US and Japan, that continues to re-assert itself. (I use these two cultures because they are the only two I have experienced with any depth)

When I first came to Japan for Karate, I was amazed at the basic level of skill compared to my previous dojo and what I’d seen at other dojo(s) in the US (with exceptions). When I studied bonsai, I was amazed at the disconnect in quality between the US and Japan/Italy/Taiwan (with exceptions).  And now, in ceramics I am amazed at the disconnect in the overall level of quality between the US and Japan (with exceptions).

I think that the concept of shuhari is useful in finding the reason for this disconnect. In Karate, it was the lack of concentration on kata and basics. In Bonsai, it was the lack of concentration on basics and traditional forms, in ceramics, it is the lack of concentration on basic skills and traditional forms. (Even the US has a rich ceramic history, even if you don’t go back more than a couple hundred years, so the youth of the country is no excuse, or basis for critique)

The concept of studying the basics seems to be lost on many Americans (notice I say many, not all). When my wife and I joined a pottery class together back in the 90’s, there were so many students who ignored what the teacher said and just did their own thing. Then later they wondered why they couldn’t get a nice pot off of the wheel. They had no interest in the boring cylinder, they wanted to make stuff  ‘their own way’.

I had a conversation with a young guy about his bonsai tree once. He saw some great work of abstract art. I saw a formless curlicue of a tree that had been trimmed so hard it was probably going to die and if it didn’t it would develop wire scars in one season. I explained the various styles of bonsai, forms and basic composition. He didn’t want any of that. “All of that stuff just constrains creativity, I want to do it my way” (I’m paraphrasing) I told him that I thought his tree was crap. (Though I did attempt to be somewhat more diplomatic than that). That was followed by the inevitable “What do you know? What makes you think you can judge me/my work?” As for ceramics, I’m sure everyone has a good quality story, but for me Etsy is a very telling example. Have you ever checked out Etsy? There is some absolutely beautiful work there, stunningly beautiful even, IF you can wade through all of the other crap and find it. And there are mountains of the other stuff. Stuff made by people who didn’t develop skills before deciding to sell to the public. Because setting up on Etsy is so easy and cheap, anyone can sell their work, piles of crud accumulate, and it cheapens the whole experience.

The first part of Shuhari, ‘protect’, means internalizing basic skills encapsulated in tradition. Why do so many people think this is a bad thing? Having this tradition to stand on is a priceless gift. Generations before you have acquired all of this knowledge and passed it on. They have separated the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Heck, they practically baked the bread for you. All you have to do is eat the bread. It’s breathtakingly easy, when compared to spending your life in trial and error, figuring out for yourself what generations before you already knew. One human life is only so long, Less time wasted the better.

Well, I had this great train of thought going, someone knocked on the door, one thing led to another, and it’s a few days later and I can’t remember exactly where I was going with this. So I’m going to wrap it up today at Shu, the level where the student studies to master the basics, without worrying about trying to be original or god forbid ‘creative’. If you haven’t mastered the basics, there’s no way you’re going to be successful at quality, aside from the occasional lucky accident.

Lately there has been an interesting thread on the Clayart email list regarding pot pricing and various methods for calculating prices. It really is a thorny subject, with the factors of locale, appreciation, materials, fuel, time, skill, market, demographic, etc… all playing a part, then further complicated by the potter’s personal subjective views.

One method I did not hear mentioned was the ‘by the load’ method. Once you have figured out all of your costs, you calculate how much you need to make per kiln load, rather than per pot. Say for example you have decided you need to make $5000.00 per load to maintain (or improve on) your lifestyle. Now, calculate how many cubic inches or cm of firing space your kiln contains. If your kiln is 0.3 cubic meters, then that would be just about 330,000 cubic cm of space. Now subtract from this the space taken by shelves and supports, and ample room between pieces for air flow during firing.

Since this is an example, I won’t go into detail, but estimate that after shelves, supports, and air flow space are removed, you end up with roughly a little over half of the original number, let’s say 200,000 cubic cm. This gives you your base number to work from. At $5000 per kiln load, you will get 0.025 dollars per cubic cm.

If you fire a theoretical cup that takes up 10x10x10 cm of space, including the wads, etc… then that cup is 1000 cubic cm, and would be priced at $25.

This is for very simple stuff, but not all things are theoretical cups. There are handles and spouts, carving, complex glazes, lugs, lids, labor intensive production methods, losses during firing, all sorts of things that factor in and modify the base theoretical figure. At the very least you end up with a good base figure to start with.

Put on a handle, that’s extra space in the kiln as well as extra time in production. You could add a modifier of  x1.5 to your base figure, to get a price of $37.50 for your theoretical handled cup. On the other end, if you are making tea caddies for powdered tea, which are possibly the most expensive tea implement for its size, you might add x50 to the base figure. So a tea caddy that is 6x6x10cm, or 360 cm with a base price of $9, would be $450 after the modifier is calculated in. (Don’t feel guilty charging this much, the little bag for the caddy alone will cost you at least $150, and the ivory lid with gold leaf about as much. It’s better to have the customer handle these things.)

Anyway, just one way to do it….

This morning I got my 15 minutes of fame. A reporter for the Nishi Nihon Shinbun did a little blurb on me and my work.

Sorry, no time to translate the thing, but if you read this blog, you pretty much have the story already.

I finally got the pictures from my first tea ceremony. This last April, my tea sensei’s mother, also a tea sensei, had her 25th annual Hanamizuki Chakai. Hanamizuki is Dogwood in English. Apparently, after the gift of cherry trees (the ones along the Potomac, I think) by Japan to the US, the US gave a gift of Dogwood trees to Japan. Ogura sensei really likes them, and donates the proceeds of every year’s Hanamizuki Chakai to planting and maintaining Dogwood trees around Saga.

Anyway, this year they allowed me to make tea at the outdoor tea setting, or temaeza. Here it is pictured from the shade of the guest seating. One of Ogura sensei’s high school students is performing the ceremony. It was a beautiful spring day, not too hot, but the sun was bright, and my white hairless pate turned pink pretty quick.

I was quite nervous and not so enthusiastic when they told me I’d go first that day, but felt better when they said that going first early in the day, there are fewer guests to watch you sweat, so I felt better about going early.

Silly me. Here was the first guest of the day:

 This is Minister (Soumu Daijin) Haraguchi, roughly equivalent in the US to the Secretary of State. What you can’t see in all the pictures are the bodyguards hovering about. One of them was over my shoulder watching me make the tea, I guess to make sure I didn’t put anything funny in it.
He was kind enough to sit by me for a photo.

My teacher, Kawakami Sensei is next to me, and her mother, Ogura Sensei is standing in the rear.
In the pics below you can see the implements. The mizusashi is a collapsed large jar that collapsed uniformly inward. Not so acceptable for a large jar, but easy to make it into a ‘found’ water jar for ocha. This day we used a palm frond as a lid. The lady sitting behind me is Tanaka san, another potter in Taku who just happened to be a student of Ogura sensei. Very nice lady, and a good potter. Though she might not want me to tell, she is one who made the collapsed jar. Don’t tell anybody…

Below is the temaeza that was set up indoors for guests. The mizusashi looks like Hagi Shiro (Hagi white), with a Shinsha teabowl (copper red) A bit more formal…  Kawakami sensei is performing the ceremony with Ogura sensei looking on.

It was a great event and lots of people came to participate and help out. Lots of work and lots of fun.

From the back/tea room:

I took this the 3rd day, and the center table is looking rather disheveled, the yakishime teabowl, second from the right in the picture where they are all in a line, was the one teabowl that sold. The next one that got picked up and asked about the most was the tall tsutsu teabowl directly above.