Ok, so I hadn’t set out to make invisible seated monks, but what I had been working at failed to materialize, and in trying to salvage it, I ended up with these little guys. The first one on the left was a mistake, the rest were sort of on purpose.
What these turned into, at least in my mind, are flower vases. They can stand as is, or with a ring installed, could be hung on the wall. Also, they can be made in various sizes from very small to very large (IT buzzword “scalable”), and will be easy to fire because they stand up by themselves.
I’m kind of interested to see what those cracks will do in the firing.
Every once in a while, I find myself flipping through some of my old pueblo pottery books and without fail I end up obsessing on this one geometric design motif. I’m not sure what it is supposed to be, but for me it is lightning. I don’t know why, but I really like it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fit into the Karatsu tradition all that easily. However, starting today I decided to start doodling with this motif until I come up with something suitable to work into my pots.
This last trip to Korea gave me a lot to think about regarding carving and inlay. There were a couple of boxes I’d made a few days back, and these are going to be experiments with inlay and aforementioned motif. The carving is not great, but it’s a start. The way that the slip fills in the rough cuts to create soft curves is very interesting to me, and the feeling of scraping away the surface of the piece to reveal the inlay design is surprisingly satisfying. Since the claybody on these boxes is porcelain, the normally white slip has some benigara (RIO) mixed in to make it red.
This box will probably get fired in a saggar with charcoal and a feldspar/soda ash glaze. Will post pics of the finished piece if it makes it through the firing, and it is not too embarrassing.
Detail of Acoma pot featuring my favorite motif.
Lightning on top, rain down the sides
The fit of the two parts. Perhaps a pin will go in one side to lock the other direction.
I just got back from a fantastic trip to Korea. Spent one week at the Gangjin Celadon Festival as a guest artist, and got to attend several really great workshops by very talented potters. There were 15 guest artists in attendance from Australia, Israel, Germany, Sweden, the US, and Japan. A really fun bunch.
Workshops were conducted by 3 contemporary ceramic artists, one teabowl artist, one traditional Onggi potter, and one contemporary Onggi potter. I took many hours of video, and will post them to the video page at karatsupots.com once they are edited down.
I did get a few still pictures with my phone camera:
Contemporary interpretation of a traditional Korean chimney. This is the base section.
The chimney turned out to be about 170cm tall, and only took about an hour to make.
Decorative lugs and a turtle
This is a three tiered pagoda with a little room and a person sitting. About 130cm
A woman sitting in the room. He whipped up that little woman in just a couple of minutes with just a ball of clay and his fingers.
Today, in spite of the typhoon passing by us, 3 of us potters decided to go out to a construction site that we previously scouted, and collect some great feldspathic sand. The whole mountainside is sandstone and the construction process has done a good job of crushing great amounts of the stuff, with trucks, back hoes, tractors, and the like. Then, when it rains, the fines travel down the hill and collect in the gutters and sumps making it easy to collect lots of fine sand which does not need to be processed further in the stamp mill.
Today everything was damp, so pretty heavy, but having cloud cover was great and we hardly broke a sweat. Sunny days here in the summer can be quite unbearable. We got at total of 38 bags of sand, and I brought home about 600kg.
Now that the mountain has been worked over pretty good by the construction company, places to collect sand have decreased, and the whitest sand (less iron contamination) is no longer available. We did get about 7 bags of the white stuff, with the rest more reddish/brown. I also found one nodule of iron (called ‘oni-ita’) in a sandstone boulder and dug it out to make underglaze pigment with.
This sand is great for adding to your clay, really gives it some character and helps it to mature at a lower temp, while preventing slumping. You can mix in up to 50% or more sand into the clay depending on what you are making, and the finest of the sand can be wedged up all by itself and made into smaller guinomi and chawan sized items.
Here you can see the sand. The finest stuff on top is basically clay and you can make pots with it.
This is the roadside gutter, the road isn’t there yet. The sand that has collected here is very fine. Oh, and we had to wear hard hats per site rules.
You can still see what the mountain looks like in the higher terrace which hasn’t been covered yet. Sandstone ranging from white to red.
This last weekend we had the show in Karatsu. It was a 3 day weekend, so we did Sat, Sun, Mon. Well, if you are thinking about having a show on a 3 day weekend, let me give you a little advice: don’t. Everyone goes somewhere else. The first two days were absolutely empty, and it was only the during the last day that I was able to make some good sales. Thanks to guests from Osaka, Kyoto, and Chiba. I guess they were using the 3 day weekend to get out of their respective areas as well.
Well, lesson learned. Overall, it was still a very enjoyable experience, with lots of time to sit and chat with friends over tea. The highlight of the show was without a doubt, the shiboridashi teapot with the river crab knob. It is a pure silver crab holding a ruby in his right claw.
Chosen Karatsu Hoso Mizusashi (water jar) w/ lacquer lid. This guy sold.
Sometimes it is nice to change the pace a little, and kick the dust off of the woodworking tools. Usually, this involves making lids for pots.
Some of the nice lacquerware lids you see out there can be quite expensive, especially the ones that are custom made to fit a piece. In my price strata, that usually results in my work doubling in price, because the lid costs so much in relation to the price of the pot. This makes it tough to sell them. For a big name potter, that same lid may be only 1/20th the price of the pot, so it doesn’t influence the selling price all that much.
As a way around the lacquer lids, I started doing things in natural wood on my lathe at home. As a sub for ivory tea caddy lids, I use small pieces of exotic hardwood, or sometimes tagua nut, which is an ethical ivory substitute.
Here are some simple lids I made for the upcoming show. They are fairly ‘quick and simple’, in that I don’t want to spend more than an hour on any one of them, to keep my costs down. I want to have something that looks nice on the pot without contributing to the price. People looking at them can get an impression of how the finished/lidded pot looks, and they may like the lid, or replace it with a lacquer lid later on.
I am not a very good lathe worker, and still end up scraping most of that waste off, rather than a skilled lathe artist who would slice it off, thus avoiding a lot of sanding later. I do it this way because by scraping it is much less likely that there will be a catch, ruining the piece. After finishing the shaping and sanding, the cedar lids get burned and brushed, then oiled. Other hardware lids just get oiled after sanding.
Here they are (remember, clicking on a small image brings up the big image):
Chosengaratsu jar with Teak lid/Ebony knob. approx. 40cm tall
Emadaragaratsu water jar with burned cedar lid. H20cm
Chosengaratsu water jar with burned cedar lid. H20cm
