Today I want to talk about ceramics a little more in depth than the basic step by step instructions I gave in the very first post on this blog. I studied under 2 master potters, and while I don't consider myself a master, I am quite capable of making anything within the two limiters of my imagination and the laws of physics. There is a major difference between me and the people I studied under. One of them was trained in Europe, the other in China. But I've always had a stylistic approach which differs from the perfect lines and perfect glazes they used. I'm inspired mostly by primitive pottery and the work of Kanzaki Shiho. My pottery has a wabisabi aesthetic. Beauty from imperfection. It's not that I can't make it perfect. But rarity is also beautiful, and you can buy perfect pottery made in a factory these days. The imperfections make it rare as they are the tell-tale signs that it was made by hand. I'm not saying to make mistakes that would reduce its usability, I'm saying to deliberately make it unusual.
There are ways to have a stone-like broken appearance on just the outside: by applying slip containing crushed roasted shells.
There are ways to make ashes build up in certain places and make a dappled glaze: by mixing wood ashes and slip 1:1 and applying it, then dusting it while wet with dry ashes.
If you lean wood shavings up against an unglazed pot in the kiln, it will darken that area, and the edges of the dark area will have a wide range of colors.
There is also making agateware. Agateware, as the name implies, looks like agate stone. It has random patterns in the surface. You make it by mixing 2 colors of clay together, and making your pottery, then at leather hard you trim the outer layer off to show the pattern.
This bowl is one of my works in the agateware medium. It is not neat and orderly. It is random. Funny story about agateware, I actually developed it independently without fore-knowledge of it. After I made a few things out of it, my teacher pulled me aside and showed me a book with the same thing. I was shocked. I had actually gone a month thinking that I was the first person to do it. I had been calling it grand canyon ware because the multi-colored rock layers were my inspiration. We all had a good laugh about it. This probably happens every time artists of the same medium are inspired by the same thing.
I forgot one thing that I learned recently. If you carve a pot when it is leather hard, brush over it with different iron content slip, wait for it to become less wet, scrape off the extra so the slip is flush with the rest of the pot, then give it a clear or semi-clear iron reactive glaze (celadon for example), the color variation will appear in the glaze.
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