121. Modernist, wood-fired, Shino-glazed chawan, ca. 1960s

 121. Modernist, wood-fired, Shino-glazed chawan, ca. 1960s

 

 

 

This was part of the estate of the late Carole Armstrong, an American potter who studied in Japan in the early 1960s. According to her family, she studied under a living national treasure but they were unable to supply the teacher’s name to the proprietor of the shop that bought Armstrong’s pottery collection for resale. The absence of any identifying marks on the piece likely indicates that it was made by Armstrong herself or a fellow student or worker at her teacher’s studio.

Gray clay, Shino glaze with significant carbon capture, resulting in gray, red, and black colors; base of ring foot left unglazed. Weight: 198 g (7 oz). Rim dimensions: 10.2–10.5 cm (4.0-4-1/4 in). foot ring diameter: 5.3 cm (2-1/8 in). Height: 7.6 cm (3 in).

This sits on the base of the foot ring. The foot ring is approximately 0.6 cm (1/4 in) on the outside; the inside has been hollowed out to about a quarter of that distance. The walls rise from the foot ring in a shallow convex arc to the rim. The shape of the bowl has been much distorted; it is a rough oval, and the rim is very irregular. Strips of clay were randomly affixed to the external walls. Several lines were scratched into the surface with a thin, needle-like tool. A tool with a thicker end was used to incise two squares with a handle-like object extending from the bottom of each. Two circles were impressed in the exterior walls using a tool with a hollow circular end. The surface of the pot was left quite bumpy.

The interior and exterior, with the exception of the base of the foot ring were covered with a Shino glaze, which was allowed to form thicker drip lines in several places. This was wood-fired, and there was significant carbon capture by the glaze during the firing, so much so that what would ordinarily be the white Shino color was colored gray. There are several places, particularly the edges of the square shapes and the circles, that show up as black from the carbon deposits. This exhibits less of the red “scorching” typical of the Shino glaze; here it is a more muted background haze under the gray. Nor does the surface exhibit many of the pinholes characteristic of this glaze.

Like item 120, this was labeled a “chawan” (teabowl), and it shares many of the qualities of that pot. To my mind, it isn’t quite as successful as that piece; it is less eccentric and doesn’t have the impact of that bowl.

Purchased in July 2012 from Ver Sacrum Studio.