Hey, it’s photographing things on the dining-room table day! Actually, no joke, I have the perfect table for this–it’s a Hans Wegner table I lucked into (though the cross-bars at each end bark my shins with regularity, which is like, who designs a table with bars at shin-height? Hans Wegner is who…) and it’s reaaaaaaally long when you pull out the end-leaves, and the natural light in my dining room is so good most of the day that my friend Nicole uses it to photograph her artwork. Sorry–just thought I should introduce you to member of this household who appears in more photos on this blog than anyone else….
Anyhoo, today’s ceramic piece is a Northern Song/Jin-style tea bowl I own with a very cool glaze I don’t think I’ve talked about much, and that’s the oil-spot glaze. Basically it was an accident, resulting from too-early cooling in Jian kilns that caused the ferrous glazes to gel into shiny, halo-like spots instead of running into hare’s-fur streaks like they were supposed to. True Jian oil-spot pieces are rare for this reason, once in a blue moon so gorgeous that they end up national treasures. But in the later Northern Song and Jin, when/where they copied Jian wares for the Chinese and global markets, potters developed a more reliable technique to create the spots, which was under-glazing the black glaze with a glaze rich in hematite or magnetite before firing, which insulated the ferrous glaze and produced the spots. That’s the technique that was used on my bowl.
The Rookery 