Ian Currie on mon 28 feb 05
Les wrote:
> I find it interesting to be discussing temoku as a glaze.
> I just attended a workshop given by Paul Davis at our Guild in
> Parksvulle, B.C. Canada According to Paul, "tenmoku" is not a glaze
> but the shapr of a tea bowl made in a particular place in Japan.
Hi Les
This is indeed one use of the word tenmoku, especially in Japan. There
are some fairly rare pots called "white tenmoku" that you will find in
any good Japanese text dealing with the history of Shino ceramics. It
is glazed with a precursor to the Japanese Shino glaze which was
probably the first Japanese attempt to come up with a white ceramic,
inspired by Chinese ceramics of the period.
The pots called "white tenmoku" are the Shino precursor applied to
teabowls that would normally be glazed with the tenmoku glaze.... a
"tenmoku shape". One could imagine them being done on the spur of the
moment as an experiment (remember they were more fussy than us about
what glaze goes on what shape).
Another possibility is this... I think they were mostly (exclusively?)
once-firing (raw glazing or slip-glazing) their tenmoku pots. I suspect
some or all of of the early Shino-type glazes were once-fired too. My
guess is that due to the relative clay content of the two glazes, the
tenmoku would have to be applied to the leather hard pot, and the
shino-type to a drier or even bone-dry pot.
So if you get some pots that dry out completely before you get to glaze
them and you need some more pots to fill the kiln, the thought would
occur: "Let's use the glaze that won't fall off". Ah so... a "tenmoku"
shaped bowl with a white glaze. Which was probably named "white
tenmoku" by a tea master who had a very different perception of the pot
than we do in our neat separation of glaze and shape.
A lot of this is speculation or based on stuff I learned half a lifetime
ago, but if you can find a copy of Hugo Munsterberg's "The Ceramic Art
of Japan" (pub. Tuttle) you will see a photo of a teabowl on page 112
(plate 36) referred to as a "white tenmoku teabowl, Muromachi period".
Regards
Ian
http://ian.currie.to/ - You can get my books here.
>
> Any takers?
>
> Les Crimp in Nanoose Bay, B.C.
> lcrimp@shaw.ca
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Wes Rolley"
> To:
> Sent: Friday, February 25, 2005 8:02 PM
> Subject: Tenmoku
>
>
> Normally, I would expect that Vince is the one who is a stickler for
> exact definition of words, unless it applies to the physical sciences
> when it is Ivor Lewis. Recently, I feel that the work tenmoku is being
> used somewhat loosely.
>
> Mel calls what he and Joe Koons are doing, Tenmoku. John Britt seems to
> want to call these "iron saturate" glazes. I guess that I did not know
> what tenmoku really meant. So, I looked up the term on Rober Yellin's
> site, http://www.e-yakimono.net. A search on the word tenmoku got me to
> http://www.e-yakimono.net/guide/html/tenmoku.html
>
> Nothing that I have seen on Mel's CLAYART page looks like this. So, I
> am still a bit confused.
>
> According to Yellin's site, one of the few extant yohen tenmoku wares
> from the Song Dynasty is at the Seikado Bunko Art Museum in Setagaya-ku,
> Tokyo. I found the image here:
> http://global.mitsubishielectric.com/tasteofjapan/brushstrokes/index.html
>
> To see this work, you have to click on "gallery" and then scroll down to
> the tea objects (Chado). You can click on the thumbnail to get a larger
> image and click on that to get one even larger. It is like nothing that
> I have seen. Gorgeous. So, I guess that this is yohen tenmoku.
>
>
Lee Love on wed 2 mar 05
Ian Currie wrote:
>
> Another possibility is this... I think they were mostly (exclusively?)
> once-firing (raw glazing or slip-glazing) their tenmoku pots. I suspect
> some or all of of the early Shino-type glazes were once-fired too. My
> guess is that due to the relative clay content of the two glazes, the
> tenmoku would have to be applied to the leather hard pot, and the
> shino-type to a drier or even bone-dry pot.
I thought that originally, shino glaze was primarily
feldspar. When I recalculated hiratsu feldspar and did some
substitution (using cheaper feldspars), what came out as a materials
mix looked very familiar to me. I looked up the old Freer anaylisis
and the original Wirt recipes and found that what I had was almost
exactly the same as these two.
The hiratsu that is used now used for shino is not ground very
fine. Just a little kaolin is added. The crawling in the glaze comes
from the texture of the feldspar. I am not sure how well this would
hang on to the leather hard pot.
Ian, can you give us any recipes to try? I'd be happy
to test them.
I am wondering if the Japanese black glazes used in
Seto had a lot of clay? Hamada's was kaki stone with ash added.
What I have for a recipe from the Tochigi prefectural Ceramics Research
Institute has only 2.8% clay. Maybe these black glazes have nothing
to do with Seto black. I don't know.
--
Lee in Mashiko, Japan http://mashiko.org
http://potters.blogspot.com/ WEB LOG
http://claycraft.blogspot.com/ Photos!
Ian Currie on wed 2 mar 05
Hi Lee
> The hiratsu that is used now used for shino is not ground very
> fine. Just a little kaolin is added. The crawling in the glaze comes
> from the texture of the feldspar. I am not sure how well this would
> hang on to the leather hard pot.
>
The point I was making in the White Tenmoku posting was that to get a
glaze to hang onto a dried-out pot they might have used the
high-feldspar shino-type glaze rather than the usual tenmoku-style slip
glaze. Most shino-type glazes will fall off a leather-hard pot... but
many bisque glazes will stay on raw clay if applied to the bone-dry
pot... but some clays will not stand the shock. Some of the old photos
of Shino pots look exactly as though the cracks occurred when the glaze
was applied raw to the dry pot, and then opened up in the firing. Just
a guess. The one important question I failed to ask until after I left
Japan (too late!) was "When did they introduce bisque firing in Japan."
By the way, I suspect the name "White Tenmoku" is given to just one
(famous) pot. The glaze is definitely not what we would call a tenmoku!
> Ian, can you give us any recipes to try? I'd be happy
> to test them.
Japanese shino was basically 100% feldspathic rock. But in western
terms this might mean a mix of mostly feldspar plus some quartz and clay
(kaolin). They were coarse (e.g. 30 mesh per inch) and LONG fired and
long cooled. This is outlined in detail in the chapter on Shino Glazes
in my book "Stoneware Glazes - A Systematic Approach" which is
obtainable by credit card at my website: http://ian.currie.to/
> I am wondering if the Japanese black glazes used in
> Seto had a lot of clay?
I suspect they were mostly clay, applied to the raw pot and once-fired.
The best analytical reference to Seto and Mino ceramics that I've come
across is:
"Seto and Mino Ceramics" by Louise Alison Cort (Freer/Smithsonian)
Regards
Ian
http://ian.currie.to/
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