Second Concentration: Koi Fish Cup
This is the an old Japanse sgraffito cup that gave me the inspiration to do sgraffito.
This piece gave me the idea to do koi fish, but mine are done in sgraffito and much less detailed.
These are the sketches that I made to create my koi fish cup.
My concentration is the diversity of humanity and culture. I am going to focus each piece on a distinct culture that has it's own unique style to ceramics. I hope to show how one idea, like ceramics, is something that can be used to show similarities and unity in the World, even when there is so much controversy present. This particular project focuses on Japanese ceramics, and my next focuses on Australian Aboriginal. I am overall happy with how it turned out, but some things were not as easy as I had expected.
With this piece my intent was create a piece that fully represented the Japanese ceramics from both the past, and the present. Sgraffito is a process that has long been used in Japan, and the koi fish are a common theme in many different artistic styles. I fused these two concepts together to create a piece that shows Japans ceramics. After a lot of research I had originally decided to make a traditional Japanese teacup, but this cup ended up as a bowl, probably because I had too much clay and didn't control the shape as well as I should have. This fits into my overall concentration because it shows the unique Japanese ceramics, but this will make more sense to my concentration when all of my pieces are finished. I will be able to line up these five pieces and show how each one it so different and unique, even though each started as a lump of clay. I am not yet finished with this piece, it is still green ware waiting to be fired, and then I have to gloss laze it, but so far I am happy with the piece overall.
