Artwork description:

Due to their short bloom time, Sakura blossoms are a metaphor for life itself:
Beautiful yet fleeting. You’ll realize when you’re as old as me to hang on to the good times because they won’t last forever.
Shannon Mullen

After visiting the Cherry Blossom Festival in Amsterdamse Bos in April 2017 I got inspired to materialize my impressions of this wonderful traditional event through a brand new ceramic collection covered by a flourishing cherry blossom decoration. This tea bowl is one of the unique results.

The decoration technique is quite complicated and demands patience and time. After the bowl is created on the potter’s wheel and has been fired at 980 degrees Celsius, I start with the decoration by painting the lines of the branches onto the bowl with fluid rubber. When the rubber is dry I dip the hole vessel in a white crackle glaze, which is a thick and milky mixture of the different glaze ingredients and water. When the glaze is dry I clean off the rubber and thus, take away the glaze across the branch decoration. Now I trace the lines of the branches with dark brown temmoku glaze before I design the flowers by dappling pink majolica glaze with a brush on top of the underlying crackle glaze. This has to be done several times from thin to thick to give the decoration vivacity. Only when the bowl is fired again at 1240 degrees the glaze receives its brightness and its final color through the melting of the glaze ingredients due to the high temperature.
All my glazes are self-prepared by my own recipes. Because all of my items are hand-made and unique you will never find another one which is exactly like yours. And best of all: they are dishwasher-proof:)!

Materials used:

stoneware clay