Nothing here was left to chance. Not one whisker.
Kutani is Shigaraki's opposite temperament, and standing them together is the point.
The piece is fired first. Then it is painted — green, yellow, red, purple, navy, the gosai, the five colours — and fired a second time at a lower heat so the enamel sits up on the surface with the thickness of lacquer. Run a finger across a Kutani plate and you can feel the painting standing above the glaze.
The moulded clay is fired once, plain white, with no colour on it yet.
The outlines of every pattern are drawn in dark enamel with a fine brush.
The five Kutani colours go on over the glaze — green, yellow, red, purple, indigo.
Gold line and gold leaf last of all, then a final low firing to fix them.
Because the colour goes on after the fire, nothing is surrendered to the kiln. A Kutani lion is not a lion that happened. It is a lion that was decided, whisker by whisker, by a person holding a very small brush.
The lion itself is a guardian. Karashishi sit in pairs at shrine gates, one mouth open, one closed — the first sound and the last, the beginning and the end of everything. Indoors they are set out to keep a room in order.
The kiln opened in 1655 in a mountain village in the Kaga domain, and then — for reasons still argued over — it closed around 1730 and stayed closed for eighty years. Everything from that first run is called Ko-Kutani, old Kutani, and there is not much of it.
Pieces are found one at a time, in Japan, and photographed before they are listed. Tell us what you are looking for, and we will write when something arrives that answers it.
We write when there is something to write about — some months twice, some months not at all.
Noted. We will write when something arrives.