Thursday, February 17, 2011

Ice Split

Ice split side

A glaze that is quite unique, although I am not entirely sure if it was just adapted for Hagi by Yamane Seigan, or if this glaze is uniquely his creation. This piece is the only Ice split piece I have, and I love it and hate it for the same reason. That is that this piece while techinically an ice split does not really showcase the desired effect in the glazes used to create an Ice Split. The desired effect is to look like white sheets of ice splitting and breaking up over a nice blue sea.


Icesplit

But why I love this piece is because it is so far from the established norm for Ice Splits, with an almost speckled pattern on the sides, and anywhere there is a fissure on the white glaze applied over the piece, it usually opens up to blackness as opposed to a deep blue. In fact the only hints of the blue glaze underneath the white occurs at the very bottom as seen in the picture above.

A note on my thoughts about Ice Splits, while they appear to be to be incredibly stunning, I am hesitant to believe that they will show some of the charm Hagi develops over time. That is because I think so many glazes go into creating an Ice Split, that it is likely that the tea will have a very hard time progressing through the whole piece to eventually stain the outside. While I hope to be proven wrong, I partially believe that because even just looking at the staining on the inside of the piece, it looks like the stain only is superficially in the glaze. By that I mean the stain only appears to actually be in the outermost glaze, and that it has not progressed any deeper.

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