POTTERY: Museums
- LeizureMaster
- Mar 18, 2025
- 2 min read
Updated: Mar 26, 2025
MUSEUMS
PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART
I will be the first to admit that BP ('Before Pottery') I never spent a lot of time looking at the ceramic pieces in art and history museums. Of course the amazing longevity of ancient artifacts was always interesting. Imagine a piece of fired clay still around after thousands of years. But unlike painting, I had never felt a connection to the craft until I started learning it myself. No, I don't paint either, but over the years I've thought about starting. I dabbled a bit with watercolors many years ago and I still have my one acrylic work from the SJSU days (painted with a putty knife) on my studio wall to remind me to keep it on my todo list.
For sure, when lookibg at these pieces, information about glazing was always skimmed over, as were the types of kilns used in ancient times.
A simple bowl probably wouldn't have held my attention unless the design was eye catching. Things are a bit different these days. Take this bowl for example. Over 1000 years old, when they were just starting to experiment with tin or copper oxides in Iran. Now that means something!
This post is a little bit travel blog as well. Over the weekend we spent a couple days in Phillly with the primary goal of trying out cheesesteaks and visiting some historical sites. But we also spent a good amount of time in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is a truly amazing museum. More on that in a travel post. First pieces, in the first room we entered, were ceramics and I realized immediately that there were new things for me to lookout for in museums! So here are a few, some of which I might even aspire to reproduce in the coming years.
In the Asian Art portion of the museum we found this unassumingly sitting in a Japanese structure. Well, Danielle did. I walked past it at least a couple times assuming it was a cloth wrapped basket. Nope, it's ceramic. Incredible! Sorry that I don't have details about the creator to provide here.
And here it is! painted while living on So. 12th St, San Jose - ~1986
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