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     In December 2003, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City mounted an exhibition on this subject entitled “Turning Point: Oribe and the Arts of Sixteenth Century Japan” with a catalog of the same name. This 390-page publication is complete with photos of all the work on display and contains essays and analyses by 20 knowledgeable historians and curators. Of particular interest to potters are the informed comments that accompany each work, shedding light on the origin, process and function of each pot. The reader is directed to this source for an expansive and definitive treatment of the subject.

     My intent here is quite different than that of true scholars. I am looking at these pieces as a practicing potter. I’ve always loved these works, because they seem so wonderfully improvised and nonchalant, yet smart. It’s not a great leap to see in Oribe ware the structural and expressive components that exist in mainstream American jazz. So, in attempting to explain these works in some way other than how historians or curators might, I think we can employ two methods. They are common to the Western world, they overlap some and they are highly practical. One is known as the principle of theme and variation. The other is contrast and comparison.

     Part of me wants to apologize for dissecting and demystifying these beautiful pots. They clearly speak for themselves. At the same time, to suppose that there isn’t anything to learn by discussing them in detail is to suppose that art just appears, like the Tooth Fairy. Of course, it doesn’t.

     The stoneware dish to the left is approximately 8 inches square and is made from both white and buff clay. It also uses iron pigment decoration, a feldspathic clear and the well-known Oribe green glaze. In his comments in the catalog, Andrew L. Maske, curator of Japanese Art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, concludes with this: “. . . the decoration of this dish, as with many Oribe wares, is abstract rather than representational and was likely intended to intrigue rather than inform the viewer.” How does that happen?

     We can say exactly how when we name what we see and employ our two strategies of understanding. How do they work? By identifying the visual elements and their relationship to one another, we discover an artist’s plan—call it visual rhetoric. This plan, composed of line, form, shape, pattern, color, texture and image, is equivalent to so many words, sentences and paragraphs. Put in the proper sequence (context in our case), they provide meaning and the resonant chord of our own understanding. Put another way, they become a part of the things we already know.

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