It's Memorial Day Weekend and there's a sale at Cornwall Bridge Pottery. I remember the first time I visited the studio near Kent, Connecticut. I was staying with friends at their 18th Century farmhouse, decorated with traditional Japanese antiques. The combination was perfect. I was visiting on my annual trip back home from Tokyo at the time, and I had already started my ceramic addiction in Japan, having first visited Mashiko in 1981, where I learned all about Shoji Hamada and Bernard Leach. What I did not know is that eventually of course, Leach returned to Britain, where other potters served as his apprentice. Much as in Buddhist and Hasidic schools there are lineages.
So when I got to Cornwall Bridge I recognized Hamada and Leach instantly, and it was no surprise to learn that indeed some of the
potters in this group got the Japanese influence by way of Leach and his students in England. The pitcher and matching tumbler you see here I got on that first trip in '81, and they exhibit the tradition "tombo" or dragonfly design so popular in
Japanese folk ceramics.
Last weekend when I was up at the Nehirim retreat in CT, I was perilously close to Cornwall Bridge. I have enough table ceramic ware to serve a 6 course dinner for 12 easily, with plates and vessels from kilns all over those horned isles. So good thing I didn't stop in. But there is a sale on this weekend, so if you're anywhere nearby, you should go and experience tableware as it was meant to be — simple and beautiful. When you touch it you feel the hands of the potter who formed it.
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