Vase with peacock feathers 1904

This is Artus Van Briggle’s green vase with peacock feathers, sitting here in the Met. It’s tall, like a slender, smooth exclamation mark. Imagine Van Briggle in his studio, coaxing the clay, pressing in those elegant vertical grooves, and then adding the final touches around the top - those curvy peacock feathers. You can feel the artist’s hand, smoothing and shaping, trying to get the light to bounce off the surface just so. What’s it like to make something from nothing? The vase has a simple palette but the details, those subtle tonal variations where the light catches just so, give it an emotional depth, don’t you think? I’m really inspired by the way Van Briggle merges form and function into one seamless gesture, like, what’s the difference between a sculpture and a vase? I think he was onto something there; maybe all of us artists are just riffing on each other’s ideas, across time and space, trying to make sense of things the only way we know how.