Vase 1901

This vase was made by the Van Briggle Pottery Company, and wow, what a unique shape! I’m imagining the artist’s hands working with the clay, pushing and pulling, trying, failing, and then, yes! The form starts to take shape: those drapery-like folds, frozen in time. It feels like the artist was thinking about sculpture, maybe even painting—a kind of three-dimensional canvas for playing with light and shadow. That olive-green glaze, with its subtle variations, seems to want to tell stories. Is it like moss on a rock, or the skin of an old tree, maybe a kind of muted landscape? I think about other artists who’ve explored similar terrain, like the painter Georgia O’Keefe, who turned flowers into almost-abstract forms. There’s something about that act of close looking, of teasing out the hidden depths of ordinary things. I wonder what was in the artist’s mind? What did they want us to feel? It’s a conversation across time, you know?