Arita Porcelain Guinomi, Gourds 瓢箪

Tsukasa lives in Fukuoka, the largest city in Kyushu, the southern part of Japan, and he works in a studio with his mentor in an old house on the main street of this picturesque old Japanese town. Arita is famous for porcelain. And this is porcelain painted in various colors, often blue and likely inspired many centuries ago by artisans from Korea and China. This particular type of porcelain became known as Arita-yaki. It gained fame when European traders, who were the first to be allowed into Japan, through Nagasaki (the only open port to “Westerners” in the Edo period) brought them back to Europe.

We happened to look into a storefront window and saw somebody working. He looked up and motioned us in. That was our introduction to Tsukasa Momota, a Fukuoka native who spent several years in northern Florida. Yup, we just happened to find a local Japanese guy who moved to Florida to study painting and fell in love with surfing and antiques. As he delved deeper into American and European antiques, he came to realize the beauty of the traditional Japanese crafts he grew up with and returned to Japan where he gained a great appreciation for Japanese porcelain.

We spent an incredibly enjoyable afternoon talking with Momota-san, hearing his story and telling ours, while he showed us his works and served us oshogatsu (New Year Holiday food) delicacies with very good regional sake.

Arita craftspeople have been making a concerted effort to reinvent Arita-yaki to make it more contemporary and have recently shown here in New York and around the world. Momota-san prefers to take a slightly different approach. His work is more subtle, evolving without losing the beauty and usefulness of the centuries of work that his forbearers created.

We are now featuring his works here. Please take a look.