A friend of mine who comes from El Salvador and now lives in Tillamook, Oregon (land o’ cheese, trees and ocean breeze), asked me to make her two bowls for individual portions of thick soups, curries or stews and she wanted to be able to balance a piece of bread on the rim. Her description reminded me of bowls that a fellow potter used to make many years ago. This potter had spent a lot of time in Japan and one of her standard pieces was what I think of as a traditional Japanese design: the bottom was quite flat, but still had a smooth curve, and the sides were almost straight with a thick flat rim. I used to have two of these bowls: they were made out of groggy brown clay with a Temoku glaze and I used them all the time but the last one broke about 10 years ago. My friend from Tillamook wanted her bowls glazed in solid bright colours so I painted the outside of the bowls with coloured slip, burnished them and carved out the same lines that I used for my scraffito vases and glazed the insides with shiny white glaze. I kept the yellow bowl for my morning porridge and I just found out that every morning my twenty-year-old son, who gets up later than I do, washes it out and uses it for his cereal. For me the bowl works perfectly for microwaving and then eating my porridge, but for him the bowl just “looks cool.”
Two Bowls