4.5x3.5x1.5 Inch Bushuan Rectangle Bonsai Pot #577 – Heavy Drip Glaze, Green, Chop Mark

A small rectangle from Bushuan under a heavy green drip, and glazed underneath as well as over. A glazed bottom is a step most potters skip, partly because it is another surface to manage in the firing and partly because nobody sees it once a tree is in. Doing it anyway says something about how the pot was meant to be regarded.

The drip is built rather than left to chance: layer on layer of glaze, then a firing that makes it run and break. Bushuan taught himself by studying the antique Chinese and Japanese ceramics he had been collecting rather than apprenticing under another potter, and he reproduced the effects of the old wood-fired climbing kilns using a modern electric one. The rim flares outward and the body was carved by hand.

At 4.5 by 3.5 inches and 1.5 inches deep this is mame to small shohin scale. An inch and a half is very shallow, which makes it a pot for a tree whose roots are fully developed, or for an accent planting rather than a main subject. It will dry quickly, which matters more at this size than at any other.