The stars are right!
Here’s a ceramic piece that mixes Georgian era mourning themes, H. P.
Lovecraft, and Chinese styles in an eclectic production worthy of its own
inclusion in Weird Tales.
An old friend of my mine, Michael W. Moses the art
ceramicist had just gotten a new piece of ceramic out of the kiln the other
day. He allowed me to photograph it in
a little tableau that sets off its complex mood and little surprises quite
nicely. The body of the box is just
over four inches at its widest and varies from just over one and a half inch
deep to over two and a half inches deep.
The lid is five and a quarter inches wide and under an inch deep. Now that we have the preliminaries out of
the way, let’s get to the fun.
This offering is a cylindrical lidded box with an asymmetric
cant to the rim so it’s not a perfect cylinder, but bent slightly. It’s painted in a type of blue-and-white
ware that is evocative of 17th and 18th century Chinese export
ware as well as period Continental imitators (such as Delftware) of this
type of ceramic. The box has been
meticulously hand-painted all over and I mean on every surface! The style is not in the typical heavy, solid
blue, but in a softer watercolor style, which is semi opaque due to the
underglaze paint being applied directly to the bisque body in delicate
layers.
The top of the lid features a classic, misty Georgian mourning scene with the iconic urn and weeping willow, but it is
perked up with a little Japanese pine tree in the right. Notice also on the far left, in place of the
typical obelisk, there is a strange stone menhir beside willow. Setting off the vignette there is a wide
border of white nothingness that frames the image – again very Japanese with
the effective use of white space.
The outside of the box is an interpretation of a cyclopedian wall,
which could well be from Machu
Picchu or R’lyeh. Actually, the wall could also be in the mood
of an abstract Japanese or fabric ceramic pattern as well. This wall echoes the Georgina themes as the
wall around the graveyard, yet is much more ancient. If you look closely at the wall, you will see curious little
things on it: creatures, mazes, and
even scenes of other places or times.
When you open this box you find a bit of a surprise inside
because it has a fully illustrated interior.
The inside wall of the box has a lot of curious plants growing around
it. Is it undersea life? Is it alien plants from another planet or
are they actually animals like corals or crinoids? I do know that each plant unique, individual
and there are about 40 of them. We’ll
probably never know their origin or names.
Notice how the plants fade in an out slightly as if they were underwater
or showing through another dimension or in a slight fog from a moor. The bottom of the interior has a polyhedral
tile set into the floor with a very long inscription in an unknown language;
it’s not even possible to determine the orientation of the text.
Do you think that’s the end of the surprises? Nope, flip the lid over and get a view of H.
P. Lovecraft’s creation, Cthulhu
(Cthulhu Pantocrator? Phagiomundi?) with yellow eyes (the only other color on
the whole piece). You see that that
Dread Cthulhu, surrounded by impressionist stars,[1] and is peering
at you from what might be the porthole of a ship, from the bottom of a well, or
from the viewer of a Tillinghast Resonator[2]. Note that the rim of the inside lip has a jaunty
dash decoration.
OK, one more bit hidden joy is found on the bottom of the
work. Along with Michael W. Moses’
inscription and signature, is a pretty unknown type of winged arachnid within a border, it
may be cryptozoological, but it probably isn’t poisonous or going to lay eggs
inside you, probably. Note that the
roundel is glazed but the rest of the bottom of the box is bisque, which gives
a different texture.
Mr. Moses has layered on historical styles, periods and
interpretations all on one box. Each
design is original, unique, and hand-painted.
It is not transfer ware or machine made. This is part of his second line of pottery where he uses a
commercial blank rather than the typical hand-built body you see in his
works. He says the great thing about
pottery and ceramics is that they can survive for thousands of years, unless a
glacier in the next ice age grinds it up.
Michael started making blue willow type porcelain about 30
years ago and it has resurfaced in his work again in his new series of
Delft-like wares. Unlike Delftware,
this ceramic is no base coat of white tin glaze, instead the bisque body is
already snowy white. The blue is
painted directly onto the bisque using an underglaze paint and then a clear
overglaze is applied over the whole.
The whole thing is fired to cone 7 or so.
This art design is copyright Michael W. Moses 2014. Go to his blog to see this
work in progress before the final firing.
You might be surprised that the false colors end up blue and the green
as clear. Each piece of his work is
individually serial numbered, but note that when I got there and photographed
the piece before the serial number was written. For that matter, he hadn’t even finalized the name of the piece
yet.
After I took the initial photos, I got playing around with
the Cthulhu Box and put together some tableaus to show off what a good
decorator it would make. I added in a few
props such as a candlestick from the late 1600s, a brass late Ottoman pen &
ink set, a pair of 1840 double lens “D” sunglasses and case, some Star Hibiscus
seed pods (because they looked interesting) and the interesting water glass is actually just a
modern green bubble glass. I didn’t
realize that the picture would be a little distorted, but in the end, but I can always claim I
meant for that effect.
 | |
| Another blue and white work |
So if you need a stealth creepy piece of art for your study,
beside table, boudoir, or just a collector of art, this box should fill the
bill. It’s a unique hand-painted work
inspired by a mélange of historical ideas and artistic styles. Michael W. Moses’ pottery can be
seen on Etsy, and his blog on line.
All you have to do is Google “Michael Moses Pottery” to get a large
number of image hits. You’ll enjoy his
cryptozoological plant/animals and other works of his fertile mind.
CoastConFan
Footnotes
[1] The Tillinghast
Resonator is a lab device from the H. P. Lovecraft story, From Beyond,
pub. 1934, which allows the unseen world to be revealed. Read the story here: http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/fb.aspx
[2] The star
background behind Cthulhu really puts me in mind of Van Gogh’s painting, The
Starry Night, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starry_Night
Michael Moses’ blog article featuring this piece:
Another Michael Moses piece, featured on Propnomicon back in
2011: http://propnomicon.blogspot.com/2011/01/cthulhu-fhtagn-moses-edition.html
Plant symbology was important in mourning iconography: http://artofmourning.com/2006/01/17/symbolism-meaning-plants/
Urn and willow symbology in mourning: http://artofmourning.com/2014/04/28/the-urn-willow-and-onyx-in-the-18th-century/
Cyclopedian walls: http://www.worldheritagesite.org/sites/mycenaetiryns.html
For those of you who made it this far, a little movie:
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