Kjell Hahn

we’re supposed to be ending the firing just before midnight on the 31st.
good times.
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a recent oni landscape drawing…

site still on auto pilot while im out of town.
heres another photo from landscape assemblage series.
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id personally like to thank the baby jesus getting me off work for the next couple weeks. i dont think i could have survived much longer.
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now im out of town with no internet so the next few posts will be on auto mode.
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heres a photo from landscape assemblage series.
these paintings wont be on the site until the new site is up and running. matt craven almost has the entire thing re-written.

finished up an anagama kiln firing at Waseda yesterday. the school pays students to do all the work so i just sat back with the other old people and relaxed. wont know the results until i get back in town from John’s firing.
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heres a photo from the loading:

going back to tamba sasayama to fire john dix’s anagama kiln. I have a couple pots in the kiln but my main reason for going up there is to learn more about the firing process with the hope I can get better results out of the firings up here in Gunma.
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(colored dots and lines refer to attached map)

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To get to work everyday i ride my bike about 25 km each way across a mountain pass to the next town. the map attached covers maybe 40 percent of the trip home. I live to the north along the blue line but lost too much resolution trying to fit it on the screen. i work at the bottom of the map at the yellow dot.
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the other day I planned to go to a hot spring bath house (onsen) partway home at the purple dot. since the bathhouse is cheaper after 5pm and the swine flu got me out of work at 3:30 i decided to do a little exploring. normally the yellow line takes me down hill to Minano town and then i have to climb back up as I come around the back of the mountain. it might not look like much on the map but its significant on a bicycle and you kinda get tired of sweating up the same hill after 200th time. All that going up and down seemed inefficient and gave me an idea. a little mountain climb through terraced farms and forest seemed like a pleasant alternative to the crowded street I normally use, even if there were a few more ups. i didnt realize it at the time but the mountain between the two is 600m – 1800 feet tall; more than a few ups. Anyway, without the benefit of looking at a map i was fairly certain that if i made a straight shot across the nearest mountain the bathhouse would be waiting for me on the other side. With an hour and a half of sunlight left I took the dark red path in the direction I assumed the bath was in. While more difficult than my usual course, I enjoyed the quaint little farm houses chiseled into the side of hills, no cars and a view of the surrounding town. The unfamiliar area made the whole outing feel like one of my old bike trips across the country.
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after several minutes up a steep incline I met an old man who told me the street wasn’t a dead end. good news. Unfortunately he couldn’t provide any details on where it would take me. I kept on going until I came to a clearing where the street began to go back down, disappearing behind another clump of mountains (orange dot on map). I stopped to access the situation figuring the street would probably just wind back to the main road and that my little wilderness trek had already ended. Ive done a lot of unmapped riding on mountain roads and learned that most just lead back to the bigger roads. Finding interesting, out of the way routes is quite uncommon.
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Standing there overlooking Chichibu city I heard a rusting sound down the cliff in front of me. Halfway expecting to find a wild bore I looked over the edge. No pig, but I saw one of those old ladies permanently bent over at nearly right angles you find all over the Japanese countryside. I didn’t know what she was doing since there was no garden or house nearby. I called down to ask directions and she immediately stopped fidgeting with some dirt pile and scrambled up the cliff to meet me. clearly not one to get many visitors she decided to compress a normal week’s worth of conversation into our brief encounter. Now I can speak Japanese pretty well and was only asking directions but found myself completely lost after the first few sentences of this woman’s ramblings. She went on about a relative in France, then japanese-american relations and somehow we ended up on the subjects of the edo period, the meji revolt, ancient gold routes and am pretty sure she brought up something about outer space. When I told her I was trying to get to the onsen on the other side of the mountain she lit up. “oh, oh. Wanda! Wanda! Go Go! Yes! Yes!” she belted out while jumping side to side with her arms in the air. apparently I was on some kind of trade route that hadn’t been used in 100 years. She insisted i continue on but was a little concerned about me running into ghosts that had never met a foreigner before with it being a forgotten path and all. She assured me that if I made a lot of noise so as not to startle them I’d be able to make it across the mountain safely. Maybe I looked hesitant or something because she did another of her one legged “wanda! Wanda! Go! Go!” dances in an attempt to urge me up the mountain. –wow, this woman was a lucky find. usually when you tell an old lady you plan to enter a mountain forest just before sunset you get a lot of “muri! Ikenai wa!” “that’s impossible, you cant go that way!” No, my new friend may have been out of her mind but she was all about adventure. I had to find this path that possibly led to gold, riches, ghosts or maybe even outer space.
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I took the road up an increasingly difficult slope to the end of the dark red line. Here there was one last building on a dead end street. I didn’t see any way to continue on, only a small creek bed that went up the mountain. No pavement, no signs, no more road. The crazy lady had been too insistent about this thing for this to all end so I entered the forest near the creak in search of some way to continue on. I climbed up several meters along a retaining wall and found that there really was a way cleared into the forest. I pulled my bicycle over my shoulder and hiked up.
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Now after 4:00pm the sun had sunk low enough that the mountain valley was already in shadow. if I was going to make it to the top before dark I had to hurry. I checked my flashlight and pushed forward. I made good time and got just below the mountain ridge when the path suddenly branched off in two directions. I followed both as far as I could but they just faded off into nothing. to the right I could make out some dark shapes deeper in the forest- maybe caves or cliffs? I wasn’t sure, either way they werent going to get me to an onsen. I didnt understand why the path would just stop so close to the top. I had all these ideas of ghosts and ancient riches floating around in my head and was just a minute or two away from the top. i knew i could make it up, path or no path. more than anything i wanted to continue on.. once i cleared that ridge the rest of the way would be all downhill. On the other hand I had no cell phone reception or compass, one light sweatshirt and a little thing of milk with me. I didnt even have a map or know for certain how close the onsen was. Realizing that if I lost the path in the last minutes of light i might have an incredibly long night ahead of me, my only choice was to stop and turn around.
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facing South down the mountain I could see the last sliver of the sun as it fell behind the horizon. I turned on my flashlight, shifted my bicycle to the other shoulder, and hurried down as fast as I could.
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Someday I gotta find the “wonder wonder” world the mountain lady jumped up and down about.

(home near end of dark red line along the “wanda wanda” gold route)

i have two more anagama firings in the next few weeks. any pots i want fired have to be done in the next day and a half, so thats all ive been working on the last couple of days. i even took off work friday to try and get everything done in time.
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finally took pictures of some of the pots.
overall they came out ok… especially considering the organizational situation. the environment inside the kiln looked fairly consistent. no dead areas in the kiln but then again only a few pieces that had exciting/dynamic surfaces.
guinomi 1, teabowl 1 and bowl 3 had fair wood-kiln fired effects.
glaze results were ok as well but again nothing surprising or terribly interesting going on.

during the firing chiaki divided half the troops to work on the kiln and half to help him paint a set for an upcoming flamenco performance in tokyo. i had very little to do with painting it but got to see the performance at the Ginza Donchou Theater.　I’ve seen three of chiaki’s flamenco shows so far and this was the best; both the dancers and the set.
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watching the show and seeing how everything came together got me thinking about his ability to fire the kiln without ever touching a pot. he has a knack for working in chaos and getting the people around him to sort it all out for him. His set of canvas with leaves stomped into the paint, veneer haphazardly nailed together, aluminum foil and string got plenty of ridicule from the stage grips that had to set it up, but none of that came across in the audience. impressive.
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Heres a picture fuyuko took of the set-up. I like the director’s computer with a desktop image of him looking into a mirror at 4 other images of himself. I never would have guessed that a successful person in the art world would be a narcissist.

i should have had pictures of more pots up by now but a friend of chiaki’s just gave me a pottery wheel, kiln furniture, tools and a smaller hand wheel for making sculptures. the electric wheel has barely been used and a better build than my old one. a new one costs over a thousand dollars and this guy could have easily sold it online. lucky me.
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i ended up rewiring the ceramics studio and building a new system of tables. its still somewhat temporary since im installing a new floor next month but now there are now 2 stations for wheel throwing and 2 stations for hand building or making sculptures. I can officially invite someone over to make pots together now.
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mr. kuehnle requested kiln pictures. i only have a few taken so far. had to buy a grinder and whatnot to clean off the pots. more to come soon.
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also running back to the car in the rain today i ended up stepping in a big pile of poop. probably not a story i should be bringing up but this was human dootie, and fresh- if that’s the right word. I was only in the store for maybe 5 minutes before running back to the car and someone had turned the place into a warzone. i guess they really had to go but who poops in a parking lot in the middle of a thurday afternoon? weird.
besides, the only people in that store were a bunch of old ladies.
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pots:

teabowl with natural ash glaze

guinomi– small sake cup with shino/ash glaze