JULY 17TH, 2009   GION MATSURI

Today was the main procession of the “Hoko” &  “Yama” the various types of wheeled and hand-carried floats as well as the “Mikoshi”, hand-carried portable shrines which comprise the main event of the Gion Matsuri (festival), dating back 1200 years & one of the 3 greatest festivals in all Japan. Since I have been avoiding the mid-summer heat in Kyoto most of the past 10 years I’ve missed seeing this amazing event, the highlight of this notoriously humid season in Kyoto and one that usually signals the end of the rainy season (tsuyu) here.

The festival was originally begun in 859A.D. to pray to the gods to protect the city from a severe plague. It grew into a major event in the mid-Heian period (794-1184), and since the Muromachi period (1392-1575) the many “floats” and various palanquins we see today were annualy paraded through the city in mid-July. Here are a random selection of photos from the days event. The festival actually spans almost the whole month, with this day being the peak.

To enjoy the details of this incredible festival please click on any image to enlarge it. The middle image is a shot of my daughter Toby and I, viewing the festival together standing in front of Kyoto’s City Hall, the same spot where I saw it 32 years ago today, on my first trip to Japan, when I was exactly her age!

Dear friends and lovers of Japanese ceramics,

Welcome to my new “blog”! Since I hate that word I have chosen to call this site “Into the Studio”, to give you an idea of what’s going on in my studio, both in Japan as well as the USA, as well as around my life. As I hope you have discovered from my website  www.teaceramics.com, for the past 9 years I have been splitting my time between my longtime home/studio (25 yrs)  outside Kyoto, Richado-Gama, and my other studio in America, Konko-Gama, in Concord, Massachusetts.

This has kept me pretty busy for some time now and the main site has fallen behind to the point where I felt it was necessary to try and create an easier way to keep you in closer  touch with what I’ve been up to most recently.

This site will also give me a chance to share some other things which directly influence the work I do, as well as how I feel about them. Hopefully as time goes on I will become comfortable with this format to the extent that I can show you the real inner workings of my creative process. It will also offer you a chance to leave comments for me which I am always glad to hear.

Since one of my other passions beyond clay is taking photos, I will also occasionally try to post some of my favorite images to share some of the fascinating and beautiful scenes from my travels, or even from my backyard! (or front yard, like this view below of my studio & kiln taken in Nov. 2008.

We are starting out in English only for now but plan to add Japanese text to the site in the near future so keep an eye out and we hope you’ll check in now & then to see what’s going on.

Thanks for visiting & Let’s share peace thru a bowl of tea!

Richado-Gama, Nov. 2008

Richard Milgrim

In this posting I’ll give you a look at the newest addition to the landscape here at Richado-Gama. A combination of 2 distinct traditional Japanese garden types, this project came about somewhat unexpectedly when we realized that the slope in front of my main studio bldg. was slowly moving, creating cracks between the facade and the slope.
In order to prevent a potential avalanche in the future, we decided in the Spring of  ’08 to take pre-emptive action and shore up the slope, thereby protecting the studio foundation from futher damage. This necessitated tearing away the slope to the base, (a rather large chunk of land), reinforcing it with concrete and then rebuilding it again. Fortunately I had the right friends locally who could handle the job.
In doing so we were left with a slightly larger piece of land in front of the studio, at which point I decided to undertake a long-lost dream to design and build an original dry landscape garden. In this case, meant specifically for the site directly in front of my wheel-throwing area of the studio, looking out over our narrow valley in Yotsuya.
In fact, I had actually built a Zen style stone garden inside the art bldg. at Antioch College as part of my senior exhibition in 1978 which combined 2 different types of popular gardens; the Zen style dry rock garden called “Karesansui Niwa”, and a borrowed landscape garden called “Shakkei Niwa”, which incorporates the surrounding scenery into the overall view of the garden. (This was only possible because the art bldg had roll-up shutters on the sides which allowed the campus surounding the bldg. to been seen from the inside). Using sand and rocks I found on campus as  well as movable gallery partitions it was possible to create this miniature garden, also known as a “TsuboNiwa”, due to the size being similar in size to a “tsubo”,the measurement equivalent of 2 tatami mats or 6′ X 6′.

Little did I imagine that I would have the opportunity to be creating a permanent garden of a similar type exactly 30 years later in Japan! The concept this time was to use a combination of materials readily available, either rocks I already had acquired over the years or ones available from my local gardener, Kaji-san. I wanted to combine the YIN/YANG theme from my kiln logo with some eternal Japanese motifs, such as waves, clouds and mountains, particularly my favorite one, Fuji-san. Using a few rocks with unique character, black & white pebbles separated by carefully cut 250~300 yr.old roof tiles from a Zen temple (Shinyodo), located only a few blocks from my former home in Kyoto (1979-1981), and granite slabs originally used under the old trolley cars in Kyoto, we were ready to go.
Over the next month I continued to tweak the design, trying to find the right balance betweent the space we had to work with, the materials at hand and the concept I wanted to express. Below are a selection of photos tracing the the progress of the project through to completion.