Sweets Bowl with Plum Tree

In this sweets bowl, Yohei IV combines ink painting techniques with advanced glazing techniques. He has painted the gnarled boughs of a plum tree in iron oxide on the surface of the bowl. The tree’s blossoms are made slightly in relief by a build-up of slip. Their centers are painted with yellow. All of this is under a blue glaze that his father developed and named “evening moon” (tsukiyoi). Before applying the glaze, he would have covered the blossoms with paper so that they remained white. It appears that after applying the tsukiyoi glaze, he then went back over the design with iron oxide to add luster and dimensionality to the branches before applying a transparent glaze.