New Kintsugi repair.

Hello all, been a while. Many weird and wonderful things having been happening within my restorations world. Been working more with antiquities if anything, ranging from 2000 year old Iranian sword sharpening stones through to miniature votive pieces from India that are 3000-4000 years old. No stress in dealing with these objects whatsoever, much.

I have been working with lacquer-ware again and enjoying the process more and more. The more you work on said areas, the more you learn. Been building up a fairly comprehensive library for research matters and also the dreaded areas of makers marks. It's bad enough having 1200 years worth of makers marks pertaining to English pottery and ceramics, try having 2000 years worth of makers marks from all of Asia to try and hunt through. Challenging and very rewarding when you find the mark on a original piece. Sadly, trying to find a original work within the Chinese market is becoming harder and harder to find, due to the fakes that are flooding the market. If some of these pieces can fool the likes of Sotheby's UK then, well, what chance do us mere mortals have. One piece of advice, look at the piece, seriously look at it, before you buy your original Tang Dynasty horse. I had a friend recently buy a piece for some outrageous amount recently and I told him it was a fake, he asked how did I know? I replied to him, "did you look at the base?", "no, I didn't", "I didn't know that the Tang Dynasty marked their pieces with "Made in China" on the bases"....

Much swearing ensued.


Back to the topic. Recently I was approached by a new client all the way up in QLD that had heard of me through the grapevine in regards to Kintsugi repairs. The client had smashed a nice Osake bottle and wanted it repaired. I did so, have a look at the photos. The final stage of the kintsugi is to put 23 karat gold powder onto the finished layer, then seal it. I am very happy with the results.

As you can see with the above photo, it was well and truly smashed.

So, after putting the majority of the remaining pieces back together (and making pieces that no longer exist) I channelled the breaks, then smoothed the channels to be able to accept the gold and give more of an artistic flow to the Kintsugi.

As you can see it has come up extremely nice. I shared the photo with the client and she is extremely happy with the piece, so am I, in fact I think it's my favourite so far, well it comes close to the Bonsai pots I did a while back.

So, I'll clean up the edges, and do so if you are doing a kintsugi piece for a hobby or whatnot otherwise it'll take away all the effort and potential beauty that will come from having the rivers of gold or silver going through the finished piece.

Thank you all for dropping by to have another look. Remember, break something and give me a call.

Rock on,

Cahl Schroedl.

More photos of recent works.

May as well use this lunch break productively. Here are some more photos of recently restored pieces.

Enjoy. (read captions for further details of the pieces)

Japanese lacquer dresser (meiji period). Lacquerware stabilised and repolished

Japanese meiji okimono. Restoration in progress.

Satsuma export ware (1920's), very obviously broken to some extent.

Chinese cloisonné stool. In its lifetime someone thought it would be a good thing to repolish it with an angle grinder
so thus I had to restore the patina.

Sung dynasty bowl that the owner promptly dropped. He wanted me to do a kintsugi repair,
so thus, I did. 22 karat filling with urushi.

As usual, thanks for dropping by to have a looksee. Have a grand time til the next post.