Nobuhito Nakaoka

Drips of blue and red, born of the natural firing process, cut the perfect contrast against a field of rustic white, befitting the colorful name “Shikisai Haiyu.”

On the next piece, a great swath of inky black and patches of navy gleam like a mirror, throwing off every color of the rainbow when struck by the light – the eye-catching “Hikidashi.”

To complete the trifecta, the rustic “Tanka”: hints of white and an expanse of greenish brown sit atop a burnt-black base, striking an exquisite balance of color and light.

Despite being a relatively young artist working in one of Japan’s oldest schools of pottery, Tamba-yaki, Nobuhito Nakaoka has mastered a broad variety of classic techniques. Yet it is the three styles above – all boldly original even while paying homage to tradition, and developed through slow and painstaking study – that truly represent the artist’s skill.

Tamba-yaki, dating from the late 12^th century, is one of Japan’s six most ancient and significant pottery traditions, alongside the Tokoname, Bizen, Seto, Shigaraki, and Echizen styles. The form is also designated by the Japanese government as one of the country’s culturally important traditional crafts.

Tamba-style pieces are typically fired over a long period of time in pit kilns built into hillsides, gaining their unique patina as ash from burned wood rises and then falls onto the clay’s surface. Nakaoka takes that aesthetic and extends it, combining it with techniques of his own to breathe new life into the traditional art.

From shortly after his birth in 1977, Nakaoka says, he could see himself working as some type of craftsman in the future. That picture became instantly clear when Nakaoka was in high school. His school’s arts teacher, a ceramics artist by training, taught a single two-hour class on pottery. As soon as he touched the clay for the first time, Nakaoka says, he felt that he could build his future in the field.

From that day on, he began telling anyone who would listen that he would become a ceramics artisan. That news eventually reached Tadashi Nishibata, one of the foremost contemporary Tamba-yaki artists. Even before Nakaoka had finished high school, the craftsman had offered him an apprenticeship – the chance to make a career in ceramics. After graduation, he took the position, buckling down to studying the basics of the field.

After four years with Nishibata, the young apprentice took a year off to hone his skills at a workshop in Kyōto. It was there that he gained a truly systematic knowledge of what pottery is: what clay does what and why, and the fundamentals of glaze. Re-comprehending through a scientific lens what he had theretofore learned by experience would later prove a key asset to Nakaoka in his own work as an artisan.

After that year had ended, Nakaoka returned to Nishibata for two final years of study. Once the apprenticeship ended, however, doubt began to rear its head: “If I’ve lived only in the world of pottery since graduating high school,” Nakaoka thought, “can I really claim to be a complete person?”

As questioning arts students are wont to do, he headed overseas, taking a two-year volunteer stint on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent as part of the Japan International Cooperation Agency’s youth volunteer corps, a semi-governmental organization serving underprivileged regions overseas.

Nakaoka’s original task was to teach pottery to the island’s impoverished residents. But it became clear soon after he arrived that there had been some mistake: there was no appropriate clay or equipment, leaving him no way to practice his craft. His mission then became to teach art to handicapped children using clay. The two years Nakaoka spent trying to square his ideals with the reality around him ultimately proved to be a period of profound personal growth.

“There was very little useful that I could do,” he says. “I had nothing but time – it was a chance for me to think hard about by own future.”

When he returned home, he had his mind made up. After a year of rapid preparation, he set out on his own as a ceramics artist. Cheap dishes and other objects provided him with his living while he applied to exhibition after exhibition. But success and recognition stubbornly eluded him.

It ultimately took five years for Nakaoka to come up with a style that was truly his own. Much of that time was spent in the time-consuming process of figuring out how to reliably replicate the beautiful patterns that would appear on his pieces during firing. Once that was complete, recognition was his as his pieces appeared in notable exhibitions. He appeared again and again in a competition at the Tanabe Museum of Art considered a traditional testing ground for teaware makers, taking home prizes several years running.

Nakaoka’s next great mission is to work with a traditional Tamba-style pit kiln, he says. We can thus expect more great things to come as the artist puts his utterly unique touch on that ancient technique.