The Process to Making Pottery

The first step in making anything is to gather the materials that are needed to make that item. For Chinese pottery, the materials needed include clay, kaolin, feldspar, and glass. The clay can be taken from a river, the kaolin and feldspar will be mined from quarries, and the glass cooked to be used in the pottery.
Once gathered, the materials will be ground down, cleaned, and mixed together to make a workable substance. The material is then fired so that it can become hard. The mixture will not melt during the firing, as glass does.
In the kiln, the pottery reaches up to temperatures of 1000 to 1300 degrees Celsius, which liquefies the mixture and allows the components it is made of to bind together.
After the components have bound and cooled to a workable temperature, the material is formed to the desired shape of pottery using a potter's wheel or hand molding. A potter's wheel is used to make a round pot. Hand molding is a technique used when a more intricate design that could not be achieved with a potter's wheel was desired.
After the pottery has been molded, it is fired again to make it hard. This firing reaches to about 1200 degrees Celsius, and the pottery will become very hard. After this final stage of firing, the pottery will be cooled and painted to be sold or used.
For a visual on what the process actually looks like, check out this video of pottery being made:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYkBimql2s0

Potters wheel

Pottery kiln

Determining Chinese Literati Art From Other Chinese Art

Perhaps the most telling feature of a literati work is the formality of the work. If it looks like it was made to be held in a court room or depicts the life of a person in the higher class of Chinese society, then it is very likely not a literati painting. The literati painted mostly nature and used very little color, while the court paintings were painted using a wide range of colors. A good contrast between these two groups of artists can be seen between the following paintings.

Literati Painting

Court Painting

These are good examples to show contrast because they show the ideal Literati or Court painting. The Literati painting uses only black and white pigments, while the Court painting has a whole host of red, yellow, orange, brown, and other colors. the Literati painting shows a mountain, while the Court Painting shows a group of people seated at a table conversing.

Another feature that is more common in Literati paintings is the use of calligraphy and poetry in the work. as is seen above, there is a bit of calligraphy on the Literati work, but no writing at all on the Court painting.

The literati were artists who painted outside the court and royal affairs. They painted of nature and families and of things other than the court. Three good examples of the literati painters are Shen Zhou, Wu Zhen, and Dong Qichang.

Shen Zhou was a literati painter during the Ming Dynasty. Shen’s most famous painting is his Lofty Mount Lu. Shen painted this for one of his prior teachers as a birthday gift. The peaks of the mountain are meant to show the teacher’s virtue and character. Although Shen had never seen the mountain, he shows the enormous scale of the mountain by painting in a tiny person at the bottom of the image. This shows the enormity of the mountain because in the Asian style, the painting is meant to be read from the bottom, up, with the bottom of the page being the closest part and the top of the page being extremely far away. The fact that the person is placed at the bottom of the page shows that even though that is the closest part, the scale of a person is nowhere close to the scale of the mountain.

Wu Zhen was a literati painter during the Yuan Dynasty. His most famous painting is the Stalks of Bamboo by a Rock. He lived as a hermit, so his view of nature was different than that of other painters. His view of the bamboo stalks each as separate pieces in a work is different than other painters who showed clusters of bamboo stalks as a single piece of a work. The way that Wu zooms in on the bamboo and shows it up close has a sort of time-slowing effect, like in a movie when the slow motion action is used, and it gives us time to really examine the bamboo in its beautiful form.

Dong Qichang was a literati artist in the Ming Dynasty. he was a wealthy landowner and a high official, and also a poet, calligrapher, and painter. Dong developed the idea that most Chinese landscape painters could be classified into two main schools of design. These were the Northern school and the Southern school. The northern school was more precise and academic, while the south was freer and more subjective. Dong himself  was considered to be a part of the Southern school. He painted Dwelling in the Qingbain Mountains, which is a mixture of Dong’s own artistic innovations like the form in which he painted the mountains, and things he borrowed from previous painters such as the inscriptions at the top of the paper.

Pottery is an art form that is significant in China because they mastered the form before any western civilization did. The Chinese artists figured out how to fire the pottery so that it would become hard to different degrees, based on their preference for their work, and they discovered new types of clay to make different types of pottery, and discovered different ways to decorate their pottery, including painting, carving, and different glazes.

Until the development of true porcelain, the Chinese people only made clay vessels of stoneware or earthenware. These clays were mainly colored by mineral impurities in the clay, usually iron compounds, which colored anywhere from yellow to brownish black.

Earthenware is clay that has been fired at a relatively low temperature in a kiln or open pit. These items remained somewhat soft and porous, which allowed liquids and air to seep through. An example of this earthenware style pottery is the vases from the Yangshao culture. These pots were found in the Gansu Province. They date to the mid-third millennium BC, and are fine examples of Chinese earthenware because they show the Chinese early mastery of the art of making pottery.

Stoneware is the same type of clay that is used for earthenware vessels, except it is fired to extremely high temperatures, up to 2000 degrees fahrenheit, which makes the clay harder and more solid and better for holding things. This new form was favored because it gave the pottery more durability and usefulness.

The pottery was decorated in various ways. One method was to rely on the changes which occurred in the kiln, changing the color of the natural impurities of the clay. Another method was to paint over the clay. Some pieces were carved into or glazed over to give a decorative look.

Chinese artists did not only use earthenware and stoneware for their pottery. They also used porcelain, made from a type of clay called kaolin, which was mixed with ground petuntse. Porcelain is, like stoneware, fired at extremely high temperatures, and is decorated mainly with underglaze which is applied to the piece before firing, and overglaze which is applied to the piece after firing. The underglaze fully bonds to the piece in the kiln, but there are fewer colors possible, while with the overglaze has more colors, but doesn’t bond as fully to the piece.

The art of pottery is important to Chinese culture because they were the first to master it and develop it until it was perfected. The Chinese people have used pottery since their beginning and it defines the Chinese culture. Pottery is a good way for artists to express themselves, while making something that is useful too.