A series
Self-portrait, or What's Left of Me
Four heads in raku-fired stoneware, four ways of getting through it
Four animals, made in this order, each standing for one way of coping. The buffalo carries. The fish keeps quiet. The raven remembers. The parrot speaks up, and was made last. Every one of them is a self-portrait, and none of them is flattering. Raku decided the rest: the fire and the smoke take the piece where the hand cannot follow, which is why no two of these could ever be made again.
More by Cristian Dobrescu
Weight
Head's down, not in defeat. That's how you hold weight. The shine only sits where you'd look first — horns, brow, eyelids, muzzle. The sides and the back of the neck I left flat black. I wasn't after a stubborn animal. I was after one that keeps pulling because that's what it does. Took me a while to tell those apart.
See the piece · €760 + VAT
Depth
I made the scales one at a time. Hundreds of them. Nobody asked me to. The eye goes inward — it's a hole, not a pupil. There's nothing hidden down there, that's just where it lives. Some things I don't say. Not the same as things I won't say.
See the piece · €960 + VAT
Watch
Beak up, beak closed. It isn't about to speak. The smoke got in deepest here, right down between the feathers, and never came out. This one just watches. Files it away. For years I thought that was restraint.
See the piece · €890 + VAT
Echo
Nothing it says is its own. Nothing I say is entirely mine either. I learned from people who learned it from someone else, and that chain only holds if somebody repeats. The buffalo carries, the fish keeps quiet, the raven remembers. The parrot speaks up. I made it last, which is how it usually goes with the part you needed most.
See the piece · €860 + VAT