Gekkou Ito (伊藤月香編)

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We have admired Ito Gekkou’s pots for some time but had yet to collect any. Well that changed this month as we acquired two of them from Japan with the help of a very good friend who was kind enough to run over to the Ueno Green Club and search for us.

This post will show a relatively small pot at about 9cm. Many of Gekkou’s pots are in the 12-14 cm range but we do like small pots and this one was just too good to pass up. We wanted to acquire a red painted pot and were able to do that along with a blue painted pot of which we will post in few days. Click the images to see a larger version of the photos.

When we first started collecting pots some 9 years ago, we just avoided painted pots like the ones on this page. We had zero appreciation for them – perhaps you find yourself like that as well. However, over time we have come to appreciate them for what they are – works of art – that when used correctly are stunningly beautiful.

Perhaps our eyes have just gotten better overtime and our appreciation for them has certainly improved and the fact that we are now spending considerably more money on higher quality pots plays a role too. We have spoken about this before in prior blog articles, but we can’t recommend highly enough for pots you collect for display or shows, buy one great pot versus say 5-7 decent quality pots. Gekkou pots run from around 40,000 to 100,000 Yen with most in the 50-75,000 Yen range.

Ito Gekkou

Gekkou’s pots remind us of Yusen and Ichi-seki Miyazaki but at about 20-50% of the price. Note the detail in the drawing. As I have shared with Peter Tea, who is building a very fine pot collection which you can see here: Peter Tea’s Blog, very well painted pots used shading to add significantly to the overall feel of the pot.

Ichi-seki Miyazaki

月ノ輪湧泉編 - Yusen Tsukinowa

Gekkou uses a similar motif in many of his pots with the emphasis on outdoors with trees, water, birds and buildings. Gekkou though excellent doesn’t quite match the quality of the painting as seen in the Yusen pot above. But when the price of a Yusen starts at around 550,000 Yen ($7,189 in US today), we will just have to enjoy them in books or when we see them for sale in Japan.