This is an very detailed jar by Steve Lucas.  He remains one of the leading Hopi-Tewa potters working today.  Each piece is coil-built, stone polished, painted with native clay slips and bee-weed (black), and traditionally fired.  Steve has won “Best of Show” at Santa Fe Indian Market, and his work remains some of the most refined and creative.  This wide shoulder jar has a classic Sikyatki shape with a wide shoulder and slightly sloping sides.  The jar is painted with five Sikyatki birds.  Sikyatki was a village below First Mesa at Hopi where pottery was created from 1400 to 1700.  It was the excavation of Sikyatki pottery in the late 1800s that inspired the designs of Nampeyo of Hano.  This jar has three large hummingbirds with elongated beaks extending across the surface.  There is one stylized bird with red feathers extending below the shoulder.  One of the birds is a Cardinal with tail feathers that extend upward.  Steve said he took this particular design from some old Hopi pottery. Finally, there are three small black birds with elongated tails.  The jar has polished areas of red, brown, and white  All the colorful areas are clays that are polished to add additional shine to the jar!  The piece was traditionally fired to create blushes on the surface of the piece.  It is signed on the bottom in the clay, “S. Lucas” and a mudhead (koyemsi) and an ear of corn (corn clan).  It is an innovative design in a classic form.

“When I first learned to make pottery, the red slip painted in the designs was difficult to work with. It wouldn’t take heat very well and would scorch and turn black. The red was also difficult to polish. My aunt Dextra had a deep red clay slip, so I experimented with it. I took some of our base clay and added the red to it, and it polished very well. I then decided to put some mica in there to get that sparkle. That’s where the new red came from, and Dextra liked how it turned out. I introduced them to that. It was nice that for my teacher, Dextra, I was able to share and teach her something.”  Steve Lucas, Spoken Through Clay