This is a tall jar by Mark Tahbo.  He was known not just for his painted pottery, but especially for the blushes on his pottery from the firing.  This jar is from 1994.  It is coil-built, stone polished, and thin-walled.  This jar is a shape that Mark admired but hated to make.  I remember he would talk to me about the Hopi tall cylinder shapes and how he kept trying to make them.  However, they would either turn out too wide or too narrow.  This jar has an elegant symmetry to the form with the tall sides.  This shape creates a lot of surface space for design!  The jar has the classic Hopi Hummingbird Moth design on each side.  It is often referred to as a “hummingbird design”, but it is inspired by the Hummingbird Moth of the southwest.  Between each moth is a large flower.  They are painted with bee-weed and a dark red clay slip. The inside is also slipped red which seems to accentuate the firing blushes on the outer surface.  The jar was traditionally fired to create the blushes on the surface.  It is signed on the bottom, “Mark Tahbo”.  It is in excellent condition with no chips, cracks, restoration, or repair.  It is an exciting and visually dynamic piece of his pottery, especially at this size!

For traditional Hopi-Tewa pottery, there are no shortcuts. I feel that the younger people, they aren’t as fortunate as I was. I was born at a time where I was with the elder women who revived Hopi-Tewa pottery and brought it to this level. I learned the old style. From how to get the clay, how to process it, from start to finish. They were simple, maybe even crude ways, but they worked. Today, it seems like the storytelling is almost gone. I always tell younger potters that it’s one of the most important foundations we can have as Hopi-Tewa potters. A story. Something to lean back on. If you don’t have that root or that foundation, you have nothing. You are just floating on your own. Soak it all in and listen to all the old stories that you can. There are just no shortcuts. You have to learn the hard way and have patience.”  Mark Tahbo, Spoken Through Clay