Kintsugi – Gold-Mended Bowl

A bowl broken and mended in gold, overflowing with colour and light.

A small kintsugi narrative in watercolour and ink, offered as an archival fine art print.

Kintsugi is the Japanese way of mending broken pottery with gold, so the break is honoured rather than hidden, and the mended thing is worth more than the unbroken one ever was. Here the bowl, its grey seams traced in gold, is filled past the rim and overflowing with glossy spheres of every colour, and a few hang in the air above it, rising free or falling in, you cannot tell which. A handful of grey, lightless spheres lie on the surface nearby.

Look for the texture: the bowl's mottled grey comes from salt dropped into the wet wash, and every sphere carries a cracked, glassy sheen, all of it worked by hand against the black.

I painted the original at just 6 by 10 centimetres, every bowl, every sphere, every gold seam.

It became an allegory for living. We cannot, and should not, get rid of our deepest, hardest parts. They stay, and sometimes we let them be for a while, but that does not mean the movement is over. Colour and light keep coming into a vessel put back together in gold. There is healing through light and colour.

This same bowl turns up again in another of my paintings, whole and full, the same vessel further along.

Printed to order on Hahnemühle German Etching, a heavyweight 310gsm mould-made fine art paper, acid- and lignin-free to museum standard, with archival pigment inks. A giclée from an original watercolour by Léna Ruisz, never a mass reproduction, colour-managed to stay true to the original painting. Because every screen shows colour a little differently, what you see on your device may vary slightly from the finished print. Free worldwide shipping, arriving ready to live with. No frame is forced on you, so choose the size that fits your wall.

You are buying the fine art print only. The frame shown in the product image, and any mount, furniture, plants or other props in the photographs, are there to show scale and setting. They are not included in your purchase.