Jane Dorner on a way of looking at collections:
Here is a shipwreck stack with a difference – they are all egg-cups. And I mean that literally; I have painted some of my collection of Qianlong and famille rose blue-and-white tea bowls on the shells sliced from the top of eight boiled eggs. This is because for the last 50-plus years, I have been painting blown egg shells for Easter, each one bearing the theme of the year that has gone by. They reside in a cabinet specially made for them (pictured) of pear and pernambuco. The first was a portrait of my husband just before we were married, painted in the style of a 16th-century miniaturist. Then our three children were recorded in various ways and at various stages. The house we lived in, holidays, significant activities and milestones – all recorded on a hollow egg: bantam, hen, duck, and some glass-blown. In 2014 I decorated an egg with a micrograph view of the cancer cell that was to kill my husband – eerily beautiful, as was the Covid virus I constructed on an egg in 2020 complete with tiny felt spikes glued all round. Last year’s was the folly I recently constructed in my garden.
The 2023 egg set celebrates my love of ceramics and three of the tea bowls have gold leaf lines to show the kintsugi mending that they bear in real life. I gave a talk to SEACS on kintsugi mending in 2021. What makes this ‘egg’ relevant to the current year is that the one on the top of the stack is a Sukhothai fish bowl from the Turiang shipwreck (c. 1305-1370) that I acquired during the year to my great joy as I had been lusting after one for some time. This one came to me via a friend who knew the marine archaeologist who ‘rescued’ it from its watery storage in 1998, and it is in perfect condition.
When you paint something as old as this, you see it with an intensity of looking closely to get just the right colour of the sandy glaze and just the right angle of the jaunty tail of the fish – dashed off with the insouciance of production-line speed by an unknown craftsman about 1000 years ago. It would have been made by an immigrant potter from Cizhou in northern China. Mine is laboured by the anxiety of ‘getting it right’ – not least because the fish represents long life and I did not want to jinx that. But painting things in your collection is a wonderful way of really appreciating them with close attention. This one is barely 3 cm in diameter and I think it captures the spirit of the original. Painting it has made me love it all the more.
These are painted in a mixture of acrylics and watercolour. I mostly use watercolour pans; sometimes you need to mix it with soap so it adheres to the surface of the egg. I have also used coloured pencils, ink and wash, gouache and I have cut into the shell with an engraver’s drill and sculpted the egg to move it away from the ovoid form. So there is a pram, a lute, a Chinese teapot, castellations made of card and other additions using plaster-of-paris bandaging; one is a hollow egg enclosed within a Fair Isle knitted cosy and the egg of my husband’s funeral year is sewn inside black velvet with jet beads hanging off it. Every year I wonder if I will have a new idea; every year I manage to think of something.
Jane Dorner’s book The Stuff of Life is a compendium of watercolours of objects in her various collections together with the stories of what they mean to her. Available for £20 from the author plus postage (which can be astronomical). Jane is a recent SEACS London member.
