1 of 1 | Paul Henry Devoti — Atlantis Studio, my studio home in the pueblo of San Juan de Oriente, Nicaragua
Spring arrives differently in the pueblo of San Juan de Oriente. It arrives in clay.
Primavera Jar is the season made permanent — a vessel that holds the full sensory abundance of spring in its shaved surfaces, its minty agua drip background, and its extraordinary hummingbirds caught mid-flight in brilliant contemporary color.
The backdrop sets the mood: a soft, mottled field of mint and sage agua — the dripped burnished slip technique that Atlantis Studio has made its own — applied here in the gentle tones of spring light filtering through a garden. Into that surface, the garden is shaved: butterflies emerge from the clay in three-dimensional relief, hibiscus blooms in deep rose, leaves reach in every direction along fine trailing vines.
And at the center of it all, the hummingbird: shaved from the slip clay with the care that only the most technically demanding subject deserves, then painted in the acrylic metallic combinations that give the Atlantis Shave-Away technique its signature luminosity. The blue of the throat, the rose of the wing, the orange flash of the breast — each color applied to a form that already has genuine dimension, so the bird does not merely sit on the surface. It hovers. It moves.
In every season, it will be spring wherever this piece lives.
Dimensions: 12 × 9 × 9 inches
Medium: Ceramic with agua drip burnished mint slip, slip shaving, and acrylic metallic contemporary pigment
Origin: Atlantis Studio — studio home of Paul Henry Devoti, pueblo of San Juan de Oriente, Nicaragua
Edition: 1 of 1
