Special treat today. Someone else's pen work!
Some time ago, one of my fellow pen makers, the very gifted Jonathon Brooks began to work with the Japanese Urushi styles of lacquer art, as applied to his pens. In a very short time, he has developed some pretty amazing skills.
Seeing his work take off, I decided I really must have some of his beautiful work (I love to collect work from other artisans), and Jonathon kindly indulged me, and began work on this amazing piece, which he describes as aka-kin tamenuri (red-gold layered urushi).
I will attempt to describe the technique from what Jonathon told me, though I will undoubtedly get some points wrong. The base pen is a black ebonite Cigar style, with multiple layers of shu (red) urushi. The pattern that you can see on the surface was created using the seirei nuri technique, with gold powder applied to the pattern. After another layer of kijiro urushi, the pen is covered in a thin layer of gold powder, followed by many coats of nashiji urushi.
The result: a truly beautiful highly polished deep reddish brown pen, with fascinating gold patterns showing from the depths of the translucent urushi. one of the very cool things about urushi is that over time, it slowly becomes more transparent, revealing more the deeper layers. This pen will only get better and better with age.
To top it off, the pen is fitted with a lovely 18k nib engraved with Jonathon's Carolina Pen Company logo.
This pen has immediately fallen into the category of one of my absolute favourite pens, and a lifetime keeper. Thank you Jonathon for a very, very cool pen and fine example of excellent craftsmanship!
Cheers,
Ken
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