Hi All
I was not aware that Bill Patrick ( I assume you mean Bill Patrick) was putting together a collection of Shandong bottles. As far as I know Bill concentrates on the modern Ji School , and some early cultural revolution. However you can check Bill's collection on his amazing website
www.snuffbottlecollector.com (on which I hope Bill will eventually let me publish my collection on-line).
There's a link to Bill's web site in the side bar.
Personally I have never been particularly impressed by the Shandong ( "Lu") school artists - with a few notable exceptions. Also I have never been sufficiently impressed to collect their works.
Speaking very generally : the Lu school bottles seem to me simplistic, stereo-typed and often rather boringly the same. They lack the rich variety and genuine creativeness of the Ji School , so I can nearly always spot a glance a Lu school bottle vs a Ji school bottle .
No - I don't mean by that statement that I consider myself an "expert" . It's simply the fact that the differences are usually so obvious.
The same goes for the difference between the "real thing" and what I loosely call "high- grade tourist class bottles" ( and even more so regarding the difference between low-grade / factory quality bottles).
It stands out a mile.
I recently put together a collection of five goldfish ("Kai") bottles to show the differences in quality to an art collector who was not a snuff bottle collector:
a) 1 x factory-made / tourist class quality : US$5
b) 1 x high class tourist quality (real artist/ probably junior Ji School but unsigned) : US$ 50
c) 2 x good artist quality ( Song Shi, Li Hui ) : US$ 1,500
d) 1 x superb artist quality / lifetime best work example ( Song Yiming) : US$5,000 ++
The differences were immediately obvious to him. He described the steps in quality as "quantum leaps".
A lot more to say on this subject ..... and I daresay I will get some flack for what I have written
In other VMIPB news I have just finished scanning the "New CIPMA" (It's actually just Ji School bottles : price RMB 398, 310 pages, Chinese only) . This was a 3 - day job by the time I had got every page perfectly scanned straight / cropped and then re-categorized each artist's work into its own file so as to add to my DB. Nothing like a 3- day scan/ crop / file job to force one to look carefully at every page and bottle pic, as I have said before! A quick 5 minute flick through can never give justice to definitive reference books like this. Same goes for the original CIPMA : be honest with yourself - have you really spent one week just studying every artist and his / her works in CIPMA : leaning and comparing every bottle with others in its peer class ? Same goes with J.H. Leung's "New Look" ? For that matter, have you ever looked at every single bottle pic in Bill's website, let alone downloaded it ? I guess not because we all tend to use books like this as reference books only, not as a subject worth studying in its own right.
But study is the only way forward regardless of what one collects. Joey has obviously invested his time wisely in this respect, which is why he can write so definitively on DB matters which he has studied (and collected) well over the years.
I was astonished to see in the new "CIPMA" a couple of new Ji artists a few of whose early works I bought in WXS's Hengshui Museum / Shop. Now these artists are growing up ( e.g Hou Changyun).
I was even more astonished to see a few of my own bottles in the new "CIPMA"! The artists had obviously chosen pics of their best works from the past few years as examples to include in the book, and I had spotted those works soon after they were painted and snapped them up. That sounds a little cocky, I admit. But in my defense I would say that:
a) because of past study I was very certain that immediately I saw those works I knew they were something "special" and would go on to become landmark works
b) equally, because I recognized those works as landmarks, I was willing to pay what at that time were for me well -over -the odds prices based on my limited spending budget ; but since then those bottles have escalated far beyond anything I could ever afford now.
Anyway - that's enough rambling one sunday morning
Cheers
Peter
