Plate from a Royal Berlin China Service c. 20th century

This Royal Berlin china plate is a riot of imagery and decoration, a ceramic canvas, if you will! The warm, peachy ground and bold red-black figures remind me of the immediacy of process. It's as if the artist was less concerned with perfection and more with just getting the image *down*. I'm drawn to the central figure with a weapon in hand. The paint is applied with confident strokes, creating texture in the drapery and the bodies of the winged creatures on either side. See how the linear marks are almost playful – not quite hieroglyphs, but somewhere between writing and pure decoration? I love that ambivalence! It makes me think of Picasso's ceramics, or maybe even Cy Twombly's scrawls. Art's an ongoing conversation, right? And this plate, with its ancient echoes and anonymous maker, has plenty to say, even if we're not quite sure what it all means.