An Inkstone That Doubles as a Candle Holder
This piece started with a stack of old stone, not a commission. A friend who knew the shop's fondness for stone-drum forms across different eras pointed Baoputang toward a particularly good batch of old Kengzai material — and from it came five small drum inkstones, 小砚鼓.
The shape itself was first tried back in 2017, for three practical reasons: it's light and small enough to carry, useful for fine regular-script or sutra-copying work; it happens to be the right size to hold one of the shop's own handmade beeswax candles; and on a desk where it isn't doing either of those jobs, it just sits well as a small object worth looking at. This 2018 batch used particularly rich stock — veined with the 青花, 火捺, and 黄龙斑 markings collectors look for, the stone running black-red, close in character to the more famous Laokeng material. The design changed slightly from the year before: the writing surface was recessed into a shallow well this time, which holds more ink and grinds faster against a matching cylindrical ink stick.
Three uses, one small object — proof that a good piece of stone doesn't need to settle on being only one thing.