Junk Love Monday: It's Black and White

It's no secret that the Blackbird girls love color. We shudder at the thought of a room with white walls. Red, teal, aqua, navy--our house looks like a Skittles factory exploded. But we also love the graphic, stark contrast of black and white mixed in with our rainbow.

The Pizio collection.

It started at a pottery show. We went specifically to visit one of my favorite clay artists, Stacy Lambert. We got to the show five minutes before the doors opened, and somehow, Stacy was already sold out. I stood there, wavering between denial and disappointment, trying to ignore the pounding in my head (you try driving 45 minutes to buy something that no longer exists by the time you get there, and see what kind of headache you end up with), when I happened to glance at the next vendor down. The pounding in my head traveled south to my heart, and I knew it was love. The table was filled with black and white pottery--owls, crows, gnarly trees...and, thanks to Leanne Pizio, a new collection was born: sgraffito.

Leanne Pizio's pottery chicken heads

We both purchased pieces, and by the time we placed them on the piano at home, knew that we had to have more. It seems like just yesterday that our collection was such a baby (only 3 pieces!), and now it has grown into a beast. We just call it The Pizio. It has grown from the piano, up the walls, across the house, and wormed its way into any available space it can find. We have allowed it to acquire color (we love the aqua!), but the majority of it is black and white perfection.

It was only after we had been collecting the Pizio pottery for a few years that we started to notice vintage sgraffito.  For two people with very little restraint, this is bad news (in a good, good way). We have a lot of conversations that start with "If we had a bigger house...," and this is one of the reasons why. If we had a bigger house, we would not only own every single piece of Leanne Pizio sgraffito that we could get our hands on, we would own every piece of vintage sgraffito we could find.

Marianne Starck for Michael Andersen Pottery, 1950s

Marianne Starck for Michael Andersen Pottery, 1950s

Marianne Starck for Michael Andersen Pottery, 1950s

And, if we had a bigger house, and it happened to be in the Czech Republic, we would want it to look like one of these:

Exterior of Schwarzenberg Palace, Czech Republic

Czech Republic, Sgraffito Exterior; photo by Paul Harris