I bought a little watch a while back that was interesting for several reasons.
It was a Seiko Business Bell, which is a mechanical alarm watch made in June 1967.
Why interesting?
Firstly, this was just around the time of the quartz crisis which caused an absolute bloodbath in the watch industry as the new high-accuracy quartz technology was rendering mechanical watches almost redundant, Seiko were producing interesting features. If you owned one of these, you could set a time and at (approximately) that time, your Business Bell would purr like a copper cat that was a little bit too excited to be on your wrist.
Business Bell is somehow one of cutest names I've ever heard of for a product. Having 'Bell' in the name makes sense, but it's almost as if the marketing team were trying to advertise the product to the financiers of 1970 Ginza so just stuck 'Business' in the name. What do you buy someone who loves business and needs audible reminders of the time? The new Seiko Business Bell
It had a replacement gold crown. The crown is one of the 2 nipply protrusions on the side of the watch. One of them basically controls the alarm part and the other allows you to set the time. The watch collecting impulse in me saw this gold crown as an alien artefact. For most collectors, the ideal is to have fully 100% original in every way. Ideally with all parts original, original bracelet, no polishing. If it still has the box, instruction manual and the price tag on that's ecstacy. In fact there seems to have been a subculture of impossibly forward thinking people who were keeping 1970s Japanese watches in supreme condition, NOS (New Old Stock) to make them available for our purchase in 2024.
Now watches do break, and they're not designed to last for decades in full use, so unless it's been sat in a bank vault for 50 years, it's likely to have needed repair. The ideal is to use original parts but this can be expensive or impossible (especially if it's a weird one). It is generally ok to use certain parts from 'donor' watches, and ideally the exact same type of watch, but it's definitely frowned upon to use random parts from another watch, especially if you use the wrong movement, handset, caseback, bracelet etc. These are called 'Frankensteins' and are pretty common given that there's a finite number of vintage watches in the world.
I was always puzzled why the person who owned this Business Bell put such an incongruous gold crown on it.
Then I read about Kintsugi.
Kintsugi is the name for a Japanese aesthetic practice of repairing broken porcelain with lacquer infused with precious metal dust. It's based on a philosophy of Wabi-Sabi, which itself is a complex concept that is somewhere between a design aesthetic (natural forms and minimal designs) and philosophy (the connections between transcience, permanence and the relationship of that with human and feeling). Basic features of Wabi-Sabi are the idea that you find beauty and melancholy in the passage of time and how it is reflected on objects. Kintsugi zooms in on the idea that you celebrate the event of the breakage in a piece of pottery by repairing it with something more beautiful. This isn't trying to disguise a break with glue, this is about making the break almost the most noticeable part of the pottery.
If you visit gardens, museums and design houses across much of Asia, China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam etc. you can see hints of something similar to Wabi-Sabi but it's most associated with Japan (they named it) and to a lesser extent China. Kintsugi seems to be mostly a Japanese idea. Legend has it that in 15th century Japan a feudal lord dropped a valuable tea urn. It must have been valuable as it was shipped to China for repair. When it came back it had been repaired with metal staples (which was the method of premium pottery repair of the time). I've read two guesses as to what happened next. The first is that everyone thought the repair resembled locusts and people considered this to be highly fascinating. The second is that people thought this to be unsightly so sought to find a more beautiful way to repair pottery.
I prefer the first interpretation, given laquering techniques existed in Japan for hundreds (if not thousands of years) before this incident, so it's hard to imagine this sparked the idea of using it for repair. Either way, it sparked a fashion of celebrating the repair itself and kintsugi repaired pottery becoming more prized than it was pre-smashing.
The attraction of Kintsugi to me is initially that it can look absolutely stunning. Largely based on the fate of how the pot breaks; and it’s almost unique in that the more damaged a piece is, the more beautiful it becomes. Within that there are some lessons both for sustainability (reusing something that was valueless in a new way) and psychologically (the reimagining of physical flaws as part of the journey and being positively attentive to them).
It occurred to me that this little Business Bell watch could well have been subject to the watch equivalent of Kintsugi. It made me feel that while there is definitely some pleasure in restoring watches to their original glory, it is not the only way, and it is equally valid to celebrate the journey that each piece has been on. The scuffs and scrapes and missing bits are part of its journey through life, and doesn’t make them a monster but something to appreciate.
I didnt know about the philosophy of Kintsugi when I started painting vintage watch dials but it feels like I’ve found a set of principles that help me explain the thoughts and feelings that go into each work as the artwork is a part of the journey of that watch (the bit of time it spends with me and whoever comes after me), it may help me try more bold changes in materials (like my Jules Verne style piece below) and indicate why my work tends to go better with older or more weathered pieces.
For more of my works check me out at www.mattanderson.online
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