Hopi pot, white kaolin slip with Sikyatki design motif by Maynard and Veronica Navasie of Keams Canyon. (Husband and wife, both born in 1945.) This pot is not old, but the brown and black paint did not adhere to the white slip and have rubbed off.
The use of a white slip is a revival (first used in 1927) of the white slip characteristic of the old 19th century Polacca Polychrome Style (see 1990-03), but the Navasie family is famous for its perfect white bowls with the slip applied thin enough that it does not crackle when fired, as the earlier bowls did. When perfect, modern white-slip pots seem too perfect and stark to me. Although the drawing on this pot is beautifully executed, the faded brown and scratched black paints give this piece a gentle look, which I like. For a more perfect white-slip pot by a member of the Navasie family, see 1994-01. Maynard and Veronica are pictured and quoted in Dillingham (1994:68).