JapaneseArt

The Ryogoku bridge–the Brooklyn Bridge of Tokyo? Week 15, Tuesday

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Bridges do seem to be particularly print-o-genic, judging by the number of prints that I have found of bridges. Of course, the Brooklyn Bridge is particularly iconic–and there are a lot more excellent pictures of it than of most of the other NY city bridges (which is why I picked it for the week-long series) . Some of that reflects its age, of course–it’s the oldest of the East River crossings and one of the oldest in NYC that’s still in use.

When flipping through images from Hokusai’s famous series The 36 Views of Mount Fuji, my eye was caught by the print Sunset across the Ryogoku Bridge from the bank of the Sumida River at Onmayagashi. With this print, as with many others, there were many editions, printed from reproduced blocks, with different inks, over decades. Not surprisingly, the colors vary tremendously. I looked at a number of editions of this print, and finally honed in on one that seemed to capture all the colors well. Almost all of the them had rich blues and greens, but the orange-pink of the sunset was barely visible in most. (Perhaps that color faded more quickly than the other colors?)

When I started reading about the Ryogoku bridge, there were many references and numerous pictures spanning the centuries. It is one of many bridges in Tokyo, but it dates back to the 17th century. I think it qualifies as a reasonable analog to the Brooklyn Bridge. I am not proposing to do a week of prints of the Ryogoku Bridge (though there are more than enough to do months!), but in addition to the one print that I was planning to share, I will include a few others.

In the original Hokusai Sunset print, I love the texture of the water aft of the boat, as well as how the sunset diffuses out behind the bridge, the mountain and the distant land.

If you have clicked through to the WordPress blog, then you can click on any of the images and get a magnified gallery with captions, which allows you to scroll through the images one by one, and you can zoom in on any of them as you would on any image on a web page.

The beauty of bare trees in winter: Sunday

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We tend to think of the beauty of trees as being bound up with their leaves, especially the gorgeous colors of autumn. We’re now in the season of bare branches, which have their own beauty.

“Ages may have passed before man gained sufficient mental stature to pay admiring tribute to the tree standing in all the glory of its full leafage, shimmering in the sunlight, making its myriad bows to the restless winds; but eons must have lapsed before the human eye grew keen enough and the human soul large enough to give sympathetic comprehension to the beauty of bare branches laced across changing skies, which is the tree-lover’s full heritage.
In winter, we are prone to regard our trees as cold, bare, and dreary; and we bid them wait until they are again clothed in verdure before we may accord to them comradeship. However, it is during this winter resting time that the tree stands revealed to the uttermost, ready to give its most intimate confidences to those who love it. It is indeed a superficial acquaintance that depends upon the garb worn for half the year; and to those who know them, the trees display even more individuality in the winter than in the summer. The summer is the tree’s period of reticence, when, behind its mysterious veil of green, it is so busy with its own life processes that it has no time for confidences, and may only now and then fling us a friendly greeting.”
Trees At Leisure, Amanda Botsford Comstock, 1916

Today I share two prints created 60 years apart, emphasizing the beauty of bare branched trees in winter.

1991-V, Grietje Postma (Color reduction woodcut, 1991) and Winter Moon at Toyomogahara, Kawase Hasui (Woodcut, 1931)

Wishes for the New Year from Hokusai: week 12, day 6 (Thursday)

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Hokusai created a series of 5 prints traditionally used as New Year’s decorations. Each contained symbols suggesting wishes or hopes for the New Year. These were all vertically oriented long pieces, suggesting they were mounted on silk scrolls and hung, in a manner usually intended for ink brush paintings. One commentator on today’s print even suggests the tree branches covered in snow were created to suggest brush strokes rather than the clean lines characteristic of these woodblock prints.

Today’s print shows cranes in a snow-covered pine tree. Both cranes and pine are traditional symbols of longevity–a typical wish for the new year. This print of Hokusai’s is fairly well-known-not nearly as famous as the Great Wave off Kanagawa, nor as well-known as the Thirty-sex Views of Mount Fuji, but still fairly widespread in its distribution.

Please accept today’s print as my wish for you to have a long, happy, healthy life, with the coming year as a harbinger of that.

Two Cranes on a Snow-covered Pine Tree (Woodcut, 1834)

A successful cricket & the Japanese art of ink wash painting: week 10, day 4 (Tuesday)

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A month or so ago, I posted a Japanese ink brush painting by Sesshu, one of the earliest Japanese masters of sumi-e (Ink brush painting). Ink brush painting (also known as ink wash painting) originated in China and was adopted and adapted by the Japanese. The ink is made of particles of soot suspended in water. Colors are used in a pretty restrained manner–many paintings are only shades of gray, produced by diluting the ink to various degrees with water. Chinese ink paintings tend to be more complex, containing more brush strokes, and color is used a bit less. Japanese ink paintings tend to emphasize simplicity of form, with fewer brush strokes. Sometimes, watercolors are used to add color into ink paintings.

Years ago, I stumbled upon the work of a local artist who has studied ink brush painting quite extensively, in Japan and China. She’s an amazingly impressive person, holding a PhD from BU, and continuing to teach, consult and paint. Her scholarly field is interdisciplinary, and my best attempt to describe it would be a crossover between cultural studies, design, and urban planning (If that’s not accurate, it’s on me.) I’ve only seen her paintings online, but they are absolutely spectacular. I urge you to look at her paintings and I hope myself to be able to see some of them in person someday.

I selected one today that hews to the Japanese style of relatively few brush strokes, and is enhanced with simple watercolor. The subject is a cricket, a symbol of success and fertility. The painting conveys a lot of feeling with few brush strokes, white and a narrow range of grays, with a blue wash for the sky.

Linda Ruth Salter, sumi-e, undated

Why do I like night scenes so much? Week 8, day 4

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In addition to landscapes and especially seascapes, you may have noticed an unusual number of night scenes. I can’t say why I like them so much, but there you go. Another Japanese print from the Shin-Hanga period (modern revival of ukiyo-e, classic Japanese woodcuts) by Koitsu, a print of whose I showed back in week 1! And it was also a night scene, though a moonlit one. Today’s print is a night scene without the moon showing, either directly or by reflection. The only light visible in the print is reflection from the city and from a boat on the water. An atmospheric piece, with colors attenuated by the darkness, but oh so lovely.

Midnight Scene at Atami (Tsuchiya Koitsu, 1935, woodcut)

Hokusai’s Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji–week 7, Tuesday (day 4) of share-a-print-a-day

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Katsushita Hokusai (1760-1849) is perhaps the best known Japanese printmaker in history thus far. Much of his fame comes from the iconic print Great Wave off Kanagawa, which is part of a well-known series of prints entitled Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji (though in fact, the series contains 46 prints), which were intensely popular during the artist’s lifetime and remain so. Mount Fuji was a landmark of great importance, and many artists include Fuji in visual works.

Today’s print is entitled “A view of Mount Fuji across Lake Suwa in Shinano province”. Not only is this print beautiful, but it illustrates some interesting aspects of the production of traditional ukiyo-e woodcut print art. Most commonly, the artist would create an original drawing of the scene on thin paper. The drawing would be glued to a block of wood, and a separate artisan (the woodcarver) would carve out the pattern in the woodblock, destroying the drawing in the process, of course. Then the woodblock would be turned over to a printer for production. For color prints, several woodblocks would be carved, one corresponding to each color in the picture, and they would be printed serially onto individual pieces of paper.

It was pretty common for printmakers to start with a simple color scheme and see how the public liked the picture. If it was popular, they might carve additional blocks to add more colors (and usually had to further carve the original blocks to accomodate the added colors.) This print began life with a mostly blue color scheme, but as it was quite popular, Hokusai reworked it to incorporate a broader palette.

As if that wasn’t complicated enough, often after many printings and/or many years, woodblocks would degrade or break. When that occurred, if additional impressions were desired, someone (often not the original artist) would carve a new block to match the originals.

I am presenting two versions of this print–one printed in 1830 from the original blocks (among the earliest editions, albeit after the color palette had been broadened), and a reproduction (new block carved and printed in 1930, with a fairly different color scheme.) In addition to the differences in the color scheme, the older print seems (to my eye) to show finer details.

A view of Mount Fuji across Lake Suwa in Shinano province
(1830) (1930)

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Another digression from prints–East Asian ink brush painting: week 6, Tuesday (day 4)

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Long before my current fascination with prints began, I was enamored of Japanese ink brush painting (sumi-e), in a sort of desultory kind of way. I didn’t give it the same enthusiasm or intensity with which I have been lately learning about print art. One of the Japanese prints I was looking at over the weekend reminded me about ink brush painting, and I plunged into a frenzy of research, just as I have been doing with prints. Ink brush painting (also known as ink wash painting) seems to have started in China in the 7th century of the common era, and after becoming a major Chinese art form, was brought to Japan in the 14th century by Zen Buddhist monks from China. (It subsequently spread to Korea, though it never achieved the popularity there it had in China and Japan.) In China, this mode of painting was particularly associated with the intellectual upper class from whom government officials were drawn. Among this group, calligraphy and painting were almost an expectation and these artistic skills were part of how their class was distinguished from lower strata. Often, a picture had a large chunk of text calligraphed on it, and this might be a poem based on the picture, or the picture might have been inspired by the poem.

The painting technique was essentially an adaptation of Chinese calligraphy, using the same brushes and water-based ink. It is most often done in monochrome, typically black ink on white paper or on silk scrolls, though color is not unheard of (and is in fact present in today’s example). Shades of gray are created based on the degree of dilution of the ink. Unlike watercolors, once the ink is applied it is permanent and cannot be blended or moved around, which clearly influences the technique.

The commonest subject by far for ink brush paintings was landscapes, which you may have already noticed I love. Today’s painting is by Sesshu Toyo, a 15th century first-generation Japanese ink brush painter (i.e. his teacher was a Chinese artist who taught in Japan). Unlike the prints of Stow Wengenroth, the landscape is more abstract, though still very detailed. These landscapes, similar to the best print landscapes, draw me in and make me feel as if I’m in the pictured place.

As you can see, the scroll is very tall, with a significant amount of calligraphed text at the top, and then a large blank space between the text and the painting. In order to allow you to see the painting portion, I have cropped the picture below and displayed it at a larger size.

Western-inflected Japanese prints: week 5, Tuesday

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Some artists of the shin-hanga period (revival of uikiyo-e traditional woodblock prints in the late 19th and early 20th century) studied Western painting, and the work of those artists is very interesting. Today’s print is by Kawase Hasui (1883-1957), who petitioned the Japanese printmaker Kaburagi to become his apprentice, and was told to go study Western style painting. After a couple of years of that training, he returned to Kaburagi and was accepted and trained in the tradition of ukiyo-e. His name Hasui was given him by his master Kaburagi, and means “water gushing from a spring”.

The print actually feels more like a Japanese-inflected Western picture, but no matter how you describe it, it is lovely. It actually reminds me of the Stow Wengenroth print Cool Forest, featured last week.

Nikko Kaido (1930) [Road from Edo (Tokyo) to Nikko]

Share-a-print-a-day, week 3/Tuesday: Rainy day in Boston, rainy day print by Hiroshige

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Given that it’s been a rainy day here, I thought a print of a rainy day would be appropriate. The Japanese ukiyo-e artists depicted weather a lot–wind, rain, snow–with sudden downpours an especially common feature. As in haiku, nature and the natural environment is very important. This print, Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi bridge and Atake, by Hiroshige, was created in 1857, as part of the famous series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.  (Edo was the older name for the city of Tokyo.) Bridges were very common in Hiroshige’s prints. This particular print is one of the better known of Hiroshige’s works, and was copied in oil paints by Van Gogh (See below). I love this print like so many of the ukiyo-e scenes, because it’s very evocative–I feel like I can be in the picture.

Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake, by Hiroshige

Bridge in the Rain by Van Gogh

Day 4: Japanese print

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Tuesday’s print: After yesterday’s profound downer, today is a day for simply a pretty picture. Tsuchiya Koitsu was a Japanese printmaker active at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. He was an important part of the Shin-Hanga movement–a sort of Ukiyo-e revival. (Ukiyo-e was the classical period of woodblock prints in Japan from late 17th to early 18th century. This style fell out of fashion from the mid 18th century until the Shin-Hanga period in the late 19th. Ukiyo-e literally means “floating world”, as the classical period included many pictures of a sensual lifestyle featuring courtesans. Shin-hanga just means “new prints”.) Koitsu was quite prolific , and I love many of his prints, so I had a hard time choosing one for today. He has done a number of moonlit scenes. In the end, I selected Moonlit Evening at Osaka Castle. I expect I will return to Koitsu and show some of his other lovely prints in the future.