Silence

 Hiroshige

Why are you afraid of silence

silence is the root of everything

If you spiral into its void

a hundred voices will thunder messages

you long to hear

Rumi

A Wabibito

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A Wabibito

is what I want to be

Ikebana

someone who understands the wisdom

of the grasshoppers and the rocks

Zen Rock Garden Kyoto

I want to become satisfied 

with my life

a simple life lived modestly

I want to pare back

and live now

and feel the peace
of the natural world
around me

Tea House

Wabi Sabi

is a Japanese view or aesthetic

based on the acceptance of transience

It suggests we find a beauty in 

all that is

Imperfect

Impermanent

and 

Incomplete

Bonsai Brooklyn Botanic Gardens

in the humble

the modest

and the unconventional

Shakuhachi Flute

Wabi Sabi nurtures all

that is authentic by acknowledging

those three simple realities

Nothing lasts

Nothing is finished

Nothing is perfect

Tale of Genji text 12th Century earliest illustrated Handscroll

The word Wabi

speaks of a rustic simplicity

a quietness

with the quirks and anomalies

which add uniqueness

and an elegance 

to a creation

Tea Cup, Hagi Ware 17th Century

Sabi

suggests a weathered rusty beauty 

and serenity

that comes with age

when the life of the object

and its impermanence are evidenced 

in its patina and wear

Kenrokuen Hanami

This is how I want to age

with wabi sabi

accepting the natural cycle of growth

decay and death

wearing the bloom of time

 Shigaraki Jar

Wabi Sabi can be considered
the material representation 

of Zen Buddhism

 

Black Raku Tea Bowl, 16th century

A wabibito

is a person

who is free in heart

who is comfortably oneself

and has the ability

to make do with less...

to appreciate the nobility
in the simple
and the common

A man is rich

in proportion to the number of things

which he can afford

to let alone

Henry David Thoreau

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Labelled Illustrations from Wiki commons

Tom Kristensen ~ Ukiyo-e

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Seagulls



Tom Kristensen 1962-
is an Australian

Conjurong Beach



a landscape designer by profession,
who is also a Sosaku Hanga artist

Currawongs


an avid collector
of Japanese art prints
and inspired
by the prints of Paul Binnie
he decided to teach himself
wood block printing

Dunes and Fence



and learned most of what he knows
from the internet!

Grass and Banksia



Like other Sosaku Hanga artists
he carves and prints his own work

Moonlight



Kristensen's images
are based on digital photography
which he has computer manipulated

Pigface



Whist his images may begin
in the age of technology
he uses traditional Japanese tools,
mulberry washi and mineral pigments

Post and Rail



most of these prints
are from a series titled:
Thirty six views of Green Island

Rock Platform

Although Kristensen has had
no formal training in art
and held no exhibitions

Flotsam



his work is greatly admired
and sought after
by lovers of Ukiyo-e




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Koson Ohara

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Koson Ohara 1877-1945

A cuckoo



Although he was a ukiyo-e artist
Koson Ohara originally studied painting
and became proficient
in both watercolours and oils.

Flowering wisteria and insect

In the early 1900s
during the Russo-Japanese war
he produced war prints
as the interest in traditional ukiyo-e
had all but died out.

Flycatcher and spider



But within ten years
the camera had replaced
the print maker as the medium
for disseminating news

Hawk and setting sun



Koson is the best known print maker
for kacho-e-
prints of flowers and birds

Kingfisher on stump



Koson taught at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts
where an American colleague
by the name of Ernest Fenellosa
encouraged him to make wood block prints
in the old style.

Monkey on a persimmon tree



After 1926 Koson returned to ukiyo-e
and was published by Wanatabe Shozaburo
the initiator of the Shin Hanga movement,
the renaissance of the wood block print art
of Ukiyo-e

Nuthatcher atop a persimmon



Practically all of Koson's prints
were exported to the USA
as Japan had lost interest
in the ukiyo-e art form

Praying mantis on a willow



Koson's skill as a painter
is evidenced in the water colour effect
of his prints

Scops owl on a branch at full moon



His kacho-e were performed
with an extremely high
degree of craftsmanship

Spring evening



Koson Ohara is sometimes known
as Hoson Ohara
Shoson Ohara,
or the other way around
It is the same artist.

Tree sparrow and bamboo



A master wood block artist
of flowers and birdlife

White fronted goose before full moon

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Jose Manuel Merello

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Jose Manuel Merello

Amarillas

When I stopped working
one of the first things I promised myself
I was planning on doing
was to make a collection of artworks
for each of the artists I loved.

La Nina de Constantinopla

I began with Picasso,
Chagall,
Modigliani
and Matisse

Green Flowers



and then I got side tracked

Boy on a Tricycle



I found new contemporary artists
whose work lifted my spirits
and spoke to me

Flores fresca de California

such as Jose Manuel Merello

The Plait

and I stayed a while
on this diversion

Florero rojo de luna

soaking up the rich colours

Velero florero de veleros

and the energy

The Optimism of Flowers

in awe of the beauty...

Jose Manuel Merello - Born Madrid 1960



Merello says of art:


"Everybody asks themselves what art is.
I think that art is any creation
that is able to lift the spirit to a higher plane
of emotion and wonderment."

I'm glad I followed my art research plan
and even gladder that I deviated from it...

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Emily Kngwarreye

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Over an early 7 am coffee at the Farmers' Market
on a rainy puddle filled Sunday morning
a friend told me a story that included two Emilys.

The first Emily is Emily Carr, the Vancouver artist,
and the second, Emily Kngwarreye.
It is the second Emily that
I am going to tell you about today...

Bush Flowers

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, 1910-1996,
lived in the Utopia community,
220 km NE of Alice Springs,
in the Northern Territory of Australia

Emily was born at Alhalkere
and raised in traditional ways,
speaking the Anmatyerre language.

She began painting when in her late seventies,
and painted prolifically
for eight years until her death.

Flower Dreaming

Emily began painting after working on batik
with other women, as part of a community project.
She initially painted primarily with line and dot
and later moved to brushes

She created over 3000 works,
averaging one painting per day.

Emily at work

In regard to the content of Emily's work
I found the following paragraph:



"What Emily painted cannot be better described
than in her own words;
her definitive and most extensive
comment given almost regardless
of the artwork in question:"

“Whole lot, that’s the whole lot -

awelye [my dreaming],
atnwelarre [pencil yam],
arnkerrthe [mountain devil lizard],
ntange [grass seed],
tinge [dreamtime pup],
ankerre [emu],
intekwe [favourite food of emus, a small plant],
and kame [yam seed].

That’s what I paint, whole lot.”

My Country

Emily developed her own style of painting.

In the 1970s the predominant aboriginal art style
was the lining of dots side by side.
Emily's work on the other hand
shows many dots often lying on top of each other
and of varying size and colour..

Later the dots were joined into lines and stripes
representing rivers and terrain.
This was followed by the use of large brushes,
including shaving brushes, in a manner
which she called the dump dump style.

Bush Potato Dreaming

Her work then shows larger patches of colour
applied by bigger brushes
and thick lines such as those
in Bush Potato Dreaming


and later still, thinner brush lines
as in Big Yam Dreaming.

Big Yam Dreaming



A biography of Emily Kngwarreye
at the national Gallery of Australia
says that:

Emily's paintings are a representation
of the land and the spiritual forces
which imbue it
the contours and formations
of the landscape, climatic changes
the parched earth and flooding rains
the shapes and patterns of seeds and plants.

In 2008 an exhibition of 120 pieces
of Emily's work was held in
Tokyo and in Osaka, Japan.
This was considered to be a considerable coup
for an Australian indigenous artist.

This utube video

which unfortunately for most of us,
is in Japanese,

shows Emily Kngwarreye's community,
Emily working,
some of her fellow townspeople,
the landscape of the Utopia region
and a body of the artist's work,
and despite the language issue is well worth watching.

Earth's Creation (click the painting to gain a better impression)

In 2007 the painting Earth's Creation was sold,
for over $1.1m, which was then
a record figure for Aboriginal Australian artwork

Awelye - My Dreaming

A poem by Jennifer A Martiniello,
entitled Inevitable Grace,
won the Banjo Patterson poetry prize
in Australia in 2002.
This poem was a tribute to
Emily Kame Kngwarreye,
a wonderful artist and woman.

Inevitable Grace

(tribute to Emily Kame Kngwarreye)



your face
is the grace a harsh life
bestows on its survivors, each crease
a bar whose notes, escaping their dirge,
run for the high octaves like a bird
to a joyous freedom once the doors
of the cage are broken

deep-coloured as the millennia
sediments that scar the cliff faces of sacred country
your face is as ancient a bed to flowing water
carving its agelessness into the land the way
wisdom enscripts its elusive dance upon
humanity

and I watch you
slowly measuring out the journeylines with a finger
brushed with red earth and hear the dust
that others only see as a place to put their boots
open its voice and speak,
see your hand on the cave walls where they
have held the ochred spirit in the rock for all
eternity, and watch how the sun shifts
to accommodate your shadow, effortlessly,
day after day without tiring

I watch you bend
your face to greet the waterhole, see
how your laughter is caught up in the transient
ripples and released without possessive grasping
to share you with reed, tree, sky – how you
and it are the same manna
born in the same creation

I see… beyond the verticals
and horizontals of skin the hundred boys who’ve
died in custody and whom you’ve mourned, the warp
and weft of sorrow in your face for all the young women
whose eyes do not know their country or their mothers
but whose children still belong to your body – how your skin
stretches to embrace their homecoming with every
carefully recorded story, mother, son, daughter,
place and time – the same way your smile
stretches other boundaries

sometimes beyond comprehension
and lesser visions restrained to the finite byte
of desert stopover, campfire talk, a desperate camera-clutch
at a surreal otherworld that fail to distinguish how you
rise from earth, become
ancestor, mother, daughter, grandmother, granddaughter,
terrain, sacred physicality – fail to see
how the one spirit makes you blood and rock, well
and water

your face wears the intaglio of embattled anguish,
betrayal, theft, deceit, massacre and grief survived–
and when I remember the zealot piety and passion
of ANZAC, two world wars, Korea, Vietnam,
I remember also that you witnessed all of them
for nine generations and more; and as I watch you
bend to trace creation in red earth with a finger
more purposeful than Michaelangelo’s Sistine god’s
I see a light more eternal kindle in those you teach,
see each one, mirror-like, reflect the tireless radiance
of an inevitable grace

Jennifer A Martiniello

Awelye

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