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| Vigilant Eye |
Showing posts with label shodo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shodo. Show all posts
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Windows and falling stones
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Shodoka Michiko Imai: Embrace your treasure/s
When I learnt via FB that the Shodoka, Michiko Imai would have a demonstration at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—my mind was made up to go to Boston. In the West, there are few opportunities to be in the presence of persons practicing any form ardently and persuasively—breathing it, so to speak. Experience teaches us what is and what is not. Having observed her manner in the virtual world that is Facebook, and having had the opportunity to appreciate her works, there was no hesitation in making a decision: Tat tvam asi (Sanskrit) That thou art.
We had planned to get there early from New York on the 6:50 am bus, and stay the length of the demonstration. I along with Noriko Miyawaki were there for only one reason—to see, meet and greet Shodoka Michiko Imai. Thats still one reason! Unfortunately, our bus was very late (not one but two breakdowns on Megabus).
But we were glad to get to see her brush three pieces: Sei Shonagon’s, Makura no soshi 枕草子 (Pillow book)/the winter section, in Kana; the charcater Ai 愛 (Love) in Gyosho (semi-cursive); and Ryu 辰(dragon), which is in the zodiac calendar 干支 (Kanshi/Eto) in Sosho (cursive). In the Pillow book piece, Michiko brought out/made extant the sound contained in the section relating to snow very admirably. Shodo has many components, and its Ways may be paralleled with being and existence itself. This becomes evident when one learns to see what a shodoka’s unique ability, and sensibility to manifest consciousness through line, with its two principal attendants—nijimi 滲み (blotting, blurring…) and kasure 掠れ (brush traces) among other inflections, can convey to a character, a line, and certainly to a body of text. In that sense, and solely in my opinion, a Shodoka and the way of Shodo is closer to Iaido and Aikido on the one hand; and Chado/Sado (Way of Tea), Kado (Way of Flowers) and Kodo (Way of Incense) on the other. It is decisive yet deliberate—honed through ones being over time. The mind through all of this is clear and tranquil.
Michiko Imai was born in Nara. Her calligraphy studies began at the tender age of four at the Baikou Calligraphy school; she subsequently gained membership to the Tenshin Kai, and later to the Cho-ko Guild. Her work has been displayed at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Osaka Municipal Museum Of Art, Nara City Museum Of Art and the Kyoto Municipal Museum Of Art; and she “is among the few to have won multiple best of category awards in national competitions (Japan).” More information may be found on her site.
Her setup for the demonstration was in the Druker Family Pavilion, Community Room 159 at the MFA Boston—a lovely space fronted by glass and open to viewing from the expansive corridor which had some people doing just that while relaxing in lovely chairs. Michiko looked resplendent working on red felts; in a dark kimono, a compact obi, and spotless tabi. Above all she moved well, and in her movement, both in her Sho as well as her artistic deportment, and overall comportment—in turn moved her audience. She spoke about the totality of her art practice (the materials, work and presentation), relationship of space to the brushed characters, a bit about brushes and absorbency; her choice of a particular brush and relationship to paper—for writing the character Ryu. she explained why it is essential for her to mount her own kakejiku (scroll). Ms Imai is also an artisan artist (Hyougushi)—one who mounts/makes scrolls; which she learnt during her apprentice at Mizuno Hyougu-ten, while she also taught calligraphy. The piece she spoke about (see image below) was well constructed and had a unique sense of balance and space dynamics. These are aspects that take years to imbue and I could not stop sharing the nomenclature of the various parts of a scroll with Noriko. That happens when one enjoys such pursuits.
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| Ryu (dragon) in Sosho |
It was also good to see the other pieces around the room, which she has calligraphed earlier, alongside various other study examples. At the back of the room, there were adjoining tables with all seats taken with visitors/afficionados keen on trying their hand at Shodo. The overall energy was very palpable and a credit to Michiko Imai.
It was soon time to leave. We managed to get an earlier bus back to New York—happy that we had availed of this opportunity. Embrace your treasure/s, thats besides: inkstone, inkstick, paper and brush for sure! Thats what happened, except that it was Ms Imai who graciously reached out and embraced, a hug in American parlance—a circle completed, the line taken back to the Big Apple.
PS: Excuse the poor angles of the images.
These links may be of interest:
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Drawing is Seeing, by Damian Fennell ARBS
The following piece was written by Damian Fennell ARBS, as a supporting text to my show Evaporated Meanings at the Hirji Gallery, Mumbai in Oct 2009. He is a sculptor with a deep sense of drawing and his works exemplify that awareness. In 2006, Damian invited me to Art in Action, in Oxfordshire to present my extreme abstract approach to drawings. It was one of the most memorable moments in my drawing exitence.
Drawing is about seeing. The primary challenge it presents lies in making the shift in the mind from seeing what you think is there to seeing what is really there. The painful but invaluable gift of drawing is that ultimately it forces the artist to recognise that we spend our entire lives seeing and therefore existing in a dreamworld – a projection of our own minds. Somehow the discipline of the drawing process breaks through that veil, because the ostensibly simplistic process of drawing what you see, whether that subject is observable through sight or only in the mind’s eye, leaves a faithful imprint of what you believed was there. Very like the detached experience of hearing a recording of your own voice as if it were someone else’s, that faithful imprint (the drawing) reflects back to the artist and to any onlooker not the ‘real’ world, but actually a record of the artist’s ideas and beliefs. Drawing involves a complex interplay of skills, but the essential one is of learning to see objectively, to turn off the labelling and recognising facility in the mind, to learn to witness like a very young child again. It is an undoing process, a right brain engagement, a discipline of consciously quietening down the left brain rationalising and filing system that habitually dominates most of or everyday thinking and perceiving, that rejects raw data absorbed through the senses in favour of a categorised version. Drawing celebrates the raw data.
Drawing is about touch. Just as the act of seeing can be experienced as a constant balancing act between the apparently paradoxical disciplines of intense concentration and the total letting go of control; similarly touch is simultaneously about both the profound connection of hand with medium right at the moment of contact and the emancipated dance of movement and accident. Touch is mark-making. The attention can become so finely focussed on the point of contact between drawing instrument and surface that no infinitesimal movement or degree of pressure is unintended. But then it takes on a life of its own nonetheless. Accidental marks occur that in the context of the whole are anything but accidental. The marks get made within an immersive field of consciousness that seems to inflate out from the sustained single-point of attention. It engulfs the mark-maker, nothing else at that moment, in that space, exists, yet the space feels vast.
Venantius Pinto’s drawings exist within this meditative genre of drawing practice – the intense subtlety and range of his marks gives the game away. His abstract drawings are highly gestural, the marks almost frenetic, but they are contained within calm compositions, and their sensitivity of touch gives them an ethereal quality, as if the energy is highly refined. Such distinctive mark-making language only evolves over years of sustained practice within this field of consciousness. Pinto’s language, although experimental and often generated in contemporary digital media, is rooted in an ancient tradition. Like his choice of media that fuses the traditional with the cutting edge, his gestural energetic marks owe a debt of allegiance to Buddhist calligraphy. Buddhist monks used the practice of calligraphy as a meditative process, much as Christian monastic orders created illuminated manuscripts. But the Eastern approach was very different of course; calligraphic pictograms were painted with quite large, unwieldy brushes that hold a lot of ink yet taper to a fine point. The pictogram is written in a flourish, a single danced movement, and the pursuit of perfection was not in the blemishlessness of the marks as it was for Christians, but in the total presentness of the act, the flourish, accompanied by a disciplined transcending of the urge to control the outcome – desirelessness. The resultant mark-making language is by its nature highly gestural and individualistic, with an overwhelming emphasis on the content in each mark. This is the tradition within which Venantius Pinto’s work seems to lie, because this is the way he seems to work. His marks are, interestingly, very calligraphic – a tendency towards short flicked strokes of varied weight surely influenced by a meditative process often with a brush. Even the long vertical scroll-like format of many of his works speaks of Eastern calligraphy. Perhaps like Chinese Brush Painting there is buried within his works a system of marks, even if subconsciously so, that each have meaning and tell a story. But more important than the story, and more insistently evident on the surface of the image, the marks speak of the exquisite interplay of concentration and desirelessness.
Damian Fennell is a Creative Director at the top architectural visualisation company Cityscape Digital, in Shoreditch, Central London, and Former Courses Director at The Art Academy, an independent fine arts diploma school on the South Bank, London. Damian’s tumblr blog.
Drawing is about seeing. The primary challenge it presents lies in making the shift in the mind from seeing what you think is there to seeing what is really there. The painful but invaluable gift of drawing is that ultimately it forces the artist to recognise that we spend our entire lives seeing and therefore existing in a dreamworld – a projection of our own minds. Somehow the discipline of the drawing process breaks through that veil, because the ostensibly simplistic process of drawing what you see, whether that subject is observable through sight or only in the mind’s eye, leaves a faithful imprint of what you believed was there. Very like the detached experience of hearing a recording of your own voice as if it were someone else’s, that faithful imprint (the drawing) reflects back to the artist and to any onlooker not the ‘real’ world, but actually a record of the artist’s ideas and beliefs. Drawing involves a complex interplay of skills, but the essential one is of learning to see objectively, to turn off the labelling and recognising facility in the mind, to learn to witness like a very young child again. It is an undoing process, a right brain engagement, a discipline of consciously quietening down the left brain rationalising and filing system that habitually dominates most of or everyday thinking and perceiving, that rejects raw data absorbed through the senses in favour of a categorised version. Drawing celebrates the raw data.
Drawing is about touch. Just as the act of seeing can be experienced as a constant balancing act between the apparently paradoxical disciplines of intense concentration and the total letting go of control; similarly touch is simultaneously about both the profound connection of hand with medium right at the moment of contact and the emancipated dance of movement and accident. Touch is mark-making. The attention can become so finely focussed on the point of contact between drawing instrument and surface that no infinitesimal movement or degree of pressure is unintended. But then it takes on a life of its own nonetheless. Accidental marks occur that in the context of the whole are anything but accidental. The marks get made within an immersive field of consciousness that seems to inflate out from the sustained single-point of attention. It engulfs the mark-maker, nothing else at that moment, in that space, exists, yet the space feels vast.
Venantius Pinto’s drawings exist within this meditative genre of drawing practice – the intense subtlety and range of his marks gives the game away. His abstract drawings are highly gestural, the marks almost frenetic, but they are contained within calm compositions, and their sensitivity of touch gives them an ethereal quality, as if the energy is highly refined. Such distinctive mark-making language only evolves over years of sustained practice within this field of consciousness. Pinto’s language, although experimental and often generated in contemporary digital media, is rooted in an ancient tradition. Like his choice of media that fuses the traditional with the cutting edge, his gestural energetic marks owe a debt of allegiance to Buddhist calligraphy. Buddhist monks used the practice of calligraphy as a meditative process, much as Christian monastic orders created illuminated manuscripts. But the Eastern approach was very different of course; calligraphic pictograms were painted with quite large, unwieldy brushes that hold a lot of ink yet taper to a fine point. The pictogram is written in a flourish, a single danced movement, and the pursuit of perfection was not in the blemishlessness of the marks as it was for Christians, but in the total presentness of the act, the flourish, accompanied by a disciplined transcending of the urge to control the outcome – desirelessness. The resultant mark-making language is by its nature highly gestural and individualistic, with an overwhelming emphasis on the content in each mark. This is the tradition within which Venantius Pinto’s work seems to lie, because this is the way he seems to work. His marks are, interestingly, very calligraphic – a tendency towards short flicked strokes of varied weight surely influenced by a meditative process often with a brush. Even the long vertical scroll-like format of many of his works speaks of Eastern calligraphy. Perhaps like Chinese Brush Painting there is buried within his works a system of marks, even if subconsciously so, that each have meaning and tell a story. But more important than the story, and more insistently evident on the surface of the image, the marks speak of the exquisite interplay of concentration and desirelessness.
Damian Fennell is a Creative Director at the top architectural visualisation company Cityscape Digital, in Shoreditch, Central London, and Former Courses Director at The Art Academy, an independent fine arts diploma school on the South Bank, London. Damian’s tumblr blog.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Lamenting the dusk, Eclipsing twilights—and Gaussian geometries
Lamenting the Dusk, Eclipsing twilights—and Gaussian geometries is an essay in progress.
This night in the late seventies exemplified the blackness of Sumi, its wide spectrum which incloud’s a deafening depth through a range of luscious gradation: sumi no notan. This analogy, and metaphor has been gifted by the journey having led me to study Shodo and Boku-ga. It was in Batim, Ilhas Goa; the birthplace of my mother, where the night howled a storm, spraying its gaussian distribution of electricity in streaks of lighting, appearing to stand still above as if this spectacular was meant only for this quiet village. The palm trees were fleetingly projecting shadows that shivered and changed shapes, intermingling forms and presenting fresher frights. Perhaps if one were to make ink out of the soot of burnt palm tress—would it be as dark as the Japanese and Chinese made sumi? The blacks appeared blacker than the Cardinal India Ink, through which I had got introduced to the concept of blackness, abysmal in density, a richness of material form—far distant from any analogy to wealth. This was a richness of tone: in depth, in texture, coalescing into phantasmal umbras, conjured by sudden flashes into the darkness.
This night in the late seventies exemplified the blackness of Sumi, its wide spectrum which incloud’s a deafening depth through a range of luscious gradation: sumi no notan. This analogy, and metaphor has been gifted by the journey having led me to study Shodo and Boku-ga. It was in Batim, Ilhas Goa; the birthplace of my mother, where the night howled a storm, spraying its gaussian distribution of electricity in streaks of lighting, appearing to stand still above as if this spectacular was meant only for this quiet village. The palm trees were fleetingly projecting shadows that shivered and changed shapes, intermingling forms and presenting fresher frights. Perhaps if one were to make ink out of the soot of burnt palm tress—would it be as dark as the Japanese and Chinese made sumi? The blacks appeared blacker than the Cardinal India Ink, through which I had got introduced to the concept of blackness, abysmal in density, a richness of material form—far distant from any analogy to wealth. This was a richness of tone: in depth, in texture, coalescing into phantasmal umbras, conjured by sudden flashes into the darkness.
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