Japanese Screens and Aerial Photography

If the screens of The Shrines of Itsukushima and Wakanoura can be thought of as a bird's eye view of that part of Japan, I decided to take a look at what the aerial photography of Japan looks like today. Yann Arthus-Bertrand's website is full of aerial photographs from all over the world, including Japan. All of the images are stunning. However this one of landscape filled with Japan's new agriculture caught my eye for a number of reasons. I could easily see, patterns moving across the frame with each having its own textural qualities. Arthus-Bertrand has this to say about these Greenhouses between Nara and Osaka.

Since the 1960s, Japan has undergone important changes in agriculture, including the development of dairy farming and fruit production, and the increase in industrial production of meat. These changes are reshaping the rural Japanese landscape. Vinyl greenhouses for the intensive farming of fruit and early vegetables have multiplied in the suburban areas of the main cities such as Tokyo and Osaka. They have even extended into such traditional rice-growing areas as the plain of Nara, the island of Honshu, and even Okoyama, to the point of supplanting rice altogether. Traditional crops such as blackberries, tea, wheat, and barley are diminishing to such an extent that Japan must import large quantities of wheat, barley, and silk. Just 30 years ago, Japan was the largest silk exporter in the world.

Japan's dietary changes are affecting not only the people but also the landscape. How would a screen painter paint these scenes? It's easier for me to see an abstractionist take on that project than a painter from the 17th century.

Japanese Screens FYI

Seriously? No one has anything to say about Rilke? I didn't know much about him other than his name, then I started reading his letters and whoosh, he floored me. I certainly didn't know his mother used to dress him as a little girl and tried to make him act like one. She had lost an infant daughter before him. This has little to do with our screens or Michael Knutson, but Rilke: if you have any opinion on the guy whatsoever- I'd like to know what it is.

Now, back to the point. The folding Japanese screen originated in China and was adopted by Japan in the Eighth Century. By the Momoyama era (say this out loud, it's fun to move your lips that way) (1568-1615) with some design changes, screens became the focal point of the home. Traditionally the dwelling consisted of open rooms with little or no furniture (because as I alluded to in the poem, the chair was invented -and should take at least 30 percent of the blame for the incredible statistic regarding our addiction to pain killers- much later.) Anyway, the rooms could be divided by opening or closing painted sliding doors fusuma, and screens. (I could use a set of those for the one room studio I live in with my husband.)

Screens softened the space. They were often used as a backdrop behind an important person (I think we're all important) or to create another area for eating or sleeping. The gold and silver had another function -and that was to reflect the light of the oil lamps. (This must have made for an ethereal atmosphere for those cloud filled stories.)

Some screens are inspired by Chinese designs and others by Japanese stories and ideas. One trick to finding out where your object is from, is to count the number of claws on a dragon; four for Chinese, three for Japanese and five for Korean.

Our screens are a pair, that's often how they were created, as sets. They have even sets of panels, from two to eight. Originally I read the screen backwards, from left to right, and had to read it right to left to understand it. I found out it is also helpful to view the screen from a low position looking slightly up. This gives you the best chance to see the screen as the artist intended.

Japanese Screens and Enfolding Fields

Thinking about the shapes and colors in The Shrines of Itsukushima and Wakanoura, I decided to take a look at Michael Knutson's paintings. This video shows his art from the recent show Enfolding Fields at Blackfish Gallery here in Portland. Knutson is currently drawing and painting spirals that to some look like colliding universes. Watching the video, I could see how at some point Knutson could have been attracted to the scenes in Japanese screens such as The Shrines of Itsukushima and Wakanoura. The screens treat us to a bird's eye view of a moment in time, much as a aerial photograph would today. The elements of the scene do become shapes that interconnect with each other.

The old saying "curiosity killed the cat but satisfaction brought him back" drove me to do a google search on Michael Knutson.  Sure enough I found Knutson and screen linked at an interview with Geoform. The interview comprises two parts that not only give a peek into how Knutson constructs his work but also a retrospective of how it developed over the years. Deep into the article (on the second page), I found the following reference to Japanese screens...

Nambam Diptych began with a 17th century Japanese screen in mind. The screen represents a bird’s eye view of a port city, and the buildings, visible through breaks in stylized, low-lying clouds, are set on parallel diagonals. The structures in my version are, of course, eccentric and non-parallel, but I thought of the space in the painting as seen from a high and hovering point of view. Like in Nighttown, its solid colored shapes are grouped in zig-zags of three planes. Some of the shapes seemed comical and animate—a reemergence of the figural impulse.

From the article I gather that it has taken Knutson many years to get to the point of seeing what the interviewer described in the statement: "Spiraling lattices of tightly interlocked forms seem to be a perfect vehicle to achieve your goal of creating what you've (Knutson) called an "all-over enmeshed space."  The interview is an excellent read. For those of us visually oriented it is also filled with images of Knutson's art from his early years in school through the present. And you can see more of  his current work in the video  above "Enfolding Fields", narrated by Carol Benson, Knutson's wife. Click here to read the interview.

Description Out of Context

I'm reading a book called Letters on Cezanne, by Rainer Maria Rilke. It hopped off one of the shelves at Powells. It's a bundle of letters he wrote to his wife while he was away in France.
Today I read one of Rilke's descriptions that seemed fitting for the week.

Paris, Rue Cassette October 12, 1907

These are the days when everything is all around you, luminous, light, barely intimated in the bright air and yet distinct; even what is nearest has the tones of distance about it, is taken away and only shown instead of being put there, as usual; and all the things that are related in distance- the river, the bridges,the long streets, and the extravagant squares- have been absorbed and hugged close by that distance, are painted upon it, as if on silk.

When I read this I rememered acutely how it was to scan the screens, each scene within the silk, the distance and nearness of a place so complete. The size of the screens (12 feet long all together) create a visual story that's miniscule in relation to the ground it covers literally.

Rilke goes on:

You can feel what a light green carriage can be on the Pont-Neuf or some red that can't contain itself, or simply a poster on the fire wall of a pearl-gray group of houses. Everything is simplified, reduced to a few regular light planes, like the face in a portrait by Manet.

What he says here reminds me of LaValle's post from yesterday, and of the gold in the screens-all that cloud-shaped gold dividing the story and taking up so much two dimensional space, like the red that can't contain itself.

He continues:

And nothing is insignificant and superfluous. The bouquinistas along the quai are opening their boxes, and the fresh or withered yellow of the books, the violet brown of the volumes, the green of a portfolio: everything is right, is valid, takes part, adds its sound to the ensemble of bright correspondences.

Ah, how sweet an end. I want to describe the screens that way. Not only because of the way he thinks to write, but because his description is apt to fit.

Screens -The Shrines of Itsukushima and Wakanoura -- Twenty Percent

Art and studying art fascinate me. A close rival is brain research. How does that gray matter up there work? How is that we can think and smell and hear and see? The New Yorker recently published an article entitled The Itch by writer and surgeon Atul Gawande. In it he talks about how we see.

We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor -- a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you'd expect that most of the fibres going to the brain's primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.

So if I understand the research correctly we all are seeing objects differently because only ten to twenty percent of the input to the visual cortex comes from the retina. What I see or what Amy sees may be boats and people but what others see may be the colors and shapes like in the image above of the right three panels of the screens. Then they add in other elements from their memories. Sometimes when I first see a complicated image like the screens in the post yesterday (also the image of the week for Week 13), I see blocks of colors and shapes. Even after I realize that there is detail within the image my main impression is the colors and shapes.

The Shrines of Itsukushima and Wakanoura

This week we will focus on two screens, The Shrines of Itsukushima and Wakanoura. Local artist Michael Knutson chose these screens as one of his two talking points for his upcoming artist talk taking place next Thursday, April 9th.
In consideration of the upcoming poetry month I will start this week off with a poem about the screens:


I read it all backwards
moving from left to right
not knowing what was coming
until I got there, to the end.

Which was really the beginning
the far right, a procession is coming
moving over the water in boats
bringing instruments, entertainers.

Stopping off on islands
along the way for lunch or tea
moving along, over mountains
where trees hide behind gold clouds.

They carry heavy boxes to ships
shop keepers cross legged
on the floor, mats rolled out
no ridiculous chairs.

All moving and sitting and moving
and sitting. Back at the end
where I began, a few people wait
like me, not knowing whats coming.

I am interested in what Knutson, whose art feels as estranged from these screens as my office cubicle and roll-around desk chair do, has to say. I guess we'll see Thursday.