Here's another Japanese work by the artist Sesshu (1420-1506). This is one of my favorite images from the textbook for the East Asian Civilizations course I took while doing my B.A. Here, too, there is a real separation between the foreground and the background, though here it is the background that is highly abstracted.
Revision: I updated my original scan to a version I found on the internet (what would we do without google??), which is not only in colour and of better quality than my version, but also includes a very nice border.
7 comments:
I love old Japanese art, especially Hokusai and the like. Does anyone know of any interesting modern Japanese artists? I would be greatly interested in that.
Hmmm, I like the use of heavy line at the front, and as you go back it gets thinner. A simple, and very effective trick. why is japanese work from this era often taller than it is wide?
wow. gorgeous work.
homework assignment: who ARE the hot, current japanese artists? i'm sure there must be some great moderns doing variations on these old themes.
For a hot, current Japanese artist I'd like to nominate Takao Tanabe although in reality he is Japanese-Canadian and an old man to boot. I saw a retrospective of his stuff at the Vancouver Art Gallery last winter, and it was amazing. (Especially his more recent landscape paintings of the west coast that are massive, detailed and full of a silent awe.)Unlike the Japanese artists of old Mr. Tanabe likes his pictures wide, and when I say wide I'm talking like 10 plus feet wide.
Unfortunately, I didn't come across too many good examples of his work on the Interweb, but here's one to give you an idea. Also this is a recent interview (or the first half anyway) as published in the Globe and Mail.
also a former Winnipegger.
The Tankao Tanabe artwork is gorgeous. I'm so out of the art loop. Sigh
If I am not mistaken, older Japanese art used to be painted on scrolls, lending itself to either tall, narrow paintings or wide, short paintings.
Post a Comment