Cloud Appreciation

A nice section of an interview with Cullom Gallery artist Binky Walker in Charles Mudede's article today in The Stranger, The Cloud Appreciation Society.  When I showed Binky's ethereal drawings of clouds in 2009, the gallery was still new as was this blog.  If you missed them then, here are a few images of the artist's beautiful meditations on the ephemeral nature of clouds. 

Binky Walker.  Triptych no. 1.  Graphite on paper.  Each panel: 8 x 8 inches.

Binky Walker.  detail, Triptych no. 1.  8 x 8 inches

Binky Walker.  Triptych no. 3. Graphite on paper.  Each panel: 8 x 8 inches.

Binky Walker.  detail, Triptych no. 3.  8 x 8 inches

The exhibit at Cullom Gallery was titled, ukiyo-e: pictures of the floating world, in a reference to the original pictures of the floating, or fleeting, world that were Japanese woodblock prints of the 18th and 19th centuries.  You can read more about the exhibit here, here, and here. 

Recently, Binky is hard at work on a new suite of single drawings, which we hope will be ready for exhibit at Cullom Gallery in late 2012.  The artist's new body of work continues her close observation and meditation on natural phenomena, this time looking at the transcendent properties of light.  I have been watching her progress with great excitement; the suite is perhaps her best work to date!

Finally, on what is a windy and rainy day here in Seattle, I couldn't resist including this short study for one of Binky's video projects in progress.  Title is Seeing the Wind.  Please stop by the gallery to see more by this talented artist.



Seeing the Wind from binky walker on Vimeo.

What's So Japan About It?

During the month of May, in conjunction with Cullom Gallery's current exhibit, East by West (highlighting work by eleven different artists who draw on technical and aesthetic traditions of Japanese art on or of paper) participating artists are invited to comment on the question, What's so Japan about it?" as it relates to their own work.  In the first response, Kansas City artist, Saskia Lehnert, shares her nexus of ukiyo-e, gender identity, and looking at Japanese culture from the outside in.  B.C.

Saskia Lehnert. Looking into the Sun: The Appearance of the Artist Imagining Herself as a Japanese Warrior in a Kurosawa Film. Japanese woodblock print. 22 x 15 inches.

The piece in question is a self-portrait entitled, “Looking into the Sun: The Appearance of the Artist Imagining Herself as a Japanese Warrior in a Kurosawa Film.” The image used to create this woodblock print comes from a photograph, distilled through a line screen pattern in photoshop, carved with a dremel tool in woodblock, and printed in the traditional Japanese style, known as moku hanga. This print was originally conceived as a kite print, and in fact an artist's proof from the edition was mounted and exhibited as a kite in Japan. The subject and title of the print contains many ukiyo-e references, and was originally inspired by traditional Japanese kite prints of the Edo period (1603-1868): namely the 'big head' kites such as the Daruma kites and those depicting close-up, enlarged head shots of famous actors of the day or great warriors from Japanese history. During that time period in Japan, the government under the Tokugawa Shogunate kept tight control on every aspect of people's lives, and everyone was expected to keep to a very specific place and role in society. As John Stevenson notes in the book, “Japanese Kite Prints”, during the seventeenth century, “kite-flying itself could be a mild form of rebellion against a strictly stratified hierarchy. Commoners loved to fly kites over the compounds of noble families in Edo: though not specifically forbidden, this was considered a way of thumbing the nose at social superiors.” Indeed, it was this very idea that provided the main inspiration for this print: the power of flying symbolically through the sky over the heads of society below. I decided that the 'big head' in my version of a kite print needed to be mine. Not that my ego is currently so enlarged as to need to fly above everyone else, but I felt that a bit of self-empowerment through art- making would certainly be in order for my own personal time and place in the world today.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861) “Mutsuki (the New Year's Festival)”. From the series, Five Festivals (Go sekku no uchi) c. 1845

The title of my print gives a nod to Yoshitoshi's famous print series, "32 Aspects of Customs and Manners (32 Aspects of Women)," produced at the end of the nineteenth century. These prints, with titles such as, “Looking sleepy: the appearance of a courtesan of the Meiji era”, or “Looking weighted-down: the appearance of a waitress at Fukagawa in the Tempo era”, depict women from various time periods in Japanese history caught in every-day moments of their lives. I adopted the naming conventions of these titles to draw a comparison between Yoshitoshi's depiction of women and my own contemporary depiction of my female self outside the Japanese tradition. Although Yoshitoshi shows a sensitivity to the women he depicts, which in my mind exceeds many of his ukiyo-e predecessors, I still hope to highlight the difference in the way his women 'look' and the way I 'look' as both the subject and the artist of this print.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839 - 1892) “Looking relaxed: the appearance of a Kyoto geisha of the Kansei era” (1789-1801). From the series: Thirty-two Aspects of Women published by Tsunashima Kamekichi, 1888

Yet not only have I muddied the gender role in this reference by 'imaging myself' into a heroic Japanese male role, unlike Yoshitoshi, it is not a role from a specific time and place in Japanese history that I take my inspiration from, but more, from my rather removed impressions of Japanese history as gathered from the movies and cultural artifacts exported from Japan, like what I absorb from watching a Kurosawa samurai film. More layers, more degrees of separation, but perhaps instead of being a romanticizing, exoticizing force, I can turn that distance into an advantage and not a disadvantage.

from Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film, The Seven Samurai

Additionally, by using myself as the subject of the print, and then imagining myself into a typical ukiyo-e subject, it gave me a chance to examine more closely my unique connection to the ukiyo-e tradition, and the ways in which it and the larger picture of Japanese artistic and aesthetic concerns inform my own work. It became a means to highlight the contradiction of a Western, American, woman artist in the twenty-first century with minimal real-life connection to modern Japan working in the tradition of Japanese woodblock prints. Also, it was a way to find the resolutions inherent in that contradiction. And so, there I am, looking heroic, looking fierce like a traditional samurai warrior. I am looking into the (Rising) Sun, both literally and symbolically; it's nebulous, it's slightly blinding, it's hard to describe what I see, but I'm still seeking to find that insight, perhaps an insight that only an outsider can bring, that only an outsider can take away. After all, the technique, content, and inspiration used in my prints exists just as much outside the ukiyo-e tradition as in it; It's quite an interesting hybrid indeed.

In the Night Kitchen - with Tabaimo

Thanks to artist, Wuon-Gean Ho, for turning me on to this great hanga-esque film.  Enjoy with a bowl of ramen.

Rainier - 36 Ways

This is the last week to see Cullom Gallery artist, Kristina Hagman's, recently completed color woodcut suite, 36 Views of Rainier, on view at Seattle University's Kinsey Gallery, through March 19, 2010.  Deborah Burns put this video slide show together along with this article for the Daniel Smith blog. 

 

Kinsey Gallery
904 12th Avenue (Corner of 12th and Marion)

Open Mon – Fri 9:00am-4:00pm
206.296.2282

The complete series is also available at Cullom Gallery, and soon online.  email or call with questions and inquiries.   info(at)cullomgallery.com or 206-919-8278.

A Local Famous View

Just in time for the Holidays, Kristina Hagman had these nice blank cards made of six of her woodcuts from the series, 36 Views of Rainier.  Actual prints from the series can be seen here.  Cards are $15 for the set of 6, plus $1.50 to mail in the US.  To order please send email to info(at)cullomgallery.com.

Introducing Sara Tabbert

Cullom Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of color woodcuts by Sara Tabbert.  For her first show at Cullom Gallery, Tabbert has incorporated her characteristic attention to the elemental beauty in natural forms of wood, water, ice, and stone, into a new series of prints based on the artist's recent trip along the famed Great Northern Railway, nicknamed The Highline.  Tabbert's series of ten reduction woodcuts considers the ‘little pieces of something’ sprinkled my human life amidst the stark topography and grandeur of America's Rocky Mountains and the Northern Great Plains.

In a nod to ukiyo-e landscape designs by Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858), Tabbert's views from Glacier Park, Montana to Fargo, North Dakota, along a well-known and linear route, recall the ukiyo-e master's Famous Views of the 53 Stations of the Tokaido Road.  Also in keeping with the format of many of Hiroshige's prints, Tabbert's Highline uses the tall and narrow paper size known as tanzaku or 'poem strip' (roughly 14 x 5 inches).  Whether hinting at a view through a cracked shoji screen, or capturing what the eye sees in a flash through the window of a speeding train, a landscape (by definition in the West, a horizontally-oriented view) seen in tanzaku format challenges our notions of perspective, scale, and scope, instead emphasizing the strata of a landscape's fore, mid, and background, as seen bottom to top.

Born in Fairbanks, Alaska, Sara Tabbert received her Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art from Grinnell College, Iowa, and her Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where she studied with Karen Kunc.  Sara Tabbert's prints and wood carvings were showcased in the solo exhibit, Near Water, at the Anchorage Museum, from December 5, 2008 - January 25, 2009.  Her prints are among public and corporate collections including the Anchorage Museum; Swedish Medical Center, Seattle; and Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska.

The Highline & other new work

November 5, 2009 - January 2, 2010

Cullom Gallery

313 Occidental Ave S

Seattle, WA  98104

206.919.8278

Map 

Email for more information

Here is the third and final portion of my email conversation with Binky Walker, my thoughts in gray, hers in black. The exhibit of her drawings, ukiyo-e: pictures of the floating world continues at Cullom Gallery through October 31st.

The pun is literally your floating ukiyo - clouds - and the pictures (the 'e' in ukiyo-e) you have produced of them. But further, the ideas you have turned around in your mind are much the same as those originally attached to ukiyo: the beauty found in sadness. The coming awareness that we and all things are temporary. You are finding peace with this I think. And certainly you are finding beauty in these ideas and teasing it out for all of us to consider.

Seems you teased out not only the title for this show and its reasons, but something more subtle. That these drawings reflect a contemporary interpretation of ukiyo-e as a re-appropriation of the original intent of ukiyo: to remove the profanity and experience fully the profound beauty and underlying sorrow of our own transience.

The moments (days, months, years) drawing the clouds I rested in a state of intense awareness of that sorrowful beauty. Both the sorrow and the beauty were almost more than I could bear. Simply looking into the sky brings me to tears, knowing what I see will only happen this once in all of eternity. It felt a blessing and responsibility to have been chosen by the clouds to bear witness. This intensity is overwhelming and brings a desire for the profane . . . for "stylish pleasures." To escape what I cannot escape, to disregard that I am bound to the floating world.

The twisting of the ideas of ukiyo that occurred during the Edo period in many ways makes a mockery of its original ideas. By the 18th and 19th centuries it had come to mean a blend of hedonism and laissez-faire. And the contrast between its old & new meanings I think, only heightens the poignancy of the idea in its nascent form; in the heyday of ukiyo-e, the period saw incredible growth of urban centers, industry, politics, and a refinement of decoration and pleasure seeking. In the end these are just gaudy diversions from the true beauty of impermanence.

Your last sentence says it all so beautifully.

More conversation with Binky Walker

Here is the second installment of my conversation with Binky Walker, whose graphite drawings are on view at Cullom Gallery through October 31, 2009 in the exhibit, ukio-e: pictures of the floating world. Her words are darker, mine are lighter. One more installment will follow tomorrow. And a reminder that Binky will be speaking at the gallery tomorrow, Saturday, September 19th, at 3:00 pm. Please join us and bring a friend. Cullom Gallery, 313 Occidental Ave S, Seattle, WA 98104. 206.919.8278. map.

At a certain point in my work I left narrative, emotions, and even representation and became interested in series, meditation, and looking more deeply at what is here. The discipline necessary to accomplish a project like the clouds is in fact a years-long meditation. Working in this way opens my mind to enter other levels of consciousness, other ways of knowing what is here. I like to be here because it is a very peaceful place and also seems a more truthful experience of existence. My hope is that someone looking at the work can enter that same realm from the other side, through the act of surrendering their attention.

My artistic trajectory prompted an exploration into Buddhism and the mystical branches of other religions. The truth explained in these readings often reflects similar observations I make during the course of my drawing meditations. Japanese Buddhism, its focus on enlightenment as coming through nature and the natural world, closely resembles my experiences as an artist. I do not consider myself a religious person, however I am a very spiritual artist. I also read a lot in science, which I find in its deepest sense to be grappling with issues of spirituality.

I had to chuckle at the literal pun that comes to mind when I consider your personal process along side the century's-old turn-of-phrase that came to define much of woodblock print making and the zeitgeist that predominated in the major Japanese cities from the 17th century to the turn of the 20th century, that is ukiyo, or 'the floating world' and ukiyo-e, the popular 'pictures of the floating world' that were born out of (some world say the twisting of) this phrase.

The floating or sorrowful world . . . the singularly human recognition of my own transience here and the fear I feel face-to-face with the prospect of (imminent) death. Death itself having no more permanence than winter summer spring fall, another season of an existence I am forever part of, as I disperse from this bodily form into other forms. Like clouds, I have no discrete moments. To hold this in awareness: being here sublimely beautiful, and supremely cruel. Ukiyo as you explain it encompassing the whole of these seeming contradictions, existence one sorrowful beauty. More sorrowful for being beautiful, more beautiful in the sorrow that the death of each moment brings.

"Ukiyo in early Japanese poetry is the floating, transient, idle world. As originally used in Chinese poetry, the term is resonant with the pessimism and melancholy of Buddhist philosophy." – taken from a text on ukiyo-e.

Only our human minds – not the conscious universe – find the death of the body more real than death of a moment. The discrete divisions of past, present, and future are human constructs upon which to rest a continuously changing present. The definition of time as the ancient Jewish mystics saw it: the measure of difference as perceived from our human eyes. The truth is, we are eternity: perpetual motion of form to form, with no end to a transformation we are forever part of. Seen in this light - the Buddhist light - transience is permanence, optimism in this beautiful sorrow. The clouds taught me this.

About the process

In lieu of an artist's statement for the exhibit, ukiyo-e: pictures of the floating world, the artist, Binky Walker, and I prepared excerpts from our correspondence leading up to the show. We felt that it might be interesting for those not involved, to have a glimpse into the collaborative process engaged in between gallery and artist: me, toward an understanding of her artistic process; she, toward an awareness of her indirect connection to centuries-old Japanese ideas; and for both of us, through this back and forth, an intriguing acknowledgment of a convergence of ideas, across cultures and centuries. I will post segments of our conversation to this blog over the course of the next week.



Why do I muse on clouds, or attend to what is fleeting?

The impulse of my mind is to grasp onto what I believe will not change, transfixed by what I hope will never leave me. Impermanence is too frightening: I cannot fathom a self this precious and so determinate. Yet in comparison to the billions of light-years that are but a moment in the heavens, my human life is more fleeting than I experience the clouds.

what I believe will not ever change
what I hope will never leave me
determinate
interior resonance

determinate - what does this word really mean?

precisely determined or limited or defined;
not continuing to grow indefinitely at the apex;
being final or conclusive

All our human measures are determinate - years into seasons into days into hours into minutes into seconds - subdivided infinitely to make smaller and smaller measures of permanence. Clouds defy language, remain unfixed in their beauty. Despite these increments and measures, clouds cannot be pinned down in time. Perhaps it is a condition of humanness to be shocked by mortality.

Is this your struggle? It seems to me that you have found peace in your exploration, in the real self of the clouds, and your real self.

Are you still struggling?

When I understand muself as part of...as cloud...there is nothing to struggle against -- only peace. But my mind does not rest here. Even with all this evidence, even in peace.

ukiyo-e: pictures of the floating world

Binky Walker. Triptych no. 3, 2008. Graphite on paper. Each panel: 8 x 8 inches on 15 x 15 inch paper

Cullom Gallery is pleased to present ukiyo-e: pictures of the floating world by artist Binky Walker, a series of 15 graphite drawings in the form of triptychs, each of which chronicles a brief passage in the ephemeral life of a cloud. Walker’s contemplative process and resulting drawings conjure the 16^th century Buddhist idea of ukiyo, or floating world: the stark and sorrowful beauty experienced as we become aware of our transience in this temporal, or floating, reality.

Over the course of two years, Walker performed daily meditations through the act of drawing. Contemplating on paper the minute shifts of clouds, she bore witness to the infinite differences that occur within their slightest movement, allowing an instant to suspend itself across the long duration it took to complete each image. These quiet, exquisitely rendered drawings question Western notions of time - our absolute belief in divisions of past, present and future - and beckon viewers to deeply consider their place in the ukiyo of a perpetually changing present.

By the mid-17th century in Japan, the meaning of ukiyo strayed from its austere Buddhist origins and came to define the decadent urban vitalization of the Edo period, marked by a ubiquitous pursuit of fleeting pleasures such as the kabuki theater, or the company of celebrated courtesans. Ukiyo-e, or pictures of the floating world, became the common name, still in use today, for the popular woodcuts that recorded the myriad amusements of the nouveau riche merchant class.

With this exhibit, Walker offers a contemporary reinterpretation of the centuries-old Japanese tradition of ukiyo-e by re-appropriating the original intent of ukiyo from the trivial. Her reverent treatment of the ephemera of clouds makes palpable the beauty and underlying sorrow of our own transience, summoning the viewer to experience the profound intensity inherent in every moment of this temporary, floating existence.

The exhibit, ukiyo-e: pictures of the floating world is on view September 3rd through October 31, 2009. Cullom Gallery will also host an artist’s talk and discussion with Binky Walker on Saturday, September 19th at 3:00 pm.

Cullom Gallery, located in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood, focuses on the tradition and influence of Japanese woodblock prints and works on paper. The gallery is open Tuesday through Thursday, and Saturday from 10 to 5, and every first Thursday until 8 pm.

Cullom Gallery
313 Occidental Ave S
Seattle, WA 98104
206.919.8278
info@cullomgallery.com
Map

Binky Walker. (detail) Triptych no. 3, 2008. Graphite on paper. 8 x 8 inches on 15 x 15 inch paper

Hokusai, the movie

I will never be as hip as my friend Jay, who sent me this great little movie a few months ago.  I like this film on so many levels - soft-handed animation of Hokusai's prints, a succinct art history lesson, all wrapped in a cool lo-fi quality.

Watching Tony White's creation (made way back in 1978, buy the way) gets me thinking about how frequently Japanese prints make their way into contemporary art and design, from little ubiquitous quotes like this tee-shirt ($49.99(!) on Ebay)

to full-fledged inspiration as seen in the art of Masami Teraoka, Roger Shimomura (really obvious examples - send me yours), or a recent favorite of mine, Eva Pietzcker, and how often most viewers aren't aware of the real source material.  This can get me down worrying about how my generation or the next will ever get excited about Japanese prints, (and sure, for my sake, start collecting them.)  Then I see something like this video for a (beautiful) Jose Gonzales tune, Hand on your Heart, (thanks again, Jay) and I perk up a little.

Is appreciation and knowledge of Japanese prints dying off?  Some days it feels that way.  Are there other 30 or 40-something Japanese print collectors out there?  Are you alone among your peers, or have you been able to turn any of your friends onto prints?  How do you regard Japanese in your life given that the world of conceptual art looms so largely in art magazines, interior design, contemporary art museums, and art fairs?  Are there other painters, printmakers, or video artists out there who find Japanese print inspiration creeping into your art?  If you're out there, I'd love to hear from you.