silver

PEAR TREE

SILVER dust
lifted from the earth,
higher than my arms reach,
you have mounted.



O silver,
higher than my arms reach
you front us with great mass;




no flower ever opened
so staunch a white leaf,
no flower ever parted silver
from such rare silver;

O white pear,
your flower-tufts,
thick on
the branch,
bring summer
and ripe fruits
in their
purple hearts.

"H. D." (Hilda Doolittle) 1886–1961

ranson's world

Paul Ranson (1861-1909)
Lustral
Tempera on canvas
H. 35.5; W. 24.3 cm
© photo RMN, Gérard Blot

Lustral

Paul Ranson, one of the Nabis, developed an original style with Symbolist and esoteric resonances. In 1891, he made two versions of Lustral, including this one, which belonged to his friend Maurice Denis.

Apart from its enigmatic title, the work can be classed as a genre scene. It can be seen as a female nude at her toilette. A sponge and bar of soap are laid on a mat at her feet alongside an ornate pottery pitcher. Ranson has multiplied details that give the scene a more symbolic meaning; the fabric which unfurls above the bather like a snake, the swan-necked fountain with its shell-shaped basin or the flower blooming on the wall invite a more erotic reading. The ablutions of the young women are a purification rite, as the title suggests. Apart from its esoteric connotations, the term "lustral" refers to medieval mysticism: lustral water is supposed to purify souls and drive out demons. It is still used for baptisms.

Ranson invites us to attend this intimate purification, almost by breaking and entering. The colour range is reduced to a palette of greens and blues conjuring up the night. The young woman's orange-brown body emerges sharply against this dark background. Keenly interested in decorative art, Ranson has surrounded his figure with arabesques and floral motifs. The deliberate flattening of form and the simplified treatment of the colour explain the nickname Ranson was given: "The Nabi who is more Japanese than the Japanese Nabi," an allusion to Bonnard. 1

(there is a very weird blogger thing wherein if you post an image either centered or 'not placed' it will not allow type to flow normally around it. i had had two images posted like that in the 'ducks post,' so i ended up changing them both. what i didn't know, until harlequinpan's question on that post, was that in doing so i would be making changes i didn't expect. knowing he wouldn't have asked unless he didn't have access to the information on the post, i checked it out. sure enough, all the images but the ones i had re-posted were no longer live. ie. you couldn't click them to see them larger, nor find out any information attached to them. fixed.)

chase

william merritt chase was one of the most prolific of the western artists in presenting the 'stuff' of japan.

his landscapes often exhibited structures and layouts inspired by japanese work, but his portraits, with some notable exceptions did not.

In an earl[y] pastel, Shinnecock Studio Interior, ... in the Terra Foundation’s collection, Chase ... experimented with the motif of a child on the floor examining a book of Japanese prints arranged to lead the eye into the composition.

This book and the large Oriental vase on a stand anchoring the view on the right announce Chase’s sympathy with Japonisme, the European and American passion for all things Japanese that rapidly followed the opening of trade between Japan and the West in the 1850s. The tipped-up perspective and casual asymmetry of the composition indicate that Chase had absorbed more than a collector’s interest in Japanese aesthetics. 1

however, this is no exploitative fancy at japan's expense, but rather a love affair, like his friend whistler's, with forms, shapes, fabrics, patterns and designs that were new to him, and were inescapably lovely. and how better to celebrate that but to wrap in the beautiful goods and surround his most beloved people.

i began to experiment with overlaying my own mountain, water, cloud photographs, with some from the japanese masters. here are some results.



if you click on the images to see them larger, you'll see who i'm combined with.






i have been doing what i call 'woodblock fotos' for a while now;

sometimes the images are combined with those, sometimes with straight photographs.



one has actually seemed to have disappeared from my hard drive! so i'm hunting it....

famous last words

japanese prints are certainly very interesting, as japanese prints -- in other words as long as they stay in japan.







a people should not appropriate what belongs to another race; in so doing, they are apt to make stupid mistakes.













there would soon be a kind of universal art, without any individual characteristics.

-- renoir 1

white ducks

Darkening waves –
cry of wild ducks,
faintly white.

Ocean waves are dark,
only calls of ducks
faintly lighten in the sky.

Dusk falls upon the sea as
ducks call
faintly in the whiteness.

The sea darkening . . .
oh voices of the
wild ducks
Crying, whirling, white.

The sea darkens;
the voices of the wild ducks
are faintly white.

The sea grows dark.
The voices of the wild ducks
turn white.

By that fallen house the pear-tree stands
full- blooming... an ancient battle site.

Shiki


The Groundfall Pear

It is the one he chooses,
Yellow, plump, a little bruised
On one side from falling.
That place he takes first.

Jane Hirshfield


Study of Two Pears

I
Opusculum paedagogum.
The pears are not viols,
Nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.

II
They are yellow forms
Composed of curves
Bulging toward the base.
They are touched red.

III
They are not flat surfaces
Having curved outlines.
They are round
Tapering toward the top.

Wallace Stevens


May Day

A delicate fabric of bird song
Floats in the air,
The smell of wet wild earth
Is everywhere.

Red small leaves of the maple
Are clenched like a hand,
Like girls at their first communion
The pear trees stand.

Oh I must pass nothing by
Without loving it much,
The raindrop try with my lips,
The grass with my touch;

For how can I be sure
I shall see again
The world on the first of May
Shining after the rain?

Sarah Teasdale

lichts camera pattern

(via) (via)

the prints are old and the wallpapers are new, then, as now, the designs, the colors wake us, warm us, cheer us and make us glad.

(artwork clockwise: maxfield parrish, marcel poncin, william merritt chase, and utamaro. wallpapers left to right tradeworth, ritva kronlund, romo, and two from fromental. please recognize that the colors here may be just plain darn wrong.)

an element always interesting to consider, but never wholly knowable, is intent. even the person who believes they know their own intent may not. so how to speak of the international flow and flux of art and ideas.

to what extent, and i'm sure it was some, was the west's fascination with japan and all things japanese a search for (the illusion of) the simpler life. the industrial revolution had made cities louder and dirtier; how attractive then the 'peaceful'

(unencumbered by the last two century's innovations) images of that eastern nation, or even the coasts and countrysides of their own.


even the japanese, meiji period on out, designed to that desire in the west, so here we have japanese art from that period, plus several, again, of the pictorialist photographers who, along with their leader stieglitz, were busy making a new branch of art.

how much of this all was 'conscious,' the grasp and re-creation of a more bucolic reality than ever may have existed? and to whom?

(via youtube)

via the wonderful estampes japonaises