Pristine Angie’s Good Homemaker Adventures at www.d332.com

A friend and I drove down to Philadelphia yesterday to see the exhibit Japanese Masters of the Brush at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A dazzling array of calligraphy and painting styles that span forty prolific years in the lives of 18th century eccentric Japanese artists Ike Taiga and his wife Tokuyama Gyokuran.

above: Two hanging scrolls from Ike Taiga flank one by Tokuyama Gyokuran

In a small, shared studio near the Gion Shrine in their native city of Kyoto, Taiga and Gyokuran lived a famously bohemian lifestyle, playing music, composing poetry, and creating their art. Contemporary woodcuts show the couple living among tattered tatami mats and torn paper shoji screens, too absorbed in their work to worry about appearances

Seal script, drunken script, standard script were all presented across hanging scrolls, hand scrolls, horizontal screens, panels, and albums. Tricky compositional techniques are employed for the both horizontal and vertical format and they range from light stately zen brevity to swirling vortices of clouds with hidden faces. Chinese literature was present in both influence and writing.

Two things surfaced when I walked through this exhibit: The importance of innovation apart from creativity - the notion that an artist is as much an inventor of his medium as he is a medium of his visions. One would be hard pressed to see an artist purely as a creator of an image when seeing, for example, Picasso’s assembly sculpture of a person using a soup ladle. Taiga and Gyokuran both experimented with different types of brushes, stamps, and printmaking tools. Innovation is surely one of the many tributaries for creativity and it makes sense that any restless artist will continue to explore not only different ways of saying the same thing, but also the different types of instruments involved.

When I try to picture Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokuran living in squalor- not caring a bit about appearances- while creating gorgeous beautiful objects, I meditate on the subject Andrei Tarkovski asks repeatedly in his movies: Why does art continue to thrive? Why do we create?

above: Orchids by Tokuyama Gyokuran It’s a lovely exhibit not to be missed. My personal recommendation is that this exhibit be viewed in person. The museum catalog, while comprehensive, has mysteriously omitted the scrolls which the artwork is presented in. The scrolls have beautiful borders, and decorative mats. Everything from the overall finish to the scroll ribbons add to the presentation of each piece. (I am at present, trying to contact the curator as to the reason for the omission in the printed catalog. My guess is that the scrolls were added posthumously.) It will be in Philadelphia (my favorite US city) until July 22, 2007. Check for details by clicking on this link here: Japanese Masters of the Brush at the Philadelphia Museum of Art