Day 95 - White herons scroll painting
October 4, 2018
Gallery 228 contains six painted scrolls from the Maruyama-Shijo school, whose artists, according to the caption, combined decorative and realistic elements in their works.
I cannot say that I see much realism in today's object, one of these screen paintings, perhaos 26 inches long and 16 inches high, that was executed by the school's founder, Maruyama Okyo, in 1769. Indeed, of all the things I have written about so far, this one seems the most enigmatic, the one that requires the closest looking. At first, I can barely discern that the subject is shore birds- this from the long dark bills and dots of ink that serve for eyes. I read the caption and see that that, more specifically, the painting is of white herons, and then I see the thin crests on the back of the heads of two birds shown in profile. But really, the birds' bodies are not depicted at all; the forms emerge only by being silhouetted against a light gray wash, where four bamboo stalks are also suggested by a very few brush strokes.
I would term this painting figurative (rather than abstract), but hardly realistic. It shows the essence of white herons - their bills, their crests- but the rest is left to the imagination. Perhaps the initial difficulty of making out the figures makes the painting all the more haunting and harder to forget.
I cannot say that I see much realism in today's object, one of these screen paintings, perhaos 26 inches long and 16 inches high, that was executed by the school's founder, Maruyama Okyo, in 1769. Indeed, of all the things I have written about so far, this one seems the most enigmatic, the one that requires the closest looking. At first, I can barely discern that the subject is shore birds- this from the long dark bills and dots of ink that serve for eyes. I read the caption and see that that, more specifically, the painting is of white herons, and then I see the thin crests on the back of the heads of two birds shown in profile. But really, the birds' bodies are not depicted at all; the forms emerge only by being silhouetted against a light gray wash, where four bamboo stalks are also suggested by a very few brush strokes.
I would term this painting figurative (rather than abstract), but hardly realistic. It shows the essence of white herons - their bills, their crests- but the rest is left to the imagination. Perhaps the initial difficulty of making out the figures makes the painting all the more haunting and harder to forget.
March 7, 2024
I'm reviewing my entries five and a half years later, and I have to say that I'd forgotten this work.
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