Day 97 - Mallard ducks




October 18, 2018

Gallery 231 has a large and varied display of screen paintings (many of courtesans in elaborate attire), landscape and seascape woodblock prints by Katsushika Hokusai, and both landscape and bird-and-flower woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige. (Both these artists worked in the first half of the 19th century, I learn.)  Large cases also display two kimonos. At first, I found the color combinations on one of these jarring - olive, mustard yellow, salmon, brown, blue, all against a dark plum background with a pink facing. Now I really love the way the colors work together - though I might still skip the pink facing.

In today's entry, I want to compare two prints, perhaps 14 inches high and 7 inches wide, of the same subject -mallard ducks - by Hiroshige. On both prints, the same haiku is shown. It reads: "A duck quacks- as the wind wrinkles- the face of the water." The print on the bottom  really seems to illustrate the haiku, which is written in block characters. It shows two ducks, one seen from the side, the other from above, by the bank of a body of water. The mouth of the duck at the bottom of the composition is open, as if it is quacking. A curved line in the water suggesting a "wrinkle" separates the two birds. While the print is a faithful rendition of the haiku, I find its shifting perspective disconcerting and the bottom bird strangely ugly. 

The image on the top is much more serene. A single duck is shown, and from a single perspective. Its head is down, its beak closed. The "wrinkle" in the water is suggested by a small wave in the lower lefthand area. The snow-laden branches framing and cutting across the figure of the duck give a strong sense of the season; flakes of snow also dot the sky and the surface of the water. Here, the haiku appears in cursive script (I didn't know there was such a thing) running down the lefthand side of the picture.  Although the season is clearly depicted, the calm of the image gives the scene an almost timeless quality.

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