Reflections - Littlestone

Missing my stuff: This blog has been sitting around for a few days,  its photos reminding me of other times and very sad but still..... and after a certain amount of cutting of words it can be published just for the record.

 

A photo often jumps out on me when I look at my albums, it is of the little white saucers used for the paints, should a painting come into the studio.  The paints were housed in a beautiful Japanese piece of furniture, something like a small escritoire but low to the ground for the Japanese people in traditional style would sit on the ground.

They would measure their rooms from the size of tatami mats, a coarse plaited mat.  Bedding would be folded away in cupboards and heating in a brazier type of fire holder under the table in a medium hole made out for it.  This particular fire we kept in the sitting room with a glass top and inside had the round roof finials from temples that Paul had collected over time.  

Well this morning a Japanese film went through my F/B link and it was about the painter Hokusai's daughter Oeio from the 19th century.  This is one Japanese painter everyone should know, for it is 'The Wave' he is most famous for.

I realised as I watched the film how things I was not too keen on figured in Japanese culture.  The dark brownness of everything is due to the fact that timber was used in traditional buildings, our European chairs or beds are not part of the old Japanese culture.

Somewhere on this blog are the glass fronted boxes of the minerals, plants and insects used in the making of paints Paul collected.  The great 'Ali Baba' pots for storing the glue made over ten years. The cupboards would have the special brushes for damping the tissues on the paintings.  For Japanese conservation is not at all like our European paintings, thick with oil paints and varnish and browning in the process of time.

I left all this with his two sons, my downsizing could not see my family being left with it. I hope they treasure their father's legacy and that his grandson Leo eventually inherits it.

So because Paul was proud of what he had achieved in life, he put on his Silbury blog a rundown or perhaps a CV of his life.  He was never wealthy but had a very interesting life I think.

I am not sure if you can link here to the video on Hokusai's Daughter....

  https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3018009/?

But it is a sweet film and I am sure Paul would have loved to watch it....

Studied art and design at Swindon School of Art, Wiltshire, England and afterwards Japanese painting and calligraphy at Kyoto University of Fine Arts, Kyoto, Japan. In 1966 I was a lay monk at the Zen Buddhist temple of Ryozen-an in Kyoto and practiced under the guidance of its Director, Ruth Fuller-Sasaki and senior monk Dana R Fraser (co-translator of Layman P'ang: A Ninth Century Zen Classic). Also present at Ryozen-an was the author and poet Gary Snyder. Gary Snyder was one of the first Westerners in Japan to study Zen Buddhism and was the inspiration for Jack Kerouac's book, The Dharma Bums. I was assistant conservator (paintings) at Kyoto National Museum from 1969-1980 and Chief Conservator (Eastern Pictorial Art) at the British Museum from 1980-1986. Japan Foundation Fellow 1973-1974 and Fellow of the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works since 1985.

The vibrant goldfish above story.  Like all folklore, Japan also has it stories, goldfish or fish symbols of luck, achievement, whatever, the fish swims upstream.  This particular painting was at our framers needing some work done.  So when we went in, for a frame for a print of mine by a friend Jane Tomlinson, the man said I will frame your print if you would do something for this painting. A good barter!

Jane also does maps, weather maps, shipping forecast maps and of course the prehistoric stones I love.... Her ability to put everything into a painting is self evident.  Silbury Hill, Wayland Smithy, the Uffington White Horse and of course nature, birds are her husband Moth's passionate hobby as well are in the print below. I know it is a bad picture, I caught the light, but when eventually my stuff comes back to me I shall once more be able to see it.