Word: ikebana
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...women, but none can compare with the silent flower." Sofu (the name means Blue Wind) is revered for such views in a land where a beautiful blossom is a benison. Round, gnome-like Teshigahara, 77, is Japan's most innovative and successful master of the ancient art of ikebana, which bears about the same relationship to flower arranging as usually practiced in the West as Rachmaninoff to country rock. Within that art, Sofu is commonly referred to as "the Picasso of flowers...
...Ikebana has been entwined in Buddhism almost since the religion was introduced to Japan in the mid-6th century; it started with floral offerings laid at the altars. Sofu has made it a highly secular art and brought it into the age of abstract expressionism. His Grass Moon school has gone beyond the simple (but stunning) classical ikebana arrangements of a bent twig and a dewy blossom arrayed in a water vase or a bamboo tube. In containers that may be ceramic sculptures or Chinese wine kegs, Sofu will blend the blooms with shells, stones, iron, leaves, driftwood, dried grass...
...Wind in Japan's traditionally hermetic culture. He is an accomplished painter, in both Oriental and Occidental styles. His spiny wooden and metal sculptures have been exhibited in New York, Milan and Paris. He is considered by some to be among his country's finest calligraphers. The ikebana that the Grass Moon master teaches and practices appeals to modern Japanese-and Westerners-for whom visual impact is more important than spiritual complexities...
...Wafu (Harmonious Wind), a master ikebanist of the Misho school, young Sofu found himself disenchanted by what he called the "shackles of tradition. You could produce a masterpiece only when you succeeded in emulating 17th century masters in all possible details." At 18 he rebelled and invented an ikebana all his own. When he told his father it represented "an extension of his individualism," Wafu slapped his face. Seven years later the upstart left home to found his own school where his works could reflect his "burning and brimming emotion." Now his son, Hiroshi, 50, a famed film director (Woman...
...years, at last in 1903, unlike Madame Butterfly, married the man and toured the world with him for twelve nomadic years until he died, leaving her a comfortable income, which she used to return home in 1938 and begin teaching the gentle art of the tea ceremony and ikebana (floral arrangement); of pneumonia; in Kyoto...