Word: kenzan
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...period lacked individual artists who were seen, then and now, as stars. Its core achievement, in painting, was the allusive and delicate work of the so-called Rimpa artists: Tawaraya Sotatsu and Hon'ami Koetsu in the 17th century, and later the brothers Ogata Korin and Ogata Kenzan, Sakai Hoitsu and others. The show abounds in their work, especially the large folding screens that were Japan's closest equivalent to Western murals. Hoitsu (1761-1828) is represented by one of his finest screens, Flowers and Grasses of Summer and Autumn, in which you can almost feel the wind bending...
Skill, once demonstrated, could be elegantly volatilized. Edo taste valued the unfinished, the rough. One of the masters of the pictorial throwaway line was Ogata Kenzan, best known as a potter. He and his more famous brother Ogata Korin--whose paintings mark the apotheosis of lyrical, erudite Edo painting--left an indelible mark on Edo style. Nothing could seem more offhand than Kenzan's scroll The Eight-Fold Bridge, an illustration of a poem with the poem itself written into it--the planks of the bridge brusquely indicated, the calligraphy mingling with the broadly brushed leaves of water iris...
...times, East or West. All this month a retrospective exhibition, including some 200 Leach pots, has been on view at London's Victoria and Albert Museum. It spans his whole working life from that first raku plate, through the wares he made as a student of the "Sixth Kenzan" (Miura Kenya, Japan's leading potter, who built a kiln for his disciple at Abiko outside Tokyo), to his return to England in 1920 and on through five productive decades in his workshop in the Cornish village of St. Ives...
...Baha'i faith-has helped to turn his St. Ives studio into a place of pilgrimage for hundreds of younger potters over the years. But the number of students working there remains limited to eleven. In an age of mechanical reproduction and mass production, the "Seventh Kenzan"-as some Japanese potters affectionately call him-has played a major part in preserving the old authority of the human hand. Above all, Leach is gratified by the growth of pottery among young people, especially in the U.S. He tells of one of his best students, Warren MacKenzie, for almost 25 years...
...lunch for a cherry blossom-viewing picnic in costly gold-leafed and painted bamboo sheaths, then nonchalantly flinging them away into the river. But he was no dilettante. Korin's work embraced most mediums, even the decoration of plates, on which he collaborated with his brother Ogata Kenzan to produce works like the hexagonal iron-brown dish bearing a figure of Juro, the dumpy little god of longevity. Korin had an almost miraculous sense of materials; witness his writing box, with a design of irises, pool and bridge. The iris leaves and stems are gold lacquer, the flowers mother...