Word: koetsu
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Dates: during 1972-1972
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Boneless Brush. The word Rimpa means, literally, "school of precious gems." Though the Rimpa school spanned 250 years and produced some of the finest decorative art Japan-or the world at large-has seen, its members were few and their identity often vague. Its founder was Hon'ami Koetsu (1558-1637). In 1615, a warlord gave Koetsu some land in the mountains around Kyoto. The artist laid out a village there: papermakers, dyers, weavers, calligraphers, lacquer masters and painters settled in it, with Koetsu presiding over them all. The collaborations that followed make it excruciatingly hard to determine which...
...Koetsu and Sotatsu reacted against the hard, linear, brushpoint drawing derived from the Chinese that dominated Japanese art in the early 17th century; instead they used the mokkotsu or "boneless" technique, dropping pigment into wet pigment, staining and mottling the shapes of flowers, twigs and thunder-god with infinitely subtle gradations of color, preparing the paper with washes of gold or silver dust or with a snowy, glistening mixture of eggshell white and flakes of mica. These hallmarks-which must in their time have seemed very "Japanese," in elaborate contrast to the austerities of Chinese brush technique-helped form...