Word: korin
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...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 the Rimpa style, and were superbly developed by Ogata Korin, born a century after Koetsu. A part of Korin's signature (see calligraph) is now used as the symbol for the Rimpa style...
...Korin, it seems, was one of those exquisitely chic and talented spendthrifts whom the Japanese remember with fond envy. The son of a wealthy artist-merchant in Kyoto, he dissipated a fortune by such gestures as wrapping his box 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...
Elegance. For Korin used traditional motifs: the S curve of the river, for instance, and its stylized scrolls of water, refer back to 16th century Momoyama screens. Yet he infused these motifs with a new, tense elegance. The line of the white plum branch, dipping down and then shooting up off the top of the screen, is electric. The river, boldly placed to unify the two separate screens, swirls with energy. Indeed, later artists bestowed his name on this way of painting water. "Korin waves" recur in a long screen of gray cranes by Suzuki Kiitsu (1796-1858). A copy...
...Korin inherited a fortune at 30, made several more from his art, and spent them all before his death at 58. He was a philosopher in love with life, knowing and glorying in its evanescence. Once, to dramatize his feeling, he brought plain rice balls, wrapped in bamboo, to a flower-viewing party. After eating, he unrolled the bamboo wrapping upon the air. It was overlaid with gold leaf and painted by himself with mountains, birds and flowers. Casually, he tossed it into the stream...
Kinko Riding a Carp is a reversal of that gesture-not reality drowned but imagination borne upon the stream. The energy of Korin's brush reflects the lightning lift and speed of human imagination, which is capable of almost anything, even of riding on the back of a fish. His art also mirrors Taoist thought, which regards "everything as destroyed and everything as in completion . . . reaching security through chaos.'' Asked where he had got this idea, the sage Nu Yu replied: "I learned it from the Son of Ink. The Son of Ink learned it from...