Word: sumi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nose and the jutting underlip have a fierce antique gravity, like Renaissance portrait sculpture-one thinks of the faces of Verrocchio's Colleoni or Donatello's Gattamelata. Every cut of the chisel seems to possess the final, unlabored Tightness of a brush stroke by a master of sumi-e (ink painting). There is probably not a sculpture on view in America this week that gives a clearer impression of the mystery of great portraiture: how realism, a recognizable type and shape, can be conveyed through complete stylization. Like a Giacometti, the figure of Muhon Kakushin is both there...
...edge pattern, made by painting a slurry of clay and steel filings along the blade just before its last firing and quenching, is even more pictorial. Its crystalline opacities resemble those of classical sumi-e ink painting, suggesting hills, river currents, islands or the wreathing of vapor. Dr. Compton likes to compare Kunimune's hamon to "low-lying mist on a swamp, with searchlights playing over it." These configurations are not seen as decoration, like inlay work or chasing on a Western sword...
...drawings of landscapes, old shoes and coats, his own face or that of a friend like Samuel Beckett, may seem frustrating at first. They look messy and disclose themselves slowly. None of the hard, wiry line of pen or silverpoint here; the brush (the kind used in Japan for sumi-e or ink painting) flits and stumbles across the roughly textured page, leaving behind tiny marks that seem knitted or crocheted together...
...were deployed; later still, the series that included Untitled, 1970, pushed the activity of color from the center of the canvas altogether, leaving the white void itself as the subject, speckled and edged with exquisitely laced drifts of color that Francis blurred, wet into wet, in imitation of Japanese sumi ink painting...
...painting had become as central to the visual culture of traditional Japan as fresco painting was to Italians. The very size of byōbu-which run to a width of twelve feet and more-was an exacting test of the painter's virtuosity in handling watercolor or sumi ink across large areas; it made the paintings into a kind of environment conducive to meditation and withdrawal. Because they were made for domestic use, the imagery of byōbu is generally secular. But Western categories of what is or is not secular make less sense in the context...