Magic in Japan – The Body of the People By toshidama In this case not necessarily the physical body – I’m thinking here of the cultural body and how that relates to the people. When we look at the extraordinary corpus of Japanese woodblock prints from the nineteenth century we are struck firstly by its hermeticism. This [...]
Japanese Ukiyo-e in a Changing Artistic Landscape: Chikanobu and the Impact of Modernity Lee Jay Walker Modern Tokyo Times Yoshu Chikanobu (Toyohara Chikanobu) lived between 1838 and 1912 and much of his art highlights the changing nature of Japan. The opening up of the land of the rising sun after the Meiji Restoration provided many [...]
Impressions of Women – Ukiyo-e and Impressionism By toshidama It’s handy to think of national (or even nationalistic) characteristics in art; I’m thinking of books such as Pevsner’s The Englishness of English Art from 1955 for example. The reality is that people talk to each other; artists, architects, producers and makers have a constant dialogue; dialogue informs the [...]
Nigao – True Likeness in Japanese Prints By toshidama How important is a likeness in a work of art? Maybe not as important as it seems; elsewhere on this site we’ve looked at how potentially disastrous it would be to use Hiroshige’s 53 Stations of the Tokaido Road as a route map; and so it was for centuries that depictions [...]
Tall Tales and Japanese Woodblock Prints Alex Faulkner By toshidama Some stories persist; immune to cultural change, embroidered and adapted to different times, rising and falling in popularity and sometimes losing touch completely with their origins and their roots. None of this matters of course, what matters is what people make of a story, how cultures [...]
Bonsai Trees in Japanese Prints – Small is Beautiful By toshidama I suppose that if you were to ask most people about traditional Japanese culture, they would talk about geishas and samurai, sushi, kimonos and bonsai trees. It’s likely though that few people would know much about the bonsai tree and probably would not have seen one. [...]
The Andon – There is a Light That Never Goes Out by toshidama There are lots of things that appear in Japanese prints which we pass over without comment or surprise. Ukiyo prints are very particular in their setting, both in contemporary scenes and in historical prints where (without the internet) artists were very concerned [...]
Toshidama Gallery and Japanese art: stunning ukiyo-e By toshidama Why? Why would these artists paint the same motif so many times over so many years? There is undoubtedly for both artists a spiritual dimension to their constant interest. For Hokusai who was a devout Buddhist, as for many Japanese, Fuji was symbolic of eternal life, a [...]
Women and the Floating World By toshidama I guess it is to be both anticipated and regretted that the women of Japan who were once the great writers and poets and priestesses, not to say robbers and warriors of their culture, should have been reduced by the middle of the nineteenth century to the status of ornament [...]
Japanese Snow Myths By toshidama For those interested in Japanese prints it will be obvious that snow is a major subject for both landscapists and narrative artists. The most desirable Hiroshige landscapes tend to be his haunting snow scenes – these great and seemingly effortless depictions of white-out conditions… the great heavy flakes that punctuate the night [...]
Japanese Gifts – Toshidama Explained By toshidama People sometimes say to us: “what is a Toshidama?” The characteristic round seal seen on many nineteenth century Japanese prints is called a Toshidama Seal. It was used at some point by most artists of the Utagawa School. At first it looks like the silhouette of a diamond ring with four [...]
The Naked and the Nude By toshidama Sir Kenneth Clark opens his book The Nude, with the following phrase: The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. [...]
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