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Something Wonderful: Cracked Ice

[In Areopagus Volume XXV – Cultural Tutor writes:] Why this painting?

How remarkable that a few scattered lines can conjure up the image of a frozen lake, and even colorless ones can draw us to picture the heavy frosts of deepest winter. The human imagination is terrifyingly powerful; Cracked Ice is evidence of that. For despite its simplicity I find this painting utterly engrossing. Ōkyo’s reduction of a natural scene to its most basic elements, to its fundamental essence, is typical of Chinese and Japanese landscape art. In this way, it’s more like poetry than art, more like a harmonic meditation than a representation of reality.

I also like Cracked Ice because it shows how supposedly modern trends are often far older than we think. Abstract art may seem like a recent invention, but the quasi-abstract work of Ōkyo and many other painters of his era and region – who used a few simple brushstrokes to evoke the natural world – would suggest otherwise.

Who was Maruyama Ōkyo and what style is Cracked Ice?

Maruyama Ōkyo (1733-1795) was both an influential and controversial artist. He spent the bulk of his life in Kyoto, and there became involved in the creation of a new Japanese school of art. See, Chinese-influenced Japanese art had long operated on different lines to Western painting. Since the Renaissance European painters had made the conquest of reality their goal: the representation of the world as it really looked, with three-dimensional perspective and realism, even idealized, its main features. In Eastern Asia, however, artists were less interested in representing reality as it looked and more in what it meant.

But contact with European nations had brought representational art to the attention of Japanese painters. Whereas some dismissed its realism as undignified, Ōkyo saw the potential for a new style. From him came the Maruyama–Shijō School, a style that blended European realism with traditional Japanese essentialism. The results, as in Cracked Ice and its vanishing-point perspective, are rather splendid. Many of Ōkyo’s other paintings are less abstract, leaning more towards the European than the Japanese. I thoroughly recommend exploring them.

What was it for?

As I’ve written before, galleries (or disembodied pictures online) can make us forget that art almost always has a specific context and purpose. Cracked Ice is actually a decorative folding screen, or byōbu, used in Japanese households to separate interiors. These decorated screens became an art form all of their own; it gave people a chance to surround themselves with the evocation of a different place – a forest, a mountain landscape, or a frozen lake. Specifically, Cracked Ice was a furoshiki byōbu, to be placed in front of the fire during tea ceremonies. It is quite beautiful on its own, but surely even more beautiful when lit from behind by a fire, as an atmospheric backdrop to the tea ceremony.

 

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  • Why So Serious November 26, 2022, 5:00 PM

    I always liked Cracked but Mad Magazine was better. (sarc)
    Art is a construct of the white male patriarchy. (honk, honk)
    Only bland drab soul destroying gray landscapes will be allowed in the not so Great Reset.
    Once you realize this world is a Hieronymus Bosch painting, then it makes the horn honk.

    • Vanderleun November 27, 2022, 2:54 PM

      MWONK! MWONK! BLONK! BLONK!

  • ThisIsNotNutella November 26, 2022, 5:33 PM

    Cross-cultural fertilisation is more often than not of the sort emitted from the back end of a cow. But man, that ice!

    Here’s another example of admixture:

    https://www.sothebys.com/en/videos/portrait-of-the-qianlong-emperor-in-court-robes-a-commanding-vision-of-qing-dynasty-power

    The Portuguese having been booted from Japan early in the Tokugawa Shogunate, the Dutch had the running there. In China, for a longer time, the Jesuits did their thing.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Castiglione_(Jesuit_painter)

  • Anonymous November 27, 2022, 4:08 AM

    Minimalist egg cream ceremony.

  • John Venlet November 27, 2022, 4:37 AM

    The second painting is evocative of a scene my Lovely Melis and I came upon the other day while driving some secondary roads in southern Michigan. A small, cattail edged lake, amongst leave stripped woods, with swans gracefully gliding into and out of them. Cracked Ice evokes not only the frozen lake, but the sharp cold of winter.

  • Rev.Bro. Generik Broderick November 27, 2022, 8:56 AM

    My Artistic expression requires rapid motion and so I wonder how fast others work. This could have been done slowly, but I think of rapidity and decision. I also ponder which strokes came first, etc. And how hard to know when to stop?

    • ThisIsNotNutella November 27, 2022, 6:24 PM

      Think Chinese / Japanese calligraphy (of which there are many contending schools) done with the same type of brush and ink used by our painter here.

      Chinese Ideographs and Japanese Kana have definite correct stroke orders and techniques for using the brush to achieve the correct effect in each part of each stroke making up the characters.

      There’s no going back and retouching in either. I’d guess that after one’s first million calligraphy practice ideographs, one would develop a sense of fitness of what to do an in what order to do it in whilst in a creative state of flow.

      The big thing is that getting to that point (like becoming a Mozart or Eugen Herrigel’s Zen Archer) requires an immense amount of practice and imitation — producing vast armies of minor talents, also-rans, and hacks. Rare is the person who at the end of this long training can break new ground. On the plus side, you also don’t get Piss Christ.

  • ThisIsNotNutella November 27, 2022, 6:33 PM

    Should have written:

    I’d guess that after one’s first million calligraphy practice ideographs, one would develop a sense of fitness of what to do and in what order to do it in whilst painting with ink and brush in a creative state of flow.

    Another thought. All Chinese scholar gentlemen (and Japanese warrior scholar gentlemen) were expected to be accomplished calligraphers, and to be able to compose allusive poetry for any given situation. (Less relevant here: In the Chinese case, ability to paint and play certain musical instruments was also expected.) It’s not a huge leap from the preceding to producing allusive visual representations using the same mediums one used for presenting written poetry.

    Two Thousand plus years of that… and then throw in at the tail end the relative (cf. China) socio-commercial mobility of Edo Period Japan and the demand for art objects by the nobility and increasingly wealthy Kanto and Kansai merchant classes, add in a dash of Western representational art showing up at first and often second-hand and Bob’s Your Uncle if you’re after a great flowering of the visual arts both high and low (ukiyo-e)