Dietmar Tallroth

A Tale of Five Painters – Part VI

August 1, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In A Tale of Five Painters

Hasegawa Tōhaku

In the year 2000 an exhibition in Zürich, Switzerland was dedicated to a single Japanese painter, or even: a single painting of that artist. That painting, in reviews of the exhibition, was hailed as an equal to da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and as the most important Japanese ink painting. That is quite some hyperbole, not often seen in describing Asian works of art. Still, I think, it was deserved. And if you have read the articles in this series so far, you are well prepared to see it as well, because everything we have found so far, now comes together in one single picture.

What I am talking about is Hasegawa Tōhaku’s (1539-1610) Shōrin-zu Byōbu (“Pine Forest”). As an exception, it might be worth this time to spend a few lines on Tōhaku’s biography. Born in the country side, he became a professional painter at the age of 20. He came from a painting school named Kenō, which specialized in colourful, golden-leaf covered paintings for the rich and mighty. This brought him to the court of the ruling Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

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Wood Wide Web

July 28, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Lose thoughts

In a recent TED talk forest ecologist Suzanne Simard explained the science that shows that forests are not mere collections of trees but living, interacting networks of plants and fungi. With its nodes, hubs and interconnections, this network indeed has a lot of similarity with the Internet and thus the term “Wood Wide Web” has been coined for it. The research further shows, that through this network, trees support their offspring, share resources or communicate dangers and insect attacks.

You might wonder, what this has to do with photography. Well, for me learning about the Wood Wide Web a couple of years ago was one of these defining moments when the view of something familiar changes in profound ways. These are true watershed moments in our lives, where darkness in our understanding is suddenly lit up by insight. While in darkness we couldn’t imagine that there is light and once our mind lit up we can’t go back or even imagine our darkness-worldview anymore. The genie out of the bottle can’t be put back.

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A Tale of Five Painters – Part V

July 25, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In A Tale of Five Painters

Sesshū Tōyō

With Sesshū (1420-1506) we leave China and enter Shogun-era Japan. We also have a richer set of biographical data about the artist and Zen-monk. Foremost, we know about his journey to China in 1468/69.On this journey Sesshū seemingly learned about the Southern Song Masters, especially Ma Yuan and Xia Gui. While no works from that time are preserved, it is said that Sesshū immediately started to copy their style – and we can see a strong influence of these masters all through Sesshū’s later works (see for exampleSesshū’s most famous work: The Landscapes of the Four Seasons.

But Sesshū didn’t stay there. Around 1495 he created some paintings that basically formed a new category; so-called “splash-ink” paintings, or Haboku. I have two of them here reproduced – and they take my breath away, every time I look at them.

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On Influences

July 21, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Lose thoughts

I am a rock. I am an island.
Paul Simon

The line from Simon & Garfunkel song is full of irony. As we all know, no one is an island. Our ways are the sum of our education, learnings and experiences. We all stand on the shoulders of others. Still, many photographers seem hesitant to talk about their influences, maybe from fear that their own contribution is undervalued or that they are accused of unoriginality. But as one might have noticed by now, I like to reflect on why and how I do things. So let’s talk about influences.

Always a good start is to give an example. My own decision to focus on black & white photography only, comes from mainly two sources. The first is the monochrome ink landscape painting, which is subject of the series A Tale about Five Painters. But in photography it is the work of Ansel Adams that convinced me of the power of black & white in showing the non-obvious in a landscape.

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A Tale of Five Painters – Part IVb

July 18, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In A Tale of Five Painters

Geese_Alighting_on_a_Sandbank_attributed_to_Muqi_(Idemitsu_Museum_of_Arts).jpg

Muqi II

When I for the first time saw a Finnish forest I was struck by the difference to what I had known about forests in Germany. Finnish forest seemed so light, fragile, transparent and for a long time I was wondering, how the experience of it could be communicated.

Only when I realized that the defining characteristic of Finnish forest is not the trees, but the empty space and light between them, I started to make progress. But the discovery of the significance of empty space is also a common thread connecting our five painters. This was, apart from the more obvious commonality of pines and rocks, what gave me the idea to use these masters as my mentors.

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Seasons: Finnish Summer

July 14, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Seasons

The summer is short and most of it is washed away by rain anyway.
Song by Tomas Ledin

Headlines in Finnish news outlets during June were about as cheerful as the lines from Tomas Ledin’s song: “Harvest catastrophe caused by rains”, “More mosquitos than usual”, “July will start wet”. But even when the rain stops, the headlines don’t lighten up. Instead, they turn towards issues of spreading ticks and how to detect skin cancer. Unless there has been a recent epidemic outbreak of clinical depression among Finnish journalists, one has to ask: “What is wrong with the Finnish summer?”.

Actually, most Finns would insist that summer is great. This has, I think, a lot to do with the notion of freedom. Freedom from layers of clothes and freedom to pursue outdoor life. But, of course, like so often, our notions of something are infringed on by reality.

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A Tale of Five Painters – Part IVa

July 11, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In A Tale of Five Painters

Six Persimmons-Muqi — Muqi “Six Persimmons”

Muqi Fachang (Muqi)

As I try to keep the length of each post to about 600 words (not that I easily would succeed), I might have to split this part about Muqi (1210-1269) in two. This is not because he would be more important than the other four painters, but because he is a kind of pivot between Southern Song painting and later Japanese zen-influenced art. Living as a Zen monk in the later part of the Southern Song dynasty he shared the fate of Ma Yuan and Xia Gui to being, after a short period of fame, first belittled and then forgotten in China. His work only survived in Japan. But there, the “Six Persimmons” are revered as a first pinnacle of Zen art and is kept at the Daitokuji temple in Kyoto.

There, I said the Z.. word again. And what I am dreading to do, I cannot longer avoid: explaining my view on Zen and art. I am dreading this not only because saying anything about Zen in a few words (or any number of them) seems quite inadequate. I am also quite aware of the risks inherent in “Westernizing” an Asian religion and philosophy, a trap into which (all too) many fellow admirers of Zen have fallen into. But overlaying one’s own cultural baggage on another culture is nothing less than intellectual colonialism; something I’d rather try to avoid.

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Minimalism

July 7, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 1 Comment

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

Photographer Thomas Peter recently published a project at Reuters on the Japanese minimalist movement. There are some interesting photos there, even though the project as such suffers from “explainitis“. That means, the photos hardly hold their own without the text.

What intrigued me, though, was the movement itself: people reducing their belongings to 100 items. I find it fascinating how certain ideas (good and bad ones) cross centuries and cultures during human history. The “less is more” idea spans from religions (Buddhism, Christianity, St. Francis, Gandhi) to psychoanalysis (Erich Fromm: To Have or to Be). Curiously, modern minimalism seems to have circulated from Zen Buddhism to Steven Jobs and from him back to Japan…

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A Tale of Five Painters – Part III

July 4, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 2 Comments

In A Tale of Five Painters / Art & Photography

Xia Gui

The second painter in this series, Xia Gui 1195-1224 was a younger contemporary of Ma Yuan and like him a master at the imperial academy of the Song court. Like Ma, Xia Gui was known for his unusual compositional style with all the weight of the painting at the bottom edge. Few (confirmed) paintings by Xia Gui have survived, but fortunately his “Pure and Remote View of Mountains and Streams” has and is now at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. This painting has cemented Xia’s fame and is one of my all-time favorites. But in presenting it here, I am facing quite a few obstacles.

The first such obstacle is the work’s sheer size. It is a scroll of 9m length, so reproducing it on a computer screen is challenging. But I do want to encourage you to have a look at the whole of it. In this post however, I will only be able to show some detail view extracts.

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Attitudes

June 30, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Lose thoughts

Better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.
Chinese Proverb

There isn’t a problem that couldn’t be rendered unsolvable by elevating it to a higher level of abstraction. I know. I have been guilty of doing this countless times. Unfortunately, a certain class of problems needs this approach as all more localized, specialized solutions are just patches, not fixes.

What I am talking about? I talk about problems rooted in attitudes. Like, all environmental issues on the table (pick here your favorite horror, from global warming to tar sands and mass extinction). And when I write attitudes, I mean all our opinions about the world, we didn’t know we have. There is for example this deeply rooted narrative in the jewish-christian tradition, that man is the crown jewel of creation with a calling to conquer nature. The view that man is a higher life form and everything else is hierarchically of lower value.

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