Hiroshige: The 53 Stations of the Tokaido

Hiroshige: The 53 Stations of the Tokaido by Muneshige Narazaki

The Tokaido is featured prominently in both of James Clavell's novels on Japan, Shogun and Gai-Jin. When Jeff and I were in the Hakone area of Japan in 2007, we had come upon a stretch of tree-lined road that was supposed to be a section of the old Tokaido. At the Edo Tokyo Museum, I had read about the extravagant daimyo processions on the Tokaido in feudal times. Countless books, poems and art work have been produced about the Tokaido, with the most famous being Hiroshige's "The 53 Stations of the Tokaido" in woodblock prints. As I have no knowledge of Japanese, these prints are the only ones that I can appreciate.

A third of the book is an introduction, with the rest being full-colour reproductions of the prints. A brief description is provided for each picture. Some of the familiar names that I encountered in Japan made me smile: Nihonbashi, Shinagawa, Odawara, Hakone, ...

While classical Japanese paintings were chiefly influenced by Tang dynasty Chinese painting techniques and subject matters, the woodblock prints of the nineteenth century were entirely original. Hiroshige's pictures leap off the pages with their vibrant colours, elegant composition, and lively human figures. The understanding of perspective being a uniquely European invention, Hiroshige's representation of buildings, trees and mountains often appears a bit awkward. However, he excelled at drawing marvellously natural, realistic, and creative human figures. Another strength of Hiroshige's was his ability to convey emotions. His pictures effortlessly exude loneliness, joy, melancholy, humour, sadness, fear, ... It is fascinating to think about the lives depicted, of that bygone era...

The distance between Tokyo and Kyoto is just over 500 kilometres. In the olden days, a trip from Edo to Kyoto on the Tokaido required two weeks on average, twice as long when the weather did not cooperate. Today, our train ride on the Shinkansen Hikari took a mere two hours and forty-five minutes without any worries about the elements. The Nozomi covers the distance in an even shorter interval of two hours and twenty minutes. Times have definitely changed.

The Magic Mirror of Escher, by Bruno Ernst

The Magic Mirror of Escher by Bruno Ernst (Taschen)

Anyone who loves mathematics would be fascinated by M.C. Escher's prints. I am drawn to them yet am also disturbed by them -- actually, all surrealist work rattles me. (Even though Escher is not considered a surrealist artist, he has often been linked to surrealists.) I can't imagine having a Magritte or a Dali painting in the house -- not that I can afford one anyway -- because it would bother me instead of giving me pleasure. This is not to say I don't find surrealism interesting. It is indeed. I just don't want that weirdness to be part of my life. I wonder if it's because I haven't enough anger in me. It seems to me that one has to be very angry to be a modern artist. I'm afraid I'm too happy with life.

Anyway, Escher's prints are in fact nothing like the typical modern art rubbish. His pictures were carefully planned, and meticulously executed. There is no vagueness to his message, only boundless imagination. Incidentally, although mathematicians find advanced mathematics embedded everywhere in Escher's work, Escher himself claimed no understanding of mathematics as he had no grasp of abstract concepts unless they were expressed with concrete drawings or objects. The book analyses most of Escher's pictures in detail, which actually took the fun out of one's private enjoyment.

As a side note, the book was published by TASCHEN. I happen to own another TASCHEN book, one on the Flemish painter Jan Vermeer, so it was interesting for me to read the story on the inside of the dusk cover of the Escher book. It was stated there that, "TASCHEN's Great Adventure began back in 1980, when eighteen-year-old Benedikt Taschen opened a shop in his native Cologne, Germany, to market his massive comics collection." More than twenty-five years later, "TASCHEN has grown into one of the most successful and unique publishers in the global market..."

Renoir Exhibit in Ottawa

Now that the weather was nicer, we drove to Ottawa to see Len and Louise again. Upon hearing from Louise about the Renoir landscape paintings exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, we went the next morning.

I must confess that I'm not a fan of the National Gallery. In 1990, while taking Grade 13 Fine Arts, my classmates and I had to write an essay defending the National Gallery's purchase of Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire for $1.76 million. While I did my best to conjure up meaning from the boring stripes in Newman's so-called painting, I disliked this sort of stuff with a passion. In my opinion, art represents either beautiful things or interesting things. Of course, what's considered beautiful or interesting is entirely in the eyes of the beholder. As far as I'm concerned, most of modern art is hideous and absurd. To this day, I view abstract art as the emperor's new clothes, daubed by fakes who have no more talent than you and me. For a national art institution to accumulate piles of this rubbish is pathetic; a look around the Gallery is enough to make one sick at most of the stuff hanging on the wall. To be fair, the whole world has been showering praises on the emperor's new clothes for decades.

Renoir, on the other hand, was not a faker. His paintings were both beautiful and interesting. My favourite was The Garden in the Rue Cortot, Montmartre. It is incredible to me how he used seemingly simple brush strokes to bring to the foreground the dazzling flowers and bland into the far side of the painting two people having a leisurely chat. Simply beautiful.

Ansel Adams at the AGO

This evening, Jeff and I met up with Danijela to see the Ansel Adams exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Anyone who has ever lived in Northern California knows about Ansel Adams. My almost five years in the San Francisco Bay Area and several trips to Yosemite during that time ensured frequent encounters of the photographer's work. For some strange reason, Adams's photos of Yosemite always leave me unsatisfied. Is it because they are mostly black-and-white, which creates an eerie style but also loses much content? Is it because I foolishly believe that my pictures would look just as wonderful if they were enlarged to absurd sizes? Most likely, I just don't get it.