I am seldom interested in artist’s statements. Many have been uninformative and seem pretentious.
My statement on the gallery wall was written forty-eight years ago. Would I still agree with my youthful ideals? I was relieved that the statement aligned with the views I still hold today. I still love the landscape. I may be influenced by traditional Chinese paintings and the modern Japanese woodcut, but as the statement concludes: I’m interested in the forms and lines of the landscape.
In Chinese art, the landscape paintings are not necessarily depictions of real places. They seldom are. This stemmed from the profound motivations of China’s great artists.
One example is Dong Qichang (Tung Ch’i-ch’ang; 董其昌; 1555–1636), an art theorist, calligrapher, painter, and politician of the later period of the Ming dynasty. He was deeply influenced by Chan (Zen) Buddhism. “Concerning the art of painting, the universe appears as the hand pleases, and everything in sight anticipates life and growth. As a result, the painter tends to enjoy longevity. If the painting attempts exact and meticulous representation and thus becomes a slave to nature, it will have a negative effect on the painter’s health for lack of the potential for life.”*
Dong also wrote that an artist must: “…model themself after heaven and earth.… After they become familiar with nature, they will transmit the spirit. To transmit the spirit, there must be form. When the form, the mind, and the hand are in total accord, each forgetting the other’s separate existence, then the spirit will reside in the painting.”
All in all, ideas like these show that the combination of art, health, longevity, and spirituality has long been intermixed in the Chinese mind. That’s why I’m so interested in the landscape and its ongoing processes. That’s the way a mortal mind can engage with eternal heaven and earth.
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https://www.artnet.com/artists/shiko-munakata-2
https://www.artnet.com/artists/kiyoshi-saito
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sōsaku-hanga
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/ukiyo-e/beyond.html
https://johnjburnslibrary.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/japaneseprints-modern/
* All quotations from The Century of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, Wai-Kam Ho, editor. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the University of Washington Press, 1992.