An Artist’s Date with Adela Breton

Celebrating Easter Sunday with a walk around Bristol in the sunshine. I usually travel everywhere by bike so today I decided to slow down and just walk. I stopped and looked at things a little more closely than usual. The bees in the flowers. The ripples on the water from boats passing. Signs on buildings I’ve never seen before. Dogs walking their people! It was a quiet Sunday but I still managed to bump into a familiar face and we walked together. We walked and talked along the docks and parted as we reached the centre of town. I made my way to Bristol Museum to see their latest exhibition.

Adela Breton: Ancient Mexico in Colour

In the late 1800’s, archeological artist and adventurer, Adela Breton, travelled around Mexico with her guide Pablo Solorio making copies of the wall paintings in temples in Chichén Itzá, Teotihuacan and Acancéh. She painted the copies with watercolours which still hold their vibrancy today as the original wall paintings begin to fade over time. 

"Adela Breton always carried a sketchbook with her, giving a 'diary' of her travels. This one has sketches of landscapes, flowers and ruins of Mexico and Canada. It includes sketches made on her climb up the volcano of Iztaccihuatl, in snow and across glaciers, up to 15,000 feet above sea level - Adela Breton also carried a notebook at all times, and made notes of lectures, objects she saw in museums, and books she read." Bristol Museum

I was especially drawn to Adela’s sketchbooks of the places she visited on her travels. I have kept sketchbooks for many years and am mostly inspired to draw when I’m travelling and sitting in cafes. In the last couple of years I've been sketching antique netsuke from museums to make a collection of mini woodblock prints. Today after walking in the sunshine and looking through the sketchbooks of Adela Breton, I was eager to sit down, open my own sketchbook and take in my surroundings. The cafe where I was having lunch was the perfect spot. 

When I finished my lunch and my sketch, I walked home remembering the paragraph from Julia Cameron’s book Walking in this World.

“Walking and talking humanize my life, draw it to an ancient and comforting scale. We live as we move, a step at a time, and there is something in gentle walking that reminds me of how I must live if I am to savour this life that I have been given.” Julia Cameron

Clockwise from top left: Landscape from Adela Breton's sketchbook. Landscape from Adela Breton's sketchbook. Adela Breton's notebook of the Maya calendar. All three from Bristol Museum. A sketch I made today at Pinkman's Bakery, Bristol. 

Netsuke - A Quail Tale

Quail's Nest

Poem by John Clare (1793 – 1864)

I wandered out one rainy day
And heard a bird with merry joys
Cry 'wet my foot' for half the way;
I stood and wondered at the noise, 

When from my foot a bird did flee--
The rain flew bouncing from her breast
I wondered what the bird could be,
And almost trampled on her nest. 

The nest was full of eggs and round--
I met a shepherd in the vales,
And stood to tell him what I found.
He knew and said it was a quail's, 

For he himself the nest had found,
Among the wheat and on the green,
When going on his daily round,
With eggs as many as fifteen. 

Among the stranger birds they feed,
Their summer flight is short and low;
There's very few know where they breed,
And scarcely any where they go. 

Quail Carving

Quail Print

Original Netsuke 'Quail (鶉)Crouching over 2 Ears of Millet' from Bristol Museum. Signed Okatomo - Japan.

BBC Tweet of the Day (2mins)

"The Sōken Kishō - (Strange and Wonderful Sword Fittings by Inaba Tsūryū) - published 1781 - of the seven volumes that make up this work, the last comprises a supplement on netsuke, with additional sections on inrō and ojime. The information It contained in the Sōken Kishō formed the backbone of netsuke studies and the West until the twentieth century. Okatomo (active 1781) - mentioned in the Sōken Kishō is widely associated with with netsuke of bird subject, especially quail and millet." Japanese Netsuke (Far Eastern Series / Victoria and Albert Museum)

Netsuke - Wood Bird II

Re-carving the wood bird

Today I make sure to take my time and carve closer to the original lines of the bird sketch.

Inking up the wood bird

The L shape sits up next to the woodblock to line up the paper. Paul Furneaux had given me some little markers to use for registration which I tape onto the wood. I place mine completely the opposite way round and slanting on the block and feel the frown of the ukiyo-e printers. But for me it's perfect as I want to bird to be at a slight angle and didn't accommodate for this in the initial carving.

Printing the wood bird

The slanted markers on a separate L Shape enable me to change the position of the printed bird. This experiment might go against the tradition of the ukiyo-e printers but exploring different methods of registration became quite common among the Sōsaku-hanga artists during the Creative Print movement.

“Many artists - Munakata, Morozumi, Kidokoro, Maki, Sasajima, to name a few - do not use registration per se because they work with monochrome prints, or they print all the colours at once, or they use colouring techniques such as resist dying after the basic monochrome image has been printed. For them it is only necessary to center the image on the paper - though the use of kentō still survives, contemporary Japanese print artists have steadily been developing their own individual approaches to to meet their particular needs. ”

— Evolving Techniques in Japanese Woodblock Prints by Gaston Petit

“The technique...in modern prints became creative rather than technical.
”

— Japanese print-making: A handbook of traditional & modern techniques - Toshi Yoshida & Rei Yuki

“Sōsaku-hanga (創作版画 “creative prints”?) was an art movement in early 20th-century Japan. It stressed the artist as the sole creator motivated by a desire for self-expression, and advocated principles of art that is “self-drawn” (自画 jiga), “self-carved” (自刻 jikoku) and “self-printed” (自刷 jizuri). As opposed to the shin-hanga (“new prints”) movement that maintained the traditional ukiyo-e collaborative system where the artist, carver, printer, and publisher engaged in division of labor, creative print artists distinguished themselves as artists creating art for art’s sake. ”

— Wikipedia - Sōsaku-hanga

Netsuke - Wood Bird with Inlaid Eyes

Sketching & Transferring Bird Image to Woodblock

Carving Bird

Dampening Paper & Printing Bird

Journey or Destination?

I constantly remind myself that the journey is more important than the destination but I still haven't learnt the lesson to slow down and really be in the present, with each moment. A distraction and a slip of the knife changes the direction of a cut resulting in a mis-shaped ridge on the body of the bird. The more simple the shape, the harder it is to hide the mistakes. To understand the contours of the bird, I need to focus, slow down, breathe and stop rushing to get to my destination.

Original netsuke 'Bird' from the V&A museum. Unsigned. Made 18th or 19th century - Japan.

“A craftsperson’s job is half meditation, half creation. It takes creativity to design whatever you are working on, but it takes meditation to do it right.”

— Andy Couturier - A Different Kind of Luxury: Japanese Lessons in Simple Living and Inner Abundance

“According to Democritus, we have learned many of our abilities from animals: the spider to weave and sew, the swallow bird to build, the swan and the nightingale to sing (one genuinely wonders if birds had not existed, man would never imagined that he could fly.)”

— Saul Frampton - When I am Playing with my Cat, how do I know she is not Playing with me? Montaigne And Being in Touch with Life.

An Introduction to Netsuke - V&A

Thank you to my friend Jo for this wonderful gift, 'An Introduction to Netsuke,' which belonged to her father. I will treasure it.

This book of Netsuke from the Victoria & Albert Museum by Joe Earle, takes me back to a trip I made to the V&A in February 2015. Many of the plates in the book are ones I made prints from last year including Tigress and Young - Signed Tomotada and Tiger - Signed Tomotada. Lovely to see the underside and detail of the Tiger's paws with Tomotada's signature carved into his hind leg.

“Little is known of the lives or origins of the netsuke carvers but we do know that during the seventeenth century miniature Buddhist shrines for domestic use were coming into widespread use and it is reasonable to assume that the makers of the images for these shrines would have been among the first to turn their hand to netsuke - we can learn something about the relations between netsuke carvers from their special art-names, which often share common elements. For example, among Kyoto artists mentioned by Inaba we find Tomotada, Tomotane and Okatomo. Tomatane and Okatomo were pupils of Tomotada, while Okatori was the brother of Okatomo. The strong master-pupil relationship implied by these closely related professional names has been a characteristic of Japanese arts of all periods.”

— An Introduction to Netsuke (V & A Museum Introductions to the Decorative Arts).

I have been meaning to make a print of the little wooden bird too, so maybe now it is time...