From: Shannon Stoney (shannonstoney@earthlink.net)
Date: 07/07/01-05:40:29 PM Z
>>
>> Was this the landscape kimonos of Itchiku Kubota? I saw a show of his stuff
>> at the Museum of Natural History in DC and was also bowled over.
Judy wrote:
> Kimonos !!!! Incredible works of art. I saw an exhibit in LA a few years
> ago and began to acquire kimono books, hoping somehow the genius would
> wear off on me. I have however come to the conclusion that to do work of
> that level you must be SECURE IN A TRADITION, as witness Korean & Chinese
> ceramics, Japanese prints, screens, kimonos, and of course the inro....
Kubota was trying to resurrect a dyeing tradition that had been lost. He had
an ancient fragment of a cloth that had been hand-dyed with natural dyes,
and he worked for years on trying to figure out how it was done. Some of
those years were spent in a prisoner of war camp during ww2. When he got
out, he thought he had the solution, and he continued to work on it until he
thought he had it right. The landscape kimonos were the result. They were
not exactly traditional, though. The dye techniques were very old and thus
traditional, but the way the kimonos were arranged next to each other to
create a sort of landscape panorama was entirely new, although it recalls
Japanese scrolls.
So, I guess you could say that he "made it new" (I think it might have been
a poet that coined that phrase) but he based the newness on something very
old.
--shannon
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 08/02/01-11:56:46 AM Z CST