my shiny new website

Most of them aren't in place yet, Kate - it took ages to write a fraction of the painting one, and the rest will take much longer. I've only made a few notes for the lacquerwork section so far.

Martin this looks really great!

Hmm, at least one page does go badly wrong at 800x600, dammit. Must start defining sizes more by percentages!

I'd suggest you deactivate some of the hyperlinks until the page is active. A little frustrating navigating to dead pages.

the dead links (esp. to comics and gardening) are such a TEASE! Maybe just put a little asterix next to the unavailable ones for now or at least change the link color or something. Otherwise I wish you the best with this project!

Comics and gardening won't be coming in the next few weeks, but they are both pretty high on my list. I have written about both a bit on Freaky Trigger. Actually, I should dig up some of my old articles on Japanese comics - they go back to the '80s.

I was nervous about embarking on this whole project - it's so huge. I started with an easy one, Edo prints being very well contained in technical, geographic and chronological terms, and the most popular Japanese art in the world at large, and offering no great difficulties. Next I really want to to Zen painting, because it's my favourite area and because it leads on to all kinds of other areas, and allows me to start making the links that I want the site to be all about. It'll link on to Zen as an idea, garden design, poetry (especially haiku), ceramics (especially the rustic bowls), the tea ceremony, calligraphy... This is daunting because it's really hard to explain the ideas behind it, and the art itself - there are the most aggressively exciting landscapes ever painted, cute monkeys (as on the welcome page) and single-stroke circles to try to pull together. Still, no point in embarking on something like this if I'm not going to bite the bullet for the hard parts...

was a great painting in the swords exhibition at BM recently. tryptich, reminded me of those insanely detailed Paul Darrow or Frank Miller splashpages. samurai, HUNDREDS of arrows. any ideas?

also, bought a postcard featuring woodcut of a frog from the shop. Frog by Matsumoto Hoji from "Meika Gafu". seems to defy google.

I don't recall the painting - I did go to the BM show twice. Worth googling Yoshitoshi, perhaps - he's the only one I can think of who did that kind of thing - look at his page on my site, http://www.japanese-arts.net/painting/artists_yoshitoshi.htm, for the style, and he did a lot of triptyches and a fair amount of samurai prints.

The frog is, I would imagine, the third print on http://www.ready-to-hang.com/RTH_View_Page2.html. I already have it saved for future use! Why they have the artist's name in the title and then say it is by 'unknown' is beyond me.

title bar titles are also used as tab titles in firefox. without them i have multiple tabs that all say "htt....html" which is useless.

yoshitoshi (great name) is similar but nothing i've found by him is quite right. i seem to remember the name 'utagawa' but that's probably japanese for 'smith'

Geezaesthetics! (Right?)

Have you read Ian Buruma's Behind the Mask? It might be of interest.

Blimey...you certainly give a personal viewpoint.

There is a point of view that zen isn't a religion as such, and that to say ...develop the same kind of deep contempt I feel for other religions that I already knew well makes the reader wonder how much the author knows about zen and religions in general...

Zen's classified as a branch of buddhism...but there is some debate over whether it is a religion as such, in the sense of having a set of principles you have to subscribe to. And, going wider, there are those who see buddhism as being more of a philosophy than a religion.

(that's why I said 'there is a point of view')

If someone convinces me that it is a philosophy, which seems highly unlikely since it is absolutely and fundamentally opposed to nearly everything philosophy is about, I will switch to having contempt for it as that instead.

OK - I wasn't trying to convince you of anything; I was just saying that "ignorance" is a point of view that some people might take.

Actually, there's something refreshing about presenting zen painting without the usual reverence, and giving your personal view.

But now I'm curious how you'll get on with the rock gardens :)

Actually, I'd still say that buddhism is a religion, and without philosophical accretions worth mentioning. Zen is unequivocally opposed to philosophy, unless you make up a useless new meaning of the word philosophy.

"I don't know what you mean by writing off...Zen strikes me as nonsense."

LOL

OK, the analogy is having a section on your website about the art of the Sistine Chapel and saying, "...I know very little about theology or the Catholic tradition except that it revered or admired by credulous church goers, but after reading a few books I regard it with the same contempt as I have for Eastern mumbo-jumbo."

Everything you've said about Zen as it is practised in Japan I'd agree with, but my perspective is that the School system is a later accretion on the Bodhidharma's original ideas, just as the religious aspects of Buddhism seem to me to be not derived from what we know about the thought of Siddhartha or the earliest surviving Buddhist tracts. Kind of like the forms that Christianity has taken are not necessarily implied by the reported teachings of Jebus.

My take on Eastern philosophy might be idiosyncratic and therefore fairly pointless in terms of thinking of it as philosophy. But I've come to the conclusion that in particular Zen, prob'ly due to the Taoist influence, is interested in grasping, not denying, reality: the quiddity of being. Which is why I think it's philosophical. Your mileage might well vary, obv.

Yeah,you've got to watch out for that Martin.

doesn't zen boil down to the finger pointing at the moon parable? = it tries to deliver stories or art or acts aimed at stopping you obsessing about the finger (technique, belief system), when the point (ha!) is the moon (a way of living; a way of painting)

i only known much about it (or care about it) bcz of john cage (whose moon was "listening", rather than dice-throwing, say) (i mean dice were a means to an end, but he only used them bcz they were effective -- and as long as they were effective -- not bcz he gave a fuck about dice)

Am I going on pointlessly? I'll shut up if so. I just like thinking about this stuff. Maybe I shd form a breakaway thread.

Way back in the day (like ten years ago) I used to have a site about one of the brontes and was often engaged in academic banter. it was fun.