Yanagi Sōetsu
What is Pattern?
Handicrafts and Sesshu
Okinawa's Bashofu
A Painted Karatsu as Food for Thought
Recently there is a tendency to pursue distortion in art, but in the case of this jar, natural deformation has raised distortion to the level of spontaneous beauty.
Woodblock Prints
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi SōetsuIt seems to me that many printmakers are suffering under a delusion. Looking at current trends, it appears that recent prints are simply copying fine art and painting. Some printmakers are working in the nanga style of painting. Others are attempting to reproduce the effects of oil. Some cleverly contrived prints are often difficult to distinguish from paintings done with a brush. The question arises: Why are these printmakers working in the medium of woodblock printing at all?
For prints to follow in the footsteps of painting has very little meaning. The art of the brush and palette should be left to the brush and palette.
Seeing and Knowing
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi SōetsuThe results of intuition can be studied by the intellect, but the intellect cannot give birth to intuition.
The Japanese Perspective
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi SōetsuGenerally speaking, the Western perception of art has its roots in Greece. For a long time its goal was perfection, which is particularly noticeable in Greek sculpture. This was in keeping with Western scientific thinking; there are no painters like Andrea Mantegna in the East. I am tempted to call such art ‘the art of even numbers’.
In contrast to this, what the Japanese eye sought was the beauty of imperfection, which I would call ‘the art of odd numbers’. No other country has pursued the art of imperfection as eagerly as Japan.
The Beauty of Kasuri
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi SōetsuThe Characteristics of Kogin
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi SōetsuThe Beauty of Miscellaneous Things
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi SōetsuWashi
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi SōetsuHandmade washi (traditional Japanese paper) is replete with appeal. Looking at it, touching it, fills me with an indescribable sense of satisfaction. The more beautiful it is, however, the more difficult it is to put to use. Only a master of calligraphy could possibly add to its beauty; it is exquisite just as it is. This is wonderfully strange, for it is merely a simple material. Yet plain and undecorated as it is, it is alive with nuanced beauty. Good washi makes possible our most ambitious creative dreams.
What is Folk Craft?
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi Sōetsu
Optical Glass House
A façade of some 6,000 pure-glass blocks (50mm x 235mm x 50mm) was employed. The pure-glass blocks, with their large mass-per-unit area, effectively shut out sound and enable the creation of an open, clearly articulated garden that admits the city scenery. To realize such a façade, glass casting was employed to produce glass of extremely high transparency from borosilicate, the raw material for optical glass. The casting process was exceedingly difficult, for it required both slow cooling to remove residual stress from within the glass, and high dimensional accuracy. Even then, however, the glass retained micro-level surface asperities, but we actively welcomed this effect, for it would produce unexpected optical illusions in the interior space.