After a full long weekend's worth of trimming, checking, signing, sealing, mat printing, mounting, and wrapping, Mystique #16 has now left the building ...

Because my 'wrapping lady' Ichikawa-san is having a difficult time caring for an elder relative these days - causing some shipping delays recently - I did all these jobs myself this time. So if your print is mounted upside-down or something, you know who to blame!

Here's a scan of the finished version:

As you can see, there are rather a lot of small gradations on this one (click to bring up an enlargement, and look at the outlines of the fruit, for example), and even now, I can't actually describe how many 'impressions' there are on it, as I 'bunched up' the gradations while printing, doing a few of them at a time ...

I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. I think that compared to the original Chinese version from around 400 years ago, this one is more vibrant and 'solidly' printed, as opposed to the more vague 'watery' feeling that many of the pages of the original book have. And my printing is 'cleaner', with fewer visible brush strokes and other 'evidence' of how it was made ...

But that's my taste!

Posted by Dave Bull at 2:53 AM | Comments (3)

Now that everybody has had time to think about possible solutions to the Chinese print mystery outlined in yesterday's post, let's see what we can discover ...

First, some response to a couple of the comments left yesterday:

the seal smudged from washing ...

The seal was almost certainly applied later - being pressed from the front - and wasn't printed. The pigment used for seals commonly contains oil-based components (to stop the stamp pad from drying out), and this kind of faint bleeding is very common on old work. I doubt that this one has been washed ...

one leaf of a 'step-by-step' painting manual ...

Such manuals did (and do) exist, but the Ten Bamboo Studio is not one of them. The images are all provided in 'complete' form, and are intended as models for students to copy and learn from.

light green underlayment ...

This is where my suspicions were first directed. A green tinge at the top edge of this sort of fruit could be quite realistic, and I originally thought this might be what we are seeing.

But there is a much more likely explanation.

Here's a closeup of the slight green tinge on one of the two fruits at the right side of the image:

Where else in this image do you see that same shade of green? Yes ... right directly above the questionable place, on the light green leaves. This is a no-brainer! That fruit was carved on the same block as the paler leaves, and the printer was a tiny bit careless, and let his brush touch the unwanted place.

Let's number these to explain:

Fruits #3 and #5 are on the same block at the light green leaves. Fruit #2 is together with the dark green leaves. In each case, the printer has 'bumped' them slightly. Fruits #1 and #4 will be on a block of their own. Lest you think that this sort of carving - with multiple colour zones on a single block - is rather unlikely, I can tell you from long personal experience (with both my own work, and seeing many other blocks) that it is very common indeed. You want to get as much stuff on any given block as you can.

The first edition of this book - so we are told - was a high-quality very carefully made edition. So there we are - after seeing what he had done, the printer pulled this sheet out of the stack and tossed it aside. It never got completed ... why waste the time?

i can't believe it took me so long to see this. After all, this is a clear case of ... 'been there, done that!'

Posted by Dave Bull at 2:44 AM | Comments (2)

This morning, just in time for lunch, I finished up printing on the first batch (120 sheets) of the current Mystique print - the design from the old Chinese book 'Ten Bamboo Studio'.

All during the work over the past week or so, I have kept a copy of the original print (from back around 1640 or so) by the side of the bench. I don't own one of course, I'm referring to the image published in a reproduction volume a few years back (clickable):

The text accompanying the image refers to the print as being 'unfinished', and it certainly seems to be, as the fruits are all uncoloured. In my own copy of the book that we saw earlier, these fruits are coloured (albeit clumsily) so it does seem as though the original intent of the designers/craftsmen was to depict them basically naturally.

Another theory for their unfinished appearance though, is that the colours as originally printed might simply have faded. We know that in both China and Japan, artists/printmakers in those days used many pigments that we would not consider 'lightfast'. Perhaps the colour in this case was particularly fugitive, and has disappeared.

If you look closely at the fruit, you can see a faint trace of left-over pigment in a few places:

... and ...

So is this a hint? Perhaps they were printed in a light green, which has faded.

But this doesn't make sense, in the light of the fact that there is so much green still visible in other areas of the print. It can't have been all that fugitive!

So there is the mystery. Faded? Designed this way? Unfinished? If so, then why?

Well, a light bulb went on over my head suddenly this morning when I was looking at this image, and I think I have it all figured out.

I'll post about it tomorrow, but in the meantime, hands up (and leave a comment, of course) from anybody else who would like to have a stab at the answer ... which - once you see it - is totally obvious! (Although that's only easy for me to say now, after staring at this thing for a week! )

Posted by Dave Bull at 2:24 AM | Comments (5)

Time to have a look at the design for #16, and where it came from. And we have to go back quite a long way ... nearly 400 years. For this entry in the 'Mystique of the Japanese Print' series, we're going to 'step outside' of the Japanese tradition for a moment, and have a look at a historical precedent ...

Before we begin though, let's slip back around ten years or so, to a day one summer when my daughter Fumi was here on a visit from Canada. At that time (this was before she entered university), she was running a little business, taking advantage of her bilingual abilities and her frequent travel back and forth across the Pacific during her school holidays.

Each time she was here, the two of us would spend most of a day down in the Kanda book district, going through bins in the shops that carried woodblock prints and related material. We would come home with quite a large stack of prints and books, and would spend the next few days cataloguing and pricing it all. She then took the prints back to Canada, and over the next few months, would then put it all on the market, either on eBay, or through the little shop she and I built on the internet, at Hangaclub.com.

Because she had good help making the selections :-) she gradually gained a reputation for having good quality products at reasonable prices, and developed quite a good 'following'. Her little business flourished, to the extent that she was able to purchase her first car (a Miata sports car) with the proceeds. This all came to an end when she entered university, as she felt that she would not be able to concentrate properly on her studies while also running a business, so she closed the shop. And four years later, when she graduated, she opened a different business, one that was more in line with her own interests, which don't particularly include wood block prints!

Anyway, to get back to our Mystique print, it was while the two of us were in a particularly dusty and messy shop one day that we came across an interesting item - a cardboard box full of what looked to be random scraps of prints and calligraphy. As I turned over some of the sheets I had one of those heart-stopping moments that we so long for when visiting such dusty places. I knew right away what I was looking at - a stack of loose sheets from the famous 'Ten Bamboo Studio' collection, something I had only ever seen in illustrations, never in real life.

I knew enough to understand that these scraps weren't from the 400-year-old original Chinese edition, but were almost certainly from a mid-19th century Japanese printing, so this wasn't a 'million dollar' find, but it was rare enough to get me plenty excited! Fumi couldn't understand my enthusiasm - as the box really just looked like a random pile of torn scraps - and when she saw that I actually intended to buy the box and its contents (for around 20,000 yen), wasn't too pleased with me.

When we got home though, and I showed her some references on the book, explaining how the volumes were structured: one on bamboo, one on stones, one for birds, etc., she got interested in solving the 'puzzle'. She shut the cat out of the room, spread the hundreds and hundreds of sheets all over the floor, and set to work to reconstruct the book. She did a wonderful job, mostly by matching up worm holes to figure out which pages should be adjacent, and after many hours of work, presented me with the reassembled set of volumes.

 

And ... to finally get to the point here ... this is one sheet, from the 'Fruits' volume:

This is a mid-19th century Japanese publisher's re-creation, based on (almost certainly) an 18th or 19th century Chinese copy, which itself was probably based on an earlier copy. (The original is exceedingly rare, but quite a number of reproductions were made, most of which were not particularly 'faithful' to the earliest work.) Here's an image I found on the 'net of what seems to be a Chinese reproduction:

And here's a book illustration of a sheet in the British Museum, which the curators 'think' is perhaps from the original:

If so, then it is either an incomplete sheet, or the colours have faded into obscurity ...

None of these are from the same block set, as there are many clear differences in the carved lines and shapes.

So at this point, with nearly 400 years having gone by (the original dates from around 1640), I think I have a pretty free hand to take this on. For my carving model, I'll use the British Museum sheet, as it is clearly of the best quality, line-wise. For the colours, I will have to use my imagination, with some hints taken from these editions. It won't take too long to carve, but printing ... will be another story!

Posted by Dave Bull at 2:25 AM | Comments (0)