Art Classes

click to download my flyer

Now that my studio is more or less set up, I’m finally able to open up my art class!

For now, to start, there are two days per week for regular classes: Tuesday and Thursdays in the afternoon. We meet at my studio in Takefu and from there we head somewhere in the neighborhood for sketching. There are tons of temples, historic buildings, alleys, and parks within walking distance, so it’s an incredibly convenient location.

Classes are 90 minutes long, and during the beginning I go over one or two basic points, and then we spend the majority of the class drawing. For now I’m starting out with just sketching, as it’s the most portable and simplest way to begin. In the future I hope to move on to teach some oil and watercolor techniques too.

There are so many beautiful places here, it’s hard not to be inspired just walking around town. I hope to share that feeling with everyone around me.

If you happen to be reading my English blog and live nearby, please join us!

(For the Japanese version of this post, click here.)

Chrysanthemum Earth Festival 2010

Last year around the same time as LoveDen, I also was lucky enough to be asked to do a poster for the Kiku Chikyuu Haku, or the Chrysanthemum Earth Festival, here in Takefu. You can see the old poster here on my blog.

Last year I was asked last-minute to do it, so I was only able to do the front side of the poster, and a university student over here did the back side. This year I there was enough time for me to do both sides, and I think we ended up with a decent poster (I know that sounds awfully cocky, but honestly I improved a lot on what we had last year).

I stuck with the same theme and the same initial painting for the poster as last year, but with a number of tweaks. This is now the 3rd or 4th year of the festival, and its been growing in size quite a bit. Hopefully this year will help it spread across the whole prefecture.

The festival’s theme is ecology, mixed with a lot of local imagery (the chrysanthemum is Takefu’s official flower). It coincides with Takefu’s Chrysanthemum Doll Festival so there should be some cross pollination (see what I did there? ;)) between the two events. Festival-comers are encouraged to bring their own bowls and chopsticks for the concessions there, and there are lots of local crafts and food on sale, including eco-bags made from chrysanthemum fiber. You can also eat chrysanthemum soba and chrysanthemum ice cream, which are very delicious!

The festival takes place in Takefu’s Ajimano-en gardens, which is an incredibly beautiful and large garden nestled in between the tall mountains with a Japanese-style pond, all kinds of flowers, a small waterfall, and a very old, traditional wooden farmhouse where you can rest and eat homemade food. There are even some castle ruins off down an old mountain trail (which I can’t believe I haven’t been to visit yet, considering how much I’ve been researching the old castles in this town).

So anyway, if you can make it to Echizen and you read my English blog, please come to the Chrysanthemum Earth Festival! It’s a great way to enjoy autumn in Japan!

front side (click for bigger image)

back side (click for bigger)

LoveDen 2010

Long-time readers of my blog might remember last year’s LoveDen post. Or not. Either way, I’ll explain what it is.

In Japan, the dating scene is a lot different from in the US. There’s a pretty different social/cultural atmosphere here, and partially because of shyness and partially because of business, it seems to be harder to find dates here than in the US (despite the fact that so many single people do desperately want boyfriends/girlfriends).  It’s even gone so far that recently the government has begun sponsoring dating services to help people get married. It wasn’t long ago that arranged marriages were the norm in Japan, and while they’re becoming less and less common, the tradition will probably never die off completely. Likely that cultural aspect also has played a part in the way the dating scene has evolved in Japan as well. Look at me, though, I’m getting all philosophical and away from my main point.

So anyway, the most common way to find a date here seems to be the kompa or goukon, a kind of group date in which an even number of young men and women get together for dinner or drinking and socializing. From what I’ve witnessed it seems like many people hate these kind of events and only go to them in order to help one of their friends find a date. One the other hand, many people really enjoy them too, but I suppose going to one you never know if you’re going to get set up with someone who is only there to support a friend or someone who is actually looking for a partner.

Okay, so back to LoveDen. The local rail company where my wife’s brother works has been sponsoring, for a few years now, a kompa event on a train in an effort to reach out to the younger population and get them to ride more. This event has turned out to be extremely successful and last year sold out almost immediately. To its credit, a couple from the first event eventually got married after first meeting on the LoveDen train.

Thanks to the familial connection, I was able to design last year’s poster, and I also just completed the poster for this year’s event. It’s a modification on the same theme but a little brighter. Hopefully this year’s event will be even more successful than last year’s!

LoveDen 2010 (click for a larger size)

The New Studio

front alley view of my studio

I promised photos some time ago… Forgive me for being a little overdue, but it’s taken a while to clean the place up to a presentable condition.

This is my new painting studio. My town of Echizen is very remote and rural, so it has a real rustic feeling to it. It was never firebombed during WW2 like its neighbor to the north, Fukui, was. Its pretty rural so it hasn’t seen a big building boom like most cities have during the post-war years. And its so remote that globalization/Westernization hasn’t taken place nearly so much here as it has in other places.

A lot of people might consider these bad points, but I think most of the foreigners who come here see those as very positive points. And the town seems to see that as a good thing too, because they spend a lot of money promoting this as a “time capsule” town, with placards and signs all over displaying historic photos. The town has seen a lot of history, and to be honest, it’s the only town I’ve seen in Japan that is putting real effort into preserving what little history it has left (sadly, none of the 4+ castles that were built here over the centuries remain).

a traditional antique stove

But I digress. My point is that there are lots of very very old houses here — ancient houses from the pre-electricity days, from back before the Japanese customarily tore down houses every few years to rebuild a fresh new plastic cookie-cutter monstrosity in its place. Through the magic of 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon, my English student who used to be my Japanese teacher has a friend who knows somebody who works for the local radio station whose owner also happens to like these ancient style houses and happened to have some rooms to rent. So after a long string of contacts, I was able to rent one of these houses for pretty cheap.

It would be my dream to live in one of these and do a big fixer-upper project, but that’s for another time.

So I’ll tell you a little more about the building. It’s built in a very old style of traditional townhouse (machiya) which originated in the ancient capital of Kyoto and spread to other urban areas (ancient Echizen was a huge urban center). If you’ve visited Kyoto or Kanazawa, you’ve no doubt seen tons of these gorgeous traditional buildings. Here is Echizen there is less money to use to preserve these houses, so they’re in varying stages of decay, but I would say there are almost more old buildings per capita than in Kyoto (of course Kyoto is huge and Echizen is tiny). The houses typically have a storefront area and a residential area, and are fairly cool in the summer (cool is a relative term, since these are pre-air conditioning houses). The building I’m using is shared between me and a radio station. Its in an area filled with old houses, alleys, no big streets, old shops, temples, and traditional crafts. A neighboring house has also been rented by an artist and is being used as a gallery. It’s a really nice area, with a slightly old and dirty look, but I tend to think of it as the patina of centuries of culture.

And now for a very brief photo tour:

inside the front door, with the staircase to the 2nd floor on the left

view of the radio studio on the 1st floor

the 6’x6′ backyard space, currently overgrown, but you can see the remains of an old stone lantern

one of my painting rooms on the 2nd floor; the other is still pretty messy and not fit for showing

rear view from the machiya from a back alley — the window opens to my painting room above

neighboring art gallery (look closely and you can see some of my chickens on the window poster)

another neighbor, Natsukashiya, connected to the gallery above

A Tribute to the Habushu

You may remember my Habushu post a few months back where I discussed the finer points of this local delicacy… well for a number of reasons I find it hard to get rid of this big jar of preserved pit viper (namely being that I refuse to open it up due to the stench) and so it accompanied us on the move back to Takefu.

However, I have found a use for it as a drawing tool. I am starting some drawing classes here this fall, and I’m also teaching a few irregular classes on “Art as Therapy” at a medical university up here, trying to impart some drawing techniques to nurses and care workers who want to use art therapy to help their patients. The first time I taught the class I gathered up some flowers and vegetables and put together a basic still life. My second class was on August 19, and as it’s past the big flower season, I had to find a new subject.

Well, it was just sitting there, staring me in the face. Literally.

The class went quite well. We were prepared for 20 students, so we set up 10 chairs around the habu and 10 chairs around a pile of vegetables (I figured not everyone would want to get up close and personal to the snake, if nothing else for the smell). We only had 12 people in the end, but it was pretty funny to watch the 10 seats around the vegetables fill up immediately, and the remaining students hover around as if they were hoping a new seat would pop up by the pumpkin by itself. Eventually though they warmed up to his little face and the class split up half and half between the two still lifes.

I did a little 2-hour watercolor demo of the habu to show the students how to do a layered watercolor painting.

Won't you *habu* some? (Ok, I'm sorry about that...)

Tadaima!

I’m back from Michigan — got in late last night, and was very pleased to find the internet was still working. Yes I know it sounds stupid, but most of August went by in a blur due to me having no net access, and coming back from a different time zone and a 24+ hour transit I was really in need of some kind of temporal anchor to keep my mind from floating away completely.

Fortunately coming to Japan from the US doesn’t result in jet lag as much as it gives you a time boost. So thanks to my confused circadian rhythms I woke up at 5:30 am, bright and early, ready to work. (Keep in mind that unlike Michigan, where the sun rises around 7 am this time of year, in Japan it’s already as bright as mid-day by 5:30.) I was able to finish up some work that had been lagging begind — two event posters and some translations — by 9 am and suddenly found myself with a bit of time to write a blog post. This is only my second post this month and my traffic is starting to take a serious dive due to my silence — which is pretty close to suicide for an artist who lives primarily on web-based sales.

Because of the move, I’ve really been lagging behind of life drawing recently. So I was determined to do some sketching in Michigan. One interesting thing about Japan is that beverages often carry little presents on them, like the prizes in the bottom of the cereal box in the US; recently I picked up a great pocket-sized sketchbook from a 6-pack of beer (actually I bought it for the sketchbook more than for the beer — I don’t like that brand). It was the perfect size to carry with me, and it felt great to be outdoors in that wonderfully cool, fresh lake breeze sketching in the afternoons. We had a sailboat and a pontoon boat, and the water was warm for swimming. The air was cool and the sun was warm, and it had been so long since I’ve been in the wide open US that I forgot how great it can be to just have a wide open space to play around in.

Since it was sort of a family reunion, relaxation and socializing got in the way of sketching (not complaining here), but I was still able to get a few pages done. The sketchbook has a soft cover so it was quite difficult to do any sketches on the boat — or rather, I did some sketches on the boat, but they turned out a little wonky. Here are a few pages of quick 5-10 minute sketches:

sketchbook page 1

My wife writing a goodbye email at Itami Airport

sketchbook page 2

The pain! It should be illegal for airlines to do this on such long flights!

Oh yes, I have to stop here and complain for just a moment. A couple years ago I mentioned how a Japan-US flight on Northwest was the most uncomfortable flight of my life. While that still holds true and I have forsworn ever flying Northwest again, this time around United pulled the same trick!! It wasn’t as bad as Northwest only because the flight (from Narita to Chicago) was shorter than the Northwest flight (from Kansai to Detroit). I wish I could make this clear to the airline; it is practically cruel and unusual punishment to have a trans-Pacific flight (really, any flight over 4 hours) without TV screens. Narita to Chicago was an 11 hour flight, and the only “entertainment” was for me to crane my neck up and to the left at such a sharp angle that I probably would have snapped something if I tried watching the barely-visible projection screen. And the movie selections were awful, but at least if I had a personal TV screen I could have flipped channels instead of having only 1 option.

And the real crime — as awful as that in-flight “entertainment” was — was that, like on Northwest, the seats have been shortened to the point where a human can longer fit. I’m not talking about some morbidly obese person trying to squeeze into the narrow airline seat — that has been discussed at length elsewhere — I’m talking about legroom. Now I’m no giant. I’m a fairly average 6 feet tall, non-lanky guy. I can put up with the painfully narrow seats and aisles that you have to sideways-shuffle through (all the while having to rub your butt and crotch against the faces of the poor fools who chose the aisle seats), but there should be a certain number of inches mandated for legroom. This time and on the previously mentioned Northwest flight, my legs actually did not fit in the space provided! That is to say, my knees were jammed up and my feet were hovering for the entire flight, giving me terrible leg cramps and bruises on my knees. If the lack of TV screens was cruel and unusual punishment, then this was downright torture. They suggest you rotate your feet and try to avoid, you know, deadly blood clots in your legs, but they mockingly don’t even give you the space to do that, so the whole flight I was paranoid I would suddenly drop dead from some embolism.

There needs to be space for a human being to be able to stand fully upright in between the seats. It doesn’t need to be much, just enough to stand up. In this seats, the edge of the seat in front of me was actually past being even with the edge of my seat; the head of the passenger in front of me was closer to me than my own feet.

I get that fuel is really expensive and airlines are struggling, but there has to be a limit to this downsizing. I’m at the point where I’ve come to despise air travel, and I almost never want to fly again in my life. My legs are still quite sore today. Anyway, if you’re reading this, I would strongly advise you to avoid both United and Northwest on anything but the shortest flights.

sketchbook page 3

The view of our backyard, the dock, the lake, and the pontoon boat

sketchbook page 4

The view of the house from the pontoon

The pontoon was great fun, but it had a maximum occupancy of 10 while there were 14 of us. As Coldwater Lake is really shallow and we were running so low in the water we ended up bottoming out on more than one occasion. Even more exciting, twice we experienced the pontoon effect — a sort of spontaneous sinking, although we luckily didn’t completely capsize. The first time it took us by surprise as all of a sudden the front of the boat dipped straight down into the lake without warning and a huge wall of water washed over the front of the boat. The second time it happened I felt like we were angling further and further forward, but I ended up not saying anything (truth be told I kind of wanted to see it happen again), and sure enough after a few more seconds we dipped, a lot deeper this time, and nearly drove straight down to the bottom before my uncle put it in full reverse and pulled us out. Great fun!

sketchbook page 5

My wife on the boat; This is one of the really wonky sketches, as we were boating around Coldwater Lake as I sketched it

sketchbook page 6

My dad reading on the boat

Is there room for one more complaint about flying here? Because on our return flight, we went down to the gate for our flight and noticed that about 75% of the chairs had been roped off and were being sold to customers. I don’t remember the price, but considering they offer to give you an extra 2 inches of legroom (still too short in my opinion) for about $100, it must have been at least $60 — just for the “luxury” of sitting in a chair! Since they ask you to come to the airport 2 hours in advance I can’t help but think that charging you to use a chair should count as some kind of extortion.

sketchbook page 9

A guy using his laptop in O'Hare

sketchbook page 10

A pilot on his lunch break

Those last two sketches were done in the airport — and for anyone who likes drawing and wants opportunities to draw people, I can’t recommend the airport enough. It’s the perfect place for sketching people. There are thousands of people around, and you’re almost guaranteed that they will be around for at least an hour while they wait for their flight. And as there’s not much to do, most of them will be reading, or sleeping, or otherwise sitting still, giving you a solid 10-15 minutes to do a sketch without any interruptions.

Just be careful about being too obvious — the very big fellow on the laptop ended up spotting me and giving me a glare that he wasn’t too happy at being drawn; and later on while I was doing the sideways-shuffle in the plane’s aisle (trying not to brush my crotch or my butt against the faces of the fools who actually chose aisle seats) I stopped in line for the bathroom right in front of his seat! I had to stare at the ceiling and pray for no turbulence lest I ended up giving him a big faceful of groin and signing my own death warrant right there.

Reconstructing Fukui Castle

I love history. When my mind wanders, one of the things I constantly go back to is imagining different worlds if history had been different. You know, like if you could go back in time and give Julius Caesar a modern chemistry textbook, or warn the American Indians about the crap the Europeans are trying to pull. Japan has an amazing and rich history, and riding my bike through town usually ends up with me daydreaming about different time periods here (a little dangerous perhaps). Particularly here in Fukui prefecture, where the modern world has just barely taken a foothold, there are so many places where the land is untouched by foreign influence or the modern global culture. It’s easy to get lost in one’s imagination.

Historically, Fukui was a very important military and cultural center of Japan for many centuries. After the feudal period its power waned considerably, but in its heyday it was one of the top population centers in Japan. Sadly, though, that history is mostly buried here. All of the castles have been leveled and paved over, the aqueducts filled in and turned into streets and real estate, and most of it has been forgotten even by the residents.

Fukui castle is one of the sites that almost brings tears to my eyes when I think how much history has been squandered. Currently the prefectural capital and largest city in the prefecture, Fukui used to be a rural swampland called Kitanosho. In the late 1500’s a castle was built here, and soon afterwards war came. The first castle was burnt down after 8 short years, and in 1606 a new castle was built at a nearby site. The whole city was designed and developed into a paragon of a castle town. Moats and canals were dug all over town separating it into many districts, walls and gates were erected all over for defense, and walled samurai towns sprung up. Looking at the old maps of Fukui city, it looks like it must have been completely impregnable.

Although the town was never taken after that, a fire destroyed the main keep in 1669 and it was never rebuilt. The innermost walls remained, as did the noble’s houses on the castle grounds, though, and it continued to be an important castle town until the Meiji Restoration. Sadly, the remaining walls and palaces were burned down when Fukui was firebombed in World War 2. A few years after the city was burnt to the ground by bombers, a huge earthquake struck and re-leveled the city once again. The stone walls of the castle still bear the marks of that earthquake. During the second reconstruction, the cityscape was changed and it lost its identity as a castle town. The aqueducts and moats were paved over with cement and a lot of important cultural heritage was lost. While other cities on Japan reconstructed their castles and turned them into parks and tourism centers, Fukui erased its past, even going so far as to build a hideous government building on top of the remains of the castle palace.

Today the city is expanding, and as it grows and new construction takes place, workers are constantly finding old walls and remnants of the castle town. Thankfully, some work has been done to restore these artifacts when they have been found, and there are plaques scattered about the city wherever a historical remnant has been uncovered. Whenever I run into one of these I stop for a while and try to picture what the city could have looked like if the people in charge of reconstructing the city had had a little more foresight (and hindsight) about preserving their history.

A few years ago, a minor reconstruction at the castle grounds took place. One of the rotting wooden footbridges was reconstructed into its original, beautiful form. On the day it opened, I went to visit it, and it was just superb. Even though it was only a bridge, the smell of the new timber and the authentic reconstruction of the ancient building stirred my imagination. I decided I wanted to paint a view of what the town might look like if the castle had never burned down, and if it had been preserved properly.

I started this painting two years ago and got about halfway done when I hit a big roadblock: I couldn’t find any reference of what the castle looked like! I thought about making up a new facade for the castle based on the other castles I have visited, but that just didn’t seem right. Each castle is unique, and that wouldn’t be fair to Fukui castle or the castle I would have copied. I had to put the painting on hold until I could accurately reconstruct it.

For the past two years I have visited libraries, history museums, and done countless image searches trying to build up a database of images I could use to reconstruct the castle. Every now and then I would find a goldmine. One store was selling postcards with pre-WW2 photographs of the town. I could finally reconstruct the outer walls! At another store I found a few old woodblock prints with images of the castle, printed back when the castle was still around! But sadly the perspective was way off and it was hard to get an accurate measuring from them. I did a lot of research and discovered a whole lot about Fukui’s history as well — not just the castle. It was like unfolding a mystery that was hidden all around me; in the street names, the rivers, under the streets, and the property lines remnants of the old castle town were still evident. From one of the paintings, I learned that one of my friend’s apartments was actually built right on top of one of the old gateways into the city!

Fukui Castle scale model

A scale model of Fukui Castle I stumbled upon while climbing Mt. Asuwa. Who hides such a beautiful piece of artwork in a field behind a parking lot on top of a mountain??

Old photo of Fukui Castle

A pre-war photo showing the walls of Fukui castle

Old photos of Fukui City

Photos showing various shots of old Fukui

An old painting of Fukui castle

A very old painting showing the castle before it burned down

A diagram of Fukui Castle

A diagram of the main keep located on a plaque outside of the castle ruins

3D digital image of Fukui Castle

3D digital recreation of Fukui Castle

Finally, I discovered a website that created some 3D images of old castles, and lo and behold, they recreated a shot of Fukui castle! It was the final bit of reference I needed to be able to reconstruct what the castle might have looked like. I spent the better part of this week putting together my references and sitting down to finish this two-year-old painting, and here is the result. The only part I was unable to faithfully recreate is the gatehouse beyond the bridge, as none of the references I found were able to give me a good image of it. So I did my best to recreate what it may have looked like, based on other castles’ gatehouses.

Fukui Castle, if it were still around today

Fukui castle, seen from the south, during cherry blossom season (click for a larger version)

In one week, I will be moving back to Echizen city after spending a year here in Fukui. Even though Echizen is only 30 minutes away from Fukui, I’m especially happy that I was able to finish this painting now, rather than later. I feel like I can present it now, saying thank you to the city that has struck my imagination so strongly. (After all, after I return to Echizen I’m going to resume obsessing over that city’s own rich, forgotten history.)