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the floating world

Posted on January 27, 2007 @ 6:43 pm by massimo | Filed under: blog, india, japan, travel, ukiyo-e, wordpress

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ukiyo-e aynaku travel illustration

 

From1688 up to1868 the chonin, urban merchants and townspeople became the affluent bourgeoisie and the standard-bearer of a new Japanese popular culture. With plenty of money, they lived a life of luxury and created a lifestyle of their own, centred greatly on the pursuit of pleasures. Chonin gave rise to new forms of theatre, poetry and visual arts, such as woodblock printing or ukiyo.e. Prints were produced -entirely by hand- by the artist, the wood engraver and the printer. Off course my short report gives only a hint of the extraordinary care and the most careful registering required by the printer in order to produce the flawless, multicoloured pictures envisioned by the artist. The attitude of living just for the moment came to life especially in every city’s pleasure quarter or “Floating World”, whose streets where lined with theatres, restaurants, public baths and houses of assignation. Life in red-light districts was brimming with excitement and artists pictured it. As matter of fact erotic prints constituted a considerable portion of the repertoire of most woodblock artist…
The funny thing is that I learned everything about, not during my staying in vibrant Tokyo, but a few months later when I found myself in a remote Indian Himalayan village, among perfumed cedar forests and moody sacred cows. In a local bookstore I bought a volume of the magazine Art of Asia entirely devoted to Japanese art and spent some rather solitary nights reading about the marvellous Floating World…who knows? I guess that the old zen adage: “both deluded beings and Buddhas gaze at the same moon” is the proper ending of this story.

Illustration Friday’s topic is: red

 

monkey

Posted on January 21, 2007 @ 12:11 pm by massimo | Filed under: animals, blog, books, china, mythology, ukiyo-e, wordpress

monkey suwkong aynaku illustration travel

“Monkey King (or Sunwukong) was born from a stone. He wanted to be like the immortals and be free from death. He was extremely smart and capable, and learned all the magic tricks from a master Taoist. He could transform himself into seventy-two different images such as a tree, a bird, a beast of prey, or a bug as small as a mosquito so as to sneak into an enemy’s belly to fight him or her inside out. Using clouds as a vehicle, he can travel 180,000 miles a single somersault…”
Monkey is the Chinese classic by ancient scholar Wu Ch’eng-en I am reading these days. It combines the divine and human and is an allegory of own personal journey to spiritual development.

Illustration Friday’s topic is: super hero

punk rock

Posted on January 13, 2007 @ 9:39 am by massimo | Filed under: africa, blog, people, travel, wordpress

lamu punk illustration travel aynaku

The island of Lamu, Kenya, was -and maybe still is- one of the most exotic places a beachcomber may expect to come across. I was there in 1981, at the end of my first, single and glorious trip to Africa. With a very few money in my pockets and nothing precisely to do, I just used to loll the charming alleys of the Arabic village till sunset. Lamu was then a popular hangout among late freaks from the 70’s, that sort of folk with long beards and bushy hairs, wearing Indian clothes and cheap Chinese slippers. Sweetish rock music was in the air all day long; let’s say Eric Clapton or the Grateful Dead…Soon after sunset I invariably climbed the steep stairway of the “New Century Hotel” getting to the terraced roof where I slept for a few shillings, usually alone, without standing another minute in daylight…
An evening I found out not to be alone. It had already happened to me to share that roof with somebody else, usually a freak on the cheap; but that night at the dark end of the terrace, was a very strange fellow with a platinum blonde striking haircut ( I would like to meet his barber…), who swallowed beer quickly and wore heavy, military-type black boots … I wonder what the hell had driven a true cockney punk upon an island in the Indian Ocean: actually I forgot to ask him! Instead we shortly talked about music and trends, and I was initiated to the Sex Pistol’s legend. As soon as I got home I had a drastic haircut, became a Talking Head’s fan and -in a few moths- I headed north to London.

Illustration Friday’s topic is: 80’s

buzz…

Posted on January 6, 2007 @ 12:23 pm by massimo | Filed under: blog, people, travel, wordpress

Singapore’s inexorable economic growth drove me there, around 1995, looking for an architectural job which I got in a week time. The city lost since long its ancient flavour of thriving and exotic colony, and …