The Blackberry Walk

It was some time ago now when, visiting Oxford with RiceIsNice, we came across a most wonderful antique map and print shop. You enter this shop, which is situated on one of Oxford's busiest roads, and you smell the faint smell of antique wood and old mottled books. A truly delightful smell from an old oak-beamed building. The shop is long, but not too wide. Across the walls are old maps, news clippings, and prints, some fetching grand sums, othersstuffed in these very large labelled binders,fetching far more modest, affordable sums,  waiting to be poured through. A beautiful shop indeed, a shop one could only imagine in Oxford. But there they had another ware being sold, one which felt quite out of place from the prints otherwise being sold: that being shin-hanga

Shin-hanga was a Japanese art movement which revived the style and techniques of ukiyo-e. Please do look up some shin-hanga prints online and have a look: they are truly beautiful. Far more beautiful, I reckon, than ukiyo-e. Do understand, I have no dislike for ukiyo-e - there is certainly a great beauty in these pieces - but for myself at least, they don't inspire the same kinds of feelings nor intensity of feelings as these shin-hanga works. There is an argument which follows that in all forms of art the most recent works are the works most accessible. As ages pass and the ways in which people think and view the world change, so too does the art; and what's communicated in that art is altered in lock-step. Art is but another form of communication, after all. And so it is often easier to relate to and understand art which is made more recently. Truly, the past is a foreign country; it is not just the past obfuscating us from art, but foreignness too is roadblock to cultural understanding. In the ever bloating mono-culture of today, the gaps and differences between cultures are ever-narrowing and becoming more and more similar; yet in the past, the gaps would've been far wider and far deeper like ravines, dividing understanding.

Ukiyo-e, then, has both these in droves. Under the Tokugawa Shogunate's policy of sakoku, cultural diffusion from the world to Japan and back again was kept to a minimum, and, given the age of ukiyo-e as a style, it is no surprise then that shin-hanga is more emotionally accessible to me. But what has changed? What indeed has changed between these styles? One large thing indeed has changed, a great and calamitous event to send reverberations through the ages: the Meiji restoration.

The Western daimyo rose up against the shogunate, reinstating the power of the emperor Meiji to legitimate their coup, and reverse the shogunate's policy of sakoku. No longer would Japan look inward, ignoring the changes of the world, but would look outward to absorb and bring back the styles and innovations which made the West the Best, and Japan lag weakly behind. The French were determined to have the best cuisine, so sent off were cadres of aspiring chefs to France to bring back culinary skills, shaping much of Japan's cuisine today. Before the Meiji restoration, Japanese cuisine was all fish, land animals were very rarely eaten; and look today, how so many dishes, from katsudon to gyudon require the meat of land animals. For their military, Japan looked to the greatest naval power, Britain, and the greatest land power, Germany, to study their discipline, tactics, and technologies. And, for whatever reason, used their outfits for school girls and school boys, the former adopting the English sailor uniform, the latter the German infantryman's. Art too was subject to this Japanese renaissance.

As with katsudon and gyudon, the artistic influence of the West upon Japan was just that, influence, not at all akin to the replacement of local art forms by Western dominance seen in many other cultures today. And that influence is keenly felt in shin-hanga. The style, the colours, the techniques are similar, but one thing which is so absent in ukiyo-e and so present in shin-hanga. The horizon.

Western oil painting seemed to have come out of nowhere. Like the mystery of the great pyramids of Giza - how on earth were the first pyramids the most technically impressive? - the same question can be asked of the first oil painters: how on Earth were the Flemish masters so talented. Oil painting had only existed for a generation or so, and there was no gradual improvement in technique or quality; they were just there, already experts of this new craft. There was the fine use of this new medium, the textures they could blend, the great detail they were able to portray on the canvas; but one more technology was crucial to their art, that being vanishing point perspective. Vanishing point perspective was invented in Florence,  Italy serving as the other pole of the fine arts to the Lowlands, at a time near about contemporary with the revolution in fine arts. Together, these techniques would define the Western artistic tradition.

Here, I'll pivot from history to philosophy, and dip into a little Spengler. For Spengler, the 'West' as a world-feeling - that is, as a way of viewing and experiencing the world - began sometime in the darkness post-Roman Europe, only beginning to see itself with Charlemagne and his empire. The new Western Roman emperor crowned, and Byzantium broken with, a new culture began to slowly grow on its own trajectory, influenced by Rome, Athens, Jerusalem, and most importantly, yet frustratingly most ineffably, Germanic traditions and customs. A new world was being born. Starting with Romanesque, Roman imitation, the West developed the Gothic tradition, building some of the most beautiful structures the world has yet to see, for my money. In both of these styles, Spengler would argue, the 'prime symbol' of the West is on show, that being the striving for the infinite. Romanesque appears to continue up with rows upon rows of arches, almost drawing you up out of yourself; I'm reminded of some scenes in Berserk which use similar imagery. And the Gothic, those florets strive for the sky's ceiling as if it were an etiolated plant, grasping. I've written about all this before so I shan't repeat myself too much. Suffice it to say, this newfangled conception of the West sees this striving for the infinite as its deepest calling.

Nowhere better can this longing and striving for the infinite be seen than in the horizon of an oil painting. For it is in the horizon one can lose oneself. I read this quote in Journey to the End of the Night in reference to a 17th century painter, and it's stuck with me:

Claude Lorrain was right in saying that the foreground of a picture is always repugnant and that the interest of an artwork must be seen in the distance, in that unfathomable realm which is the refuge of lies, of those dreams caught in the act, which are the only thing men love.

And I believe this to be true. It is in the background, in the infinite distance evoked by vanishing point perspective, that Western man comes into contact his prime symbol. You look deeply into any traditional landscape and set your eyes upon the horizon, or the vanishing point, and there you get a sense for the infinite, for the boundless. It's as if, through this form, that you're witnessing a drawing up into some kind of Platonic form (ignoring for a moment Plato's scorn for art). By witnessing the endless countryside, you see the endless countryside, and thus the infinite or ideal countryside.¹This is indeed the potency a horizon has on us, but this potency is bound with our cultural forms. The flattened look of many ukiyo-e works is bound up with a Japanese expression. The Chinese, when painting their landscapes, had the artist roam the mountain for weeks to paint from an omniscient perspective looking at the mountain from every angle. And the Byzantines design their icons so that there is a kind of negative perspective, so that when you stare in to the icon it is as if you are looking into a greater, gold-bathed world of depth and clarity greater than your own. If you doubt what I write, have a look at the pages on the books the saints hold, and you'll notice the reverse perspective. There is nothing obvious nor necessarily correct about vanishing point perspective. How is one to display the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional canvas without a little jiggery-pokery, after all - and vanishing point is the West's attempt to square that circle, in a way responsive to the Western soul.

We shall return, then, to shin-hanga, which has a horizon, and has vanishing point perspective. It's an innovation brought in from the West through the Meiji restoration. And it resonates deeply with me. There are shin-hanga prints which draw you in to that sense of the infinite, of the immortal hour, where time is still, yet space continues and continues endlessly, because they have adopted a Western, a Faustian, grammar. And I mean grammar in both the current and the original sense. The current sense being that only through grammar can words, or in this case art be understood. Art connects with us and contains meaning only by virtue of access to these cultural archetypes. And also in the original sense, that being gramarye, magic. The horizon and these artistic techniques are a kind of magic spell, because the endless beach, the endless road, the endless horizon, none of these exist. They are all tricks of the brush, and then tricks of the mind, instilling this longing for the infinite within us. But this longing for the infinite Western man knows - or perhaps knew - was not of this world, and was not destined for this life. Indeed, as our forebearers knew, this desire could never be sated in this life: only in the next.

1. I would quickly add here that Spengler would argue that the ideal being the infinite is a Western conception of the Platonic form, and one which Plato, as a Classical man, would have scorned. For Apollonian man, the ideal is perfectly bounded without blemish, not drawn up into the infinite.