Meeting Renku

Ko Sagae introduced himself by telling me I was not pronouncing a Chinese character correctly.   It was an important pictograph.  It was the title of my show.   I was not surprised.   It was a complicated character, made up of 64 separate strokes of the brush.  I chose it because it was beautiful, but admit that I was not clear on how to pronounce it.

Mr. Sagae and I spoke.  He invited me to a renku writing session he was hosting.  Renku is a form of Japanese poetry.  It is It is comunal. It is a poem made by many people, each person writing one verse that connects with the verse before it.

I am not a poet.  Neither am I a student of Japanese language, so I quickly refused.  But then he explained.  He did not want me to write in Japanese.  He wanted me to paint my verses not write words.

 I thought about this.  He said he did not want me to make illustrations.  He wanted me to paint my verses.   We would connect pictures with words, and words with pictures.   I said I did not understand how it would work.  He said neither did he, but it might be fun to try.  I said OK

Later I thought about it, mixing words and images, linking one to another?  To me painting is not verbal or intellectual.  It is a visual world of inspiration.  Art is not so easily to direct as illustration.  Paintings come from inside.  My paintings are like bad children.  I never know what my paintings are going to do.  They are impossible to control.

I became nervous.

I remembered elementary school.  I was in a play.  I did not have a big part.    I was supposed to stand up and say, “Don’t play with matches!”  It was the only thing I had to say.  For one week before the performance I could not sleep.  I kept worrying - What if I opened my mouth and no words came out?

 I felt this same way before the renku session.  What if my turn came and I  unfolded my paper, but no painting came out?

After a week of worry, it was time for my first renku session.  Mr. Sagae had a studio at the top of an old hill.  I found my way from a map.  I knocked on the door and was invited in.   Seven other people were already in the room.  I recognized one immediately, Oda Giyokue-sensei, a famous calligrapher and hanko maker.  I was introduced to the others, college professors, medical doctors, poets, historians.  It did not help me relax.

 The poem started in a usual way, the first verse was written to the season and the next to the room.  People took their turns.  The renku began to grow in one direction, then another.  Then it was time for me to paint.  The person before me wrote a verse about men standing by the river in the fog.  My mind filled up with empty space. It was totally blank.  All faces turned to me.  I looked down at my empty paper.

 Winston Churchill was a great politician during one of England’s most violent and difficult times.  Before he was a politician he was in the British army.  He fought in two wars.  He was also a painter.  He said that the most terrifying thing in the world was an empty white canvas.

Before the renku, I never understood Churchill’s words.

My empty paper taunted me.  It looked up at me.  It dared me to fill it.  But I could not.  I could not move my hand.  But with the room looking at me I had to do something, so I pulled a little address book out of my pants.  There was a pencil in the address book.  I took it and I began to scratch on an old calendar page.  The pencil moved one way and then the next.  Soon the paper was filled with lines.  Soon the lines began to look like something.  It began to looked like a sketch I had done of the Brooklyn bridge many years before, in New York.  This surprised me, to see my bridge pop put of my address book in the middle of a renku session, so I kept scratching.  I forgot where I was for a few minutes.

 When I looked up the room was still waiting, so I held up my bridge.  “The Brooklyn Bridge.”  To my delight and surprise, it followed the men in the fog by the river.

 I was relieved and relaxed.  I looked over to Dr. Kamizawa.  His had to write the verse to follow mine.  His face looked bad.  I understood his expression.  He was confused as I had been.  Now he had to follow a picture with words.
 

in December 2002- a new Ren Collaboration with Poet, Sagae Ko - an Exhibition of a startling new makemono in the Ginza, Tokyo

an invitation to our 1999 exhibition

from our 2000 exhibition

new : previous exhibitions : cut : ink in japan essay : books : studio : renku : talk : bio : live : tessai mailto:sumiink@hotmail.com all material copyrighted �Jim Hathaway 2001  Thanks to Mizuno-san at LiquidSite for help with my Japanese language pages