There's a difference between, of course, rational knowledge and the intuitive knowledge.
I believe that the intuitive side comes first, almost everything we do not just painting
but in life, that your experience of touching and mixing materials and wrestling with it
physically, sometimes literally, is very important to the understanding of how we
come to a particular knowledge about our cultures.
Nihonga is an art form that you can trace back to about a thousand plus years in Japan.
So Nihon is Japan and Ga is painted, so Nihonga.
Nihonga is what I call slow art and it's in slow food movement, it's a slow art movement.
It takes time for you to learn and master, it forces you I think to be more contemplative
about the process of creating.
I decided to crack the glue and put it in my Starbucks cup and you let it sit overnight
and that's the best way to let it melt.
This is a hide glue that's more like pebbles here, I'll pass this around.
I'm going to start by layering my glue here, just straight glue that I made last night
and you notice that it creates these puddles, right, you can see that.
I mean this technique is to create an even surface, you can manipulate.
There's something about this process of experiential knowledge that you build up over the years
and then with just the right mixture, you know, that only comes by experience.
So how do you know how much to add and I say, I don't know, I just know.
You start to understand that it's right and that only comes from years and years of making
mistakes.
It's more than just knowing the technique or learning the right information, it's actually
doing and making mistakes.
By the way, a lot of these will tarnish over time, aluminum will turn white, whitish.
So traditional Japanese artists accounted for that.
So if they were using silver powder, they knew that in about 50 years it would darken
and that was part of their aesthetic was to account for those things that are changing
and ephemeral and you use it for your expression.
For the Japanese, what is beautiful is what is ephemeral and changing and so cherry blossoms
falling is beautiful not because cherries themselves are beautiful but because they are so fragile
and they are temporary.
Saigyo, who is a 11th century poet, wrote about this, desiring to die under a cherry
blossom, you know, falling on you.
And that aesthetic is very much carried through in Japanese tradition, which is very beautiful
and it explains a lot of what you see in Japanese art and music as well.
And architecture, you know, Japanese built houses at least traditionally that were designed
to fall apart when the earthquake hit.
But it's not built with heavy materials, so the damage is not as great.
It's a remarkable but system that works until really recently and modernism took over with
our idea of what permanence is.
And so in the areas that were devastated in the northern, western, eastern Japan, you
had a mixture of sendai buildings that were built with concrete that withstood the, you
know, damage but it's unusable, right?
And the coastal older homes, it's devastating to see them wash away but that's how it was
designed to be.
The idea of permanence and beauty and what is ephemeral and it's completely different.
And so silver, which will tarnish over time, is seen as something very symbolic of our
lives and what is beautiful.
And so changing is sort of accept, not only acceptable but preferred, yeah, yeah.
