Hillel began collecting his first Japanese woodblock prints after discovering Sosaku Hanga artist Haku Maki's work while searching for chawans for drinking Japanese green tea. The prints instilled in him a profound sense of contemplative stillness and the green tea definitely heightened his experience.
Sosaku Hanga (創作版画), or the “creative print” movement in Modern Japanese art, was an expression of individualism that emerged out of traditional Japanese arts and culture. Co-occurring with the more commercialized Shin Hanga ( 新版画) "new prints" movement during the early decades of the 20th century, Sosaku Hanga artists enthusiastically embraced the freedom to express their individual aesthetics in their choices of subject matter, techniques, production methods, and materials . "Fisherman" by Yamamoto Kanae 1904 Image source: Revolvy.com The artists of the Sosaku Hanga movement advocated taking full control over all the aspects in the creation of their prints. Today this may sound like the natural way art is made but historically in Japan prints were made in stages. Each stage of the art was produced by a different group of artist/artisans who had trained for many years in their specialty be it drawing, carving, making ink, pr
Hi -- apologies for contacting you out of the blue -- but are you THE Hillel Krauss who shared a house in Somerville MA with me (and your brother Jeremy) and a bunch of other people back in the early 1980s? Estelle (Kunoff) Epstein called me up last week -- and she's managed to track down virtually everyone who lived there: Zvika (now Zvi), Maia, Rosabel (now Rose), Leah, Sara Lynn, Helise, Yale... and me.
ReplyDeleteAnyhow: they're getting together for a long-overdue Zoom "house-meeting" next week (Mon 15th, 4:30 pm Eastern Daylight time -- 9:30 pm here in the UK)... It would be great to see you if you're free!
My e-mail at work is w.e.kunin@leeds.ac.uk -- for some reason your website auto-filled with my g-mail address, which I never use. Let me know if you're free to join us.
And thanks for posting all the beautiful Japanese prints; it made tracking you down a real pleasure!
Your housemate (I think)
Bill (Kunin)