Personal Reflections, by Arthur Secunda
In a strangely precognitive way, A Good Morning relates
to an experience I was to have about two years after the serigraph
was executed in Santa Monica. In 1987 I found myself in Japan on
tour with a traveling exhibit of my graphics. Knowing that I was a
seasoned traveler, my host and friend, Yasuo Iwasaki, was discrete
and clever about introducing me to the intricate complexities of
Japanese culture. In Kyoto, he left me alone for over a week at the
Kansai Seminar House with his son's bicycle and a host of books and
Arashiyama walking maps, and allowed me to discover the incredible
beauty of the temples and rambling byways myself. Another time,
driving with Yas from Gifu to Fukui-Ken to meet an extraordinary
silkscreen printer, Sukeda Kenryo, we passed through fertile green
irrigated farmlands and ghost-like hilly, landmasses that linger in
my memory as shifting projections and phantoms of 19th century
O-Kyo prints.
Nearby, also in Fukui-Ken, the most memorably blurred
image-shapes in nature I recall, were on a visit to the ancient
Wagami traditional papermaking mill, where I was invited to watch
the beating, washing, drying and storage of beautiful papers,
performed by extraordinary artisans utilizing virtually the same
tools and methods used back in the 7th century. Later, I was kindly
asked to make some paper-art using their materials at the mill. Via
translators, I explained that I had made paper in France at the
famed Richard de Bas paper mills in Ambert, by a method and process
no less traditional and beautiful, but as surprisingly different as
French cuisine is from Japanese cooking. Afterwards, a host of many
persons - TV crews, paper executives, gallery owners, and I don't
know who else - moved on to a sort of tea-house tavern down the
hill, for jovial toasting and animated discussion, generously
including me into their pro and con paper-talk where possible,
given the difficult circumstances of language barrier and sake
imbibing.
The geographic location of paper mills in ancient times was
always dependant on natural water sources and this is why old mills
everywhere are in or near streams, fountains, springs, or rivers
cuddled into valleys or hewed into mountainous regions where
melting snows provide a never-ending gift of water - the liquid
magic movement which is, in effect, the soul of paper. Though the
composition of A Good Morning was derived from an
experimental monoprint in 1985, the final serigraph version was
almost a mental photograph of the imagery for me of the Fukui-Ken
region, the ribbons of light corresponding to shifting and random
passages of time, which I actually experienced in 1987.
A final and formal note of some interest to me in this work is
that the mountain shadows are juxtaposed to the forward plane
somewhat in the manner of Duchamps descending lady (though his lady
is moving across the picture plane while mine breaks the plane in
a forward-backward shifting), giving the effect, I believe, of the
mountain's shadow changing gears or having just passed by.
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