My Suzuri, my ink stone

“Wash your face every week, but wash your ink stone every day.” a old ink painter’s saying.

and i have become an old ink painter.

Before, with 25 years of my use

After

For the new year

I was sharpening knives.

This little carpenters knife has been in the family - father's, grandfather's, further back? Can't say. I noticed it is getting shorter. I remember my father buying a set of wood chisels and telling me that well cared for they would outlast my children's children. The company was going out of business. He bought two sets.

His son's children's children. Why would he need to buy two sets?

It was my belief he bought one set for using. And the other set just for looking at.

Solstice and I start again

My exhibitions are in October, then the clean-up and the teaching. by the time I get back to painting I have to relearn how to do it. Its the solstice. It begins.

New Year Coming, nobody runing

They don't do this anymore. They learned to make them as child, sent them to teachers and friends. Their parents still do it, most of them. But not one of my university in fifty still makes or sends New Years cards anymore.

down low

Every exhibition I also put something up high, and something on the floor. Few visitors to the current exhibition notice this thing on the floor. One in a hundred has looked inside, young children mostly.

Exhibition week 2

Tomorrow I open the door for my second Sunday. Sorry the gallery is only open Sundays this year.

The gallery has two rooms. The building was built in the Taisho Era as a working/living space for a Japanese box maker so they are not big rooms. I believe it was build on the earlier Edo Era scale. It was a shock and and endearment when I realized that the living room in this house is one tatami mat in size.

This year the ichi Jo gallery space is dedicated to people, mostly portraits. It is the first time in twenty years of exhibitions here that has happened.