Richard Diebenkorn: Everything All At Once

September 21, 2012

The moment I saw the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn for the first time was one that shifted the course of my life as an artist. I was an 18-year-old student wrestling with things like color, form and, more onerously, ways to convey my ideas and break free from the self-aggrandizing egotism that artistic practice so easily brings about. Something in the style of my complaints must have triggered my teacher to offer me a book of Diebenkorn’s work. I had never been so affected by paintings.

Even in the cramped dimensions of a catalogue, his works felt huge—they carried the visual grandness of a mural in a few square inches. His endless washes of color, falling through and beneath one another in farm-like grids, conveyed a vibrant and somehow weathered atmosphere, like sunlight piercing through morning fog. It was dilapidated doors, smoke, hot asphalt, sweat, fields, style, color, shape, geography, line, form, joy, peace, war. It was paint. And it had never looked better to me.

I remember wanting to run my hands all over these paintings, these fields and strips of color that looked like Mondrian charged with a scuffed, pulsing static. I wanted to lift up the veils of yellow paint to explore the oceans of red ochre and blue-grey beneath the surface. Diebenkorn lets viewers into his process in this way, allowing us to know his paintings inside and out—and he offers this portal to us without reservation or anxiety. In his time, Diebenkorn was a famously generous and patient teacher, and this comes out in his work—even his paintings are good teachers.

Unlike so many artists of the past century who went to great lengths to hide their techniques, Diebenkorn unveils his methods to us garnished on a plate. This was a man who wanted painting to survive when others denounced it as dead, to move the arts into the future in a way that connected and involved audiences.

For the second half of the 20th century, Diebenkorn was the painter’s painter. You would be hard pressed to find a working artist today that does not adore this man’s work. It is painting as the idea in itself, which seems to speak about everything—about an artist in his environment, but also about things transcending any singular time, place or individual. “The idea is to get everything right,” Diebenkorn once said, rather prophetically. “It’s not just color or form or space or line—it’s everything all at once.”

Take a moment to spend time in front of his paintings and you will know what he’s talking about.

Through the end of September, the Corcoran Gallery of Art is hosting “Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series,” a retrospective of the artist’s landmark series made between 1967 and 1988, which marks the first major museum exhibition focused on these luminous, grid-like paintings. Small works on paper, prints, drawings and collages—even some “cigar box” studies—share space with his signature massive canvases, many of which are over eight feet tall.

“These works are powerful investigations of space, light, composition, and the fundamental principles of modern abstraction,” said Philip Brookman, chief curator and head of research at the Corcoran. “Diebenkorn investigated the tension between the real world and his own interior landscape… These are not landscapes or architectural interiors but topographically rooted abstractions in which a sense of the skewed light and place of that time emerges through the painting process.”

A lifelong inhabitant of the west coast, Diebenkorn (1922 – 1993) served in the U.S. Marine Corps after attending Stanford University and afterwards took advantage of the G.I. bill to study art at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Among his teachers was Mark Rothko, the acclaimed abstract expressionist who doubtlessly effected his perception of modern art. A look at Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series leaves no doubt that Rothko influenced his sense of composition and color palette. (And as The Georgetowner’s Gary Tischler often points out, “Washington is the Rothko City.” All the more reason to welcome this show to our town.)

As a young painter in the 1950s, it was no small feat to reckon with the wild assault of abstract expressionism on the contemporary art scene. To come into your own at the tail end of one of art history’s most explosive, brazen and contentious periods was a considerable strain on many emerging artists. But with that pressure came a certain liberation for Diebenkorn. Willem De Kooning later would say that the abstract expressionists (and Jackson Pollock, specifically) “broke the ice”; afterwards, art could go anywhere and be almost anything.

During this time, however, Diebenkorn did a rather unusual thing: he pioneered a representational movement, at once a gesture to the tradition of art history and an outright rejection of modern art critics like Clement Greenberg, who argued for “advanced art” that renounced subject matter and representation for the “purity” of abstraction.

Along with fellow artists such as Wayne Thiebaud—most recognized for his over-saturated paintings of cakes and patisserie treats— they together founded The Bay Area Figurative Movement, which pioneered an expressive, representational style that brought together the thick, lustrous brushwork and wanton impasto of abstract expressionism with the earthy romance of the Impressionists.

Though a far cry from his later work with the Ocean Park series, Diebenkorn began in his early paintings a pattern of weaving the threads of familiar people, family members and California landscapes with a grand intimacy that connected his quiet, precise observations to the collective subconscious of postwar America. It was a mutual search for peace, balance and beauty. He learned what it meant to be a modern painter as the world around him learned to see as a modern audience. His work was met with acclaim from critics, viewers and patrons alike.

In the mid 1960s, Diebenkorn took a teaching position at UCLA, moving from San Francisco to Santa Monica. It was during this time that he moved away from his figurative style, for which he had by now become quite popular, and began work on his Ocean Park paintings, a pursuit that would last him the rest of his life and become one of the most influential bodies of work in the second half of the 20th century.

Named for the beachside community where he set up his studio, the Ocean Park series cemented Diebenkorn at the forefront of his generation as an artist dedicated not just to his own work, but to the history and future of his medium.

The shift happened gradually but surprisingly, according to the artist, and in a way he always had trouble explaining. “Maybe someone from the outside observing what I was doing would have known what was about to happen,” he said in an interview in the late ’60s. “But I didn’t. I didn’t see the signs. Then, one day, I was thinking about abstract painting again… I did about four large canvases—still representation, but, again, much flatter. Then, suddenly, I abandoned the figure altogether.”

But looking at these paintings, what we see in fact is an unprecedented balance of abstraction and representation. These paintings are not just shapes that resemble things, like looking up at the sky and seeing a cloud shaped like a poodle. They are distillations of whole environments from which they are born.

Within the canvases are the layouts of suburban neighborhoods, the aluminum siding and split-level houses of mid-20th century America, power lines and clotheslines, interstates and parklands, oceans and shorelines, even the great frontiers of the Wild West. But while these visual tropes are tangible and intriguing, no one theme sits within any particular canvas. You will not find a painting in this exhibit titled “House by the Sea.” Diebenkorn named each piece in this series with a number in the order by which he made them.

The numbers become markers of the passage of time that denote the changing and shifting of the artist’s environment as he lived it. Just as Monet painted the Rouen Cathedral in different lights of day and Matisse evoked the emotional sentiments of his era with the wild, dissonant color palette of Fauvism, so did Diebenkorn acknowledge his time and place by sweeping his brush across his own physical and cultural landscape. He captured the grand, clean-shaven, perhaps diluted idealism of his time in wash- worn, infinitely expansive color fields, cut up with arbitrary vanishing points and the stark measurements of clean, straight lines.

Still, the paintings impose almost nothing upon us as viewers. We are free to explore the pictures in our own way and at our own pace. Diebenkorn’s postwar American abstraction offers glimpses of harmony and calm, a generalization of that “American Dream,” the sincerity and earnestness of which has not really been seen since.

I still wrestle with the same issues as I did when I was first introduced to Diebenkorn’s work, but he helped me to learn that these artistic dilemmas are not just equations that you solve and move past. These issues are themselves the pursuit of art. Diebenkorn’s work inspired me beyond myself. When that happens, you cannot help but to believe in art. ? [gallery ids="100901,128322,128315,128302,128310" nav="thumbs"]

Beyond the Blooming Sculpture Gardens

August 10, 2012

Between the sculpture gardens at the National Gallery, the Kreeger Museum and Hirshhorn, there’s a lot to see around the streets of Washington. Throw in the fraternity of bronze-cast historic figures scattered throughout the city and there’s an all-star cast of artistic and historic characters around every corner. You’ll see Henri Moore and Henry Longfellow, Giacometti and Ghandi, Alexander Calder and Alexander Hamilton.

Indeed, there are so many longstanding outdoor fixtures that we miss on our daily commute alone (who among us has ever actually seen a Boundary Stone?), that it’s all too easy to overlook a new public installation. Doug Aitken’s “Song 1” at the Hirshhorn was a deserved success before it came down early last month, with projectors flashing a fully encompassing video around the building’s elliptical façade to a remixed exploration of the 1930s pop song “I Only Have Eyes for You.” It left audiences wanting more of that interactive, environmentally specific experience. Thankfully, the Hirshhorn isn’t lacking for new outdoor installations, and neither is the National Museum of Women in the Arts. And now is just the right time of year to be outside and experience them.

Chakaia Booker Scultures Roll Into New York Avenue

There is a peculiar group of sculptures on a well-kept, grassy median on New York Avenue between 12th and 13th Streets NW, amid the oil drum echoes of construction by Mount Vernon Square and the arterial bustle of downtown. Black and unusually textured, they appear almost aloof to their surroundings — curious as to what exactly is going on around them.

This is the work of sculptor Chakaia Booker, the second artist selected for the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ (NMWA) New York Avenue Sculpture Project, the only public art space featuring changing installations of contemporary works by women artists. Booker, by integrating discarded construction materials into large outdoor sculptures, works here with recycled tires which she slices, twists, weaves and rivets into radically new forms. Tires resonate with the artist for their versatility and rich historical and cultural legacy: The harvest and production of rubber is entwined with a history of brutal colonization, cultural injustices and slave labor in Africa and the world beyond.

Given the space they occupy, these sculptures are oddly modest in size, as if refusing to compete with surrounding noise and structures. They stick out from their environment by utter disassociation of urban aesthetics. They do not try to be big—and in this way they grow. These dancing forms, with interlacing planes that revolve through and around each other, are Brancusian in their suggestive shapes and movement, while their texture and tactility remain rooted somewhere firmly in the earth of this world.

They have the texture of nature, vines, bushes and nettles, like fictitious plants you might see in a Maurice Sendack illustration. Also like Sendack’s work, there is an undertow of darkness about them—a keyhole’s peek into a world of magnificent intrigue and epochal wrath. Perhaps it’s the wondrous patterns and textures against the sheer literality of the tires—once you get close to them, the sculptures are upfront about their material: masses of diced, slit rubber and hundreds of heavy screws securing them to their skeleton.

While there is a good chance you already passed them by without even noticing their presence, Chakaia’s sculptures are worth serious consideration. The good news is they will be on view through 2014, so there’s time to see them.

For more information visit www.NMWA.org.

Ai Weiwei Turns Heads at the Hirshhorn

“Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads” is the first major US public art project by internationally renowned Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei. The installation comprises a dozen bronze sculptures, each roughly ten feet tall, that represent the signs of the Chinese zodiac (snake, horse, ram, monkey, rooster, dog, pig, rat, ox tiger, rabbit and dragon).

The sculptures are re-envisioned and enlarged versions of original eighteenth-century heads that were designed during the Qing dynasty for the fountain clock of the Yuanming Yuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness), an imperial, European-style retreat outside Beijing, which was pillaged in 1860. The Hirshhorn placed them encircling the fountain in the center of the Hirshhorn’s rounded courtyard.

Weiwei went to great pains to depict the animals with detail, down to the veins in the rabbit’s forehead and the chicken’s grainy crown, every surface suggestive of hair, feathers or skin. The heads cut off abruptly at the neck, the stanchions they are affixed to connecting rather artlessly underneath, as if they were each severed from the body and mounted on coarsely carved wooden spikes—like the pig’s head in William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies.”

There is always a lot of historical and political baggage when dealing with Ai Weiwei—and I mean that in the best possible way. A noted dissident, Weiwei has spent his career speaking up against social and political oppression in his homeland. He is a master of the conversation between abrasive confrontation (including a photographic series of his own middle finger interrupting otherwise innocuous snapshots of historic Chinese landmarks, such as Tiananmen Square) and subtle symbolism (covering the floor at London’s Tate Modern with hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds—a comment on mass consumption, among countless other things).

Knowing this, why would Weiwei go to the effort of such odd and meticulous realism if he didn’t mean them to be perceived that way? Without forcing anything on the audience, the work raises questions about repatriation and intention as well as our own blindness to suffering, religious misinterpretation and historical injustice.

For more information visit www.Hirshhorn.si.edu. [gallery ids="100821,125482" nav="thumbs"]

Dupont Circle Art Walk


In Washington, there might not be a more accommodating neighborhood for contemporary visual art than Dupont Circle. It started as early as 1921, when Duncan Phillips began exhibiting his collection of modern art in special galleries at his home on the corner of 21st and Q Streets. Phillips played an important role in introducing the United States to contemporary art, exhibiting Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse when most of the country was still incensed by modernism. The Phillips Collection still stands at the site of Duncan’s old home—the original house now the southern section of the museum—and the gallery is still on the forefront of contemporary visual art (its current exhibitions of Jasper Johns and Antony Gormley are stunning proofs of that).

The foundation Phillips laid in his lifetime has only grown stronger; Dupont Circle is now a cultural mecca, housing some of the District’s most enviable performance spaces, restaurants and art galleries, nestled among honored historic landmarks, foreign embassies and international institutions. Its spirit is the living embodiment of Phillips’s lifelong focus of the continuous progress and tradition of art and culture. The galleries below have visual offerings this season worthy of multiple explorations. The owners know their stuff and enjoy sharing their knowledge and enthusiasm with interested patrons. There’s no better way to celebrate summer than with an evening walk through Dupont’s gallery crowd. For more on Dupont Circle’s gallery scene, check out the Dupont Circle Arts blog: www.DupontCircleArts.BlogSpot.com.

Studio Gallery

Studio Gallery showcases contemporary art from a variety of artists both American and international living in the DC area, and they always have a lot going on. One of their upcoming shows features the work of Jan Willem van der Vossen, whose series of abstract and wild landscapes are a swathe of color and line, taking the viewer from the red-hot landscapes of Andalusia to a minimalist forest of trees. Another show belongs to the work of Shahrzad Jalinous, whose debut exhibition with Studio will feature her large figurative oil paintings. Jalinous’s paintings are a blurred whirlwind of earthy texture and color, muted, saturated and entirely satisfying. The exhibits run June 20 – July 14.

2108 R St. NW. www.StudioGalleryDC.com. Hours: Wed. – Fri. 1 – 7, Sat. 1 – 6, or by appointment.

Hillyer Artspace

For the past six years, Hillyer Art Space has been dedicated to exhibiting underexposed D.C. area artists alongside those of established international reputation. To celebrate the occasion of six successful years, it has invited all of its previous artists to return to the gallery once more. This retrospective is a celebration not only of the gallery but of its family of artists that have come through the doors and realized great accomplishments. Each artist in this exhibition has shown in the gallery or is an Artist Advisory Committee Member. The exhibit runs through June 26.

9 Hillyer Ct. NW. www.ArtsAndArtists.org. Hours: Tue. – Fri. 12 – 6, Mon. & Sat. 12 – 5, or by appointment.

Burton Marinkovich Fine Art

Burton Marinkovich is a small gallery with a huge but well curated inventory of artwork, specializing in works on paper by modern and contemporary masters. Its collection ranges from some of the foremost artists of the past half-century—Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Diebenkorn, David Hockney and D.C.’s own Kenneth Noland—to mid-career and established artists still working today. “We opened in 1993,” says Royce Burton, who runs the gallery with Andrea Marinkovich. “And, actually, we chose this location for its proximity to The Phillips Collection.”

Marinkovich told the Washington Post that the gallery is, “kind of messy, with the atmosphere of maybe a professor’s office or research library,” reminiscent of old-world European salons with intimate spaces full of treasures.

1506 21st St. NW. www.BurtonMarinkovich.com. Hours: Tue. – Sat. 11 to 6, or by appointment. Ring the buzzer to get in.

Cross-Mackenzie

Cross MacKenzie Gallery, a haven for those of us enamored by sculptural and ceramic arts, is exhibiting ceramic works by Anthony Stellaccio and paintings by Mary Armstrong. A curatorial research specialist for the National Museum of African Art by day, Stellaccio creates ceramics that are both scholarly and playful, referencing game pieces, pets and native toys and synthesizing his cultural studies with his artistic endeavors. This body of work is full of dynamic contrasts: rough, un-polished porcelain with cracked glazes atop smooth, reflective black and white Formica pedestal-like bases. The color in Armstrong’s paintings resonates with Stellaccio’s fresh green glazes and compliments the three-dimensional, hard-edged sculpture in the gallery. Armstrong’s soft paintings hover between landscapes and atmosphere, shifting back and forth from a view of a distant horizon to the drifting particles of dust and clouds. The exhibit runs through June 30.

2026 R St. NW. www.CrossMackenzie.com. Hours: Wed. – Sat. 12 – 6, or
by appointment.

Jane Haslem Gallery

Established in 1960 at the onset of the contemporary printmaking revival, Jane Haslem Gallery is well known for its thorough collection of prints by those artists responsible for reviving the medium in the U.S. after World War II. Currently on view are the works of Gabor Peterdi and Richard Ziemann. Peterdi, who died in 2001 at the age of 86, was a Hungarian-American printmaker and teacher who had a profound impact his students in the mid-20th century. Ziemann, a sort of spiritual documentarian of the natural world, has spent his life studying both the grandness and finiteness of the American landscape, focused particularly on the Northeastern woodlands. Ziemann was a student of Peterdi—in fact, the gallery was introduced to Ziemann’s work by Peterdi himself—and says of his teacher’s influence: “We all studied with Gabor Peterd… He taught us everything.”

2025 Hillyer Pl. NW. www.JaneHaslemGallery.com. Hours: Fri. 3 – 7 and by appointment. [gallery ids="100855,126818,126813,126801,126808" nav="thumbs"]

The Soul of DC’s Jazz Festival


Washington has its own culture —and it’s not just the whole center-of-the world, seat-of-government thing. It’s about music and neighborhoods, actors and museums—all the things that are the mosaic and the background of our daily lives Washington’s culture gets richer every year because of the work of its native citizens—people who have ideas, see needs and get other people to see what they see. The result is an environment of cultural arts institutions, festivals, concerts and music series and a rich theater and art world that have endured and enriched Washington culture, its contents and its reputation.

A good chunk of the heavy lifting in this arena—not excluding the existing culture totem poles and brand names like the Kennedy Center—has been done by individuals who can best be described as originals, one-of-a-kinds.

We’ve always had them in one form or another. The late Raissa Tselentis, who created the Bach Competition, the late and larger-than-life Maria Fisher, founder of the Beethoven Society and the Thelonius Monk Institute, Jerome Barry practicing cultural and musical diplomacy with Embassy Series, Norman Scribner, the founder of the Washington Choral Arts Society, Chuck Brown, who gave the city its own go-go sound, and many others.

To that list should be added the name of Charlie Fishman, the founder and executive producer of what is now called the D.C. Jazz Festival, now in its eighth year, and celebrating all over town June 1 through 10. Jazz festivals have been tried before, but it was Fishman who has grown and expanded the festival, guided it through rough patches and made it what appears to be a permanent institution of Washington’s culture.

You can get all the evidence you want by looking at the full schedule and various features of the festival, spread to all corners of the city with its innovative “Jazz in the Hood” component. It has big name artists—Ron Carter, Kenny Barron, Anat Cohen, Paquito D’Rivera, Dianne Reeves. They will playing at the Hamilton restaurant in downtown Washington, the spectacularly renovated, refurbished Howard Theatre, neighborhood clubs and restaurants as well as featured jazz performances at the I Street Synagogue and the Kennedy Center. The festival, as it exists today, is marked by innovation, an eye to the future, tremendous variety and energy, and Fishman’s rock-solid belief in the future of jazz as an American art form.

Everything has changed since 2005, when the first festival was held. Yet when you visit Fishman at his Adams Morgan home in the basement-office, nothing much appears to have changed since we first met there three years ago before the fifth festival, when it was still called the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival. There is, if that’s possible, more clutter on his desk, and some additions to the array of stuff you find there—a huge library of jazz CDs, books, magazines and newspapers.

Fishman himself is parked behind his desk, wearing as always one of a collection of yarmulkes, handmade, a thin gray-white beard on his face. He’s plugged into a phone and his computer, doing what he was doing the last time I saw him here, which is checking schedules, checking incoming musicians’ hotel reservations, making sure his seven-year-old son Moses was being picked up from school

“Yeah, I think this city is rich in originators, in people who have influenced the culture, who’ve created something,” Fishman said. “I knew Maria Fisher, by way of the Monk thing for one. Now, there was an original. I can think of others—Ari Roth, over at Theater J, Bill Warrell, who was District Curator and tried to keep a jazz festival going. He was a forerunner.”

“Jazz is our—America’s—idiom, its most original cultural contribution,” Fishman said. “And that’s especially true here—the Duke Ellington history is here. There are so many terrific local jazz musicians here, and there’s an audience. But for a long time, given all that, we were still the only city in the country that didn’t have a proper jazz festival.”

That changed eight years ago, when Fishman, with the help of many others, turned vision into reality and maintained it. “It was shaky sometimes,” he said. “But I think we’ve turned the corner here.”
“I think the festival is in a very good place,” Fishman said. “But when you talk about making something permanent, you can’t think just in terms of a festival, however good it might be. We’re already doing some things—educational outreach, special programs throughout the year in the schools, at embassies, we had a thing with the Cherry Blossom Festival. To me, the jazz festival is a year-round thing, and it’s a part of the heart and soul of this city.”

Fishman, as any founder worth his soul, wants national recognition and respect for the festival. He tends to think big, including global—which is natural enough given his 20-plus years with the legendary Dizzie Gillespie. But he also sees the music and the festival as a living thing, part of the neighborhoods of Washington—hence, the “Jazz in the Hood” special, which can be found in parts of D.C. as different as Anacostia and Georgetown.

“To me and people I know, Washington is about neighborhoods,” Fishman said. “I like living where I do, in Adams Morgan. It’s a lively neighborhood, the kind of place where the music is appreciated, and you can talk about it with your neighbors and friends.

He’s living a life that seems to get richer—in terms of meaning, if not necessarily, money—with the passage of time, a development that seems to surprise him still. Fishman talks about his family—wife Stephanie Peters, an executive with Microsoft, and their son, Moses. “It’s our 10th anniversary this year,” he said. “She was a surprise to me. I was divorced, I’d been single for 19 years and I have three grown children. I just thought that was it, and I was going to spend the rest of my life alone. Then, I met Stephanie, and that was it. I’ll tell you, if anybody keeps the festival together, it’s Stephanie. ”

He and his wife have a shared passion for jazz, and a devotion to their son. “He’s amazing. He’s a gift. He really is.”

He’s a little something more—he’s steeped in jazz, which couldn’t be helped given his parents. He played drums, and now he’s playing piano. “Let me show you something,” Fishman said. He does some clicking and brings up a video of Moses confidently playing Thelonius Monk at age seven.
For Fishman, jazz is the music he’s always heard running through his life. “I see the festival growing, taking on its own life,” he said. When it comes to his own life, he added: “the rest is not yet history.”

DC Jazz Fest Sidebar
Jazz in the Hoods, Jazz Meets the Classic, Jazz and Family Fun Days, Jazz at theHamilton, Jazz at the Howard. It’s all that Jazz at the annual DC Jazz Festival June 1-10, with top drawer attractions, jazz legends and new blazing stars and musicians.

As always the festival honors the living legends of jazz, with the presentation of its Lifetime Achievement Award to Kenny Barron, called the “most lyrical piano player of our time” by Jazz Weekly, and Ron Carter, a legendary jazz multitasker as bassist, cellist and author, an artist with more than 2,500 albums to his credit and numerous awards including two Grammies.

The two men will be honored at the festival’s signature concert Jazz Meets the Classics in collaboration with the Kennedy Center on June 4 with a performances by the Classical Jazz Quartet (Barron, Carter, Stefon Harris and Lewis Nash), preceded by an opening concert with the festival’s co-artistic director Paquito D’Rivera and his Sextet.

Other highlights of the Festival include the mushrooming in size and events Jazz in the “Hoods”, which splashes jazz, its music and performers city-wide with 80 performances at over 40 museums, clubs, restaurants, hotels and galleries. It’s presented by Events DC, and attracts a large and diverse audience and showcases D.C.-based jazz groups.

Kicking things off in the ‘Hoods is Ron Carter headlining at the Bohemian Caverns, the popular jazz club on U Street, one of the key elements in the festival. Also part of Jazz in the ‘Hoods is the DC Jazz Loft Series, a three-day series of events that includes a mini-festival on June 9.

The Hamilton (on 14th Street), one of downtown’s newest clubs and hot restaurants, will be the Festivals main venue with ten nights of performances with such headliners as Monty Alexander, Jimmy Heath, Roy Hargrove, David Sanchez, Les Nubians, Marshall Keyes, Antonio Hart and others, along with Jazz Gospel Brunches, featuring with the WPAS Gospel Choir and Lori Williams.

Jazz at the Howard highlights and celebrates the return of the restored Howard Theater, which only recently opened and will including such performers as Grammy Award-winning vocalist Dianne Reeves and Italian guitarist Pino Daniele.

A highlight of this year’s festival is a performance by Israeli clarinetist and saxophonist Anat Cohen at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue, as well as six concerts co-presented by the Kennedy Center at its Milenniuim Stage, with performers like the Bohemian Caverns Jazz Orchestra, Origem and Malika Zara.
[gallery ids="102455,121041,121058,121064,121034,121048,121052" nav="thumbs"]

ART METAMORPHOSIS Gala at Georgetown Waterfront


Art Metamorphosis Gala was a great success with over 3500 attendees in attendance including DC Mayor Vincent C. Gray.

For one night only, the harbour area in the heart of the nation’s capital has been transformed into an artist’s canvas.

Twenty-seven (27) innovative artists of DC created 300 feet long works of art in front of attendees. Artistic video and light installations by SND+VSN on flood walls, music by MANIFESTO accompanied by his live violin act and live opera performance by Pablo Henrich, hair and fantasy show by Stella Bonds & Roche Salon will enhance the transformation.

Nick’s Riverside Grille and Tony & Joe’s offered summer inspired cocktails and full bar menu.

[gallery ids="100869,127239,127233,127225,127219,127213,127206,127200,127193,127251,127187,127256,127261,127179,127267,127245" nav="thumbs"]

Corcoran Free Summer Saturdays Commence

June 11, 2012

Each summer between Memorial Day and Labor Day, the Corcoran Gallery of Art drops its admission fees on Saturdays, offering their impressive and engaging collection to the community. As of last weekend, the gallery’s Free Summer Saturdays have begun.

Ontop of free admission, the Gallery offers complimentary tours, family workshops and special programs throughout the season. Programs this summer are inspired by their summer exhibition of painter Richard Diebenkorn’s lauded Ocean Park Series (opening on June 30). Events include the opportunity to create your own cigar box artwork inspired by the color planes and angular structures of Diebenkorn’s work.

Their exhibition of beach photography, “The Deep Element: Photography at the Beach,” will accompany an array of other beach-inspired exhibitions and activities. They are even offering yoga sessions, taught by Christine Saladino of Tranquil Space, throughout July.

For the full list of Free Summer Saturdays programs and ongoing events, visit Corcoran.com. For a video tour outlining all the Corcoran’s summer offerings, click here.

Georgetown Gallery Walk: Book Hill

May 17, 2012

The Georgetown galleries on Book Hill are one of the few remaining true gallery clusters in the city. Meandering along a few blocks of Wisconsin Ave., we are surrounded by art, free to walk into galleries that call to us from their vibrant window displays. This group of galleries offers us a great variety of works to explore, from renowned glasswork to classic landscapes and the contemporary and avant-garde. Here’s a look at what’s happening on Book Hill. For more information on the Georgetown Galleries on Book Hill, visit GeorgetownGalleries.com.

Addison/Ripley Fine Art
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Washington artist Isabel Manalo is a painter who has taught at American University’s art department for ten years, as well as shown locally, nationally and internationally throughout her career. “Bits of Elsewhere” is Manalo’s third exhibition with Addison Ripley, and the new work follows her ongoing pursuit of capturing memory and the tenuous, ethereal uncertainty of human nature. Her mixed media works mix paints and photographs with unprecedented subtlety and grace—it’s hard not to be moved by their pulsing, expansive nature. March 10 – April 14.

1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW. AddisonRipleyFineArt.com

Heiner Contemporary
——
Through March 3, the collages, sketchbooks, prints and installations of Austin Thomas turn Heiner Contemporary into a center of social and artistic discourse. Thomas’s centerpiece for the exhibit, an interactive desk and workspace, engages visitors to talk, read, draw, think, and listen. The show will close with an artist discussion on March 3 at 4 p.m. On March 10, Heiner Contemporary will open its next exhibition, titled: “Avery Lawrence is Moving a Tree and Arranging Suitcases.” Details are still trickling in, but if the title alone doesn’t get your attention, what will?

1675 Wisconsin Ave. NW. HeinerContemporary.com

Maurine Littleton Gallery
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Renowned Seattle-based glass artist Ginny Ruffner will open an exhibit of her work on February 29, in conjunction with a screening of an award-winning documentary of the artist’s life and work at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery on the same day. The film will be screened at noon, followed by a gallery event at 2 p.m., where the artist will be in attendance. Ruffner’s works are constantly evolving “visual thought experiments,” and her glass sculptures and drawings turn life’s daily props and occurrences into remarkable visual experiences.

1667 Wisconsin Ave. NW. LitteltonGallery.comhttp://www.littletongallery.com/)

Susan Calloway Fine Arts
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Local interior designer Andrew Law will employ his craft and eye for refined, classic and approachable design to “create a room” in Susan Calloway Fine Arts’ already gorgeous and comfortable gallery, pulling from contemporary artworks, antique paintings and prints from the gallery’s private collection. The collaboration, “At the Crossroads: Art + (Interior) Design,” pursues a common and important objective of enhancing design and lifestyle with art, and offering a platform for beauty in our daily lives. March 2 – March 17.

1643 Wisconsin Ave. NW. CallowayArt.com

Galerie Blue Square
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Two series of works by Russian-born artist Yevgeniy Fiks will open with a public reception on March 3, from 4 – 7 p.m., and continue through April 14. Fiks explores historical, communist threads in his conceptual works and projects, presenting the cultural, Post-Soviet practice of “making the absurd seem normal, at the same time the West is seduced and implicated in it.” His latest series, “Magnitogorsk Guide to the National Gallery of Art,” will be on view, and a “performance” tour at the National Gallery of Art on March 24 accompanies the exhibit.

1662 33rd St. NW. GalerieBlueSquare.com

Neptune Fine Art
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Gallery Director Chris Neptune, recently moved into DC from New York, specializes in Modern and Contemporary art. With an extensive collection of artists ranging from contemporary masters such as Mel Bochner (now on view in the Tower of the National Gallery) and Alex Katz, to the timeless works of the Cubists and Impressionists, Neptune Fine Art has work to suit anyone’s palette. Opening April 21, “On Paper: Picasso & Matisse” offers a look into the drawings and prints of these renowned artists, who had a history of healthy competition with each other.

1662 33rd St. NW. NeptuneFineArt.com

Robert Brown Gallery
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Formerly on R St. near Dupont Circle, gallerist Robert Brown specializes in 20th century and contemporary works, as well as rare Chinese advertising posters from the early 1900s and Chinese antiques. Currently on display are works by prominent DC-based artist Linn Meyers, who has been commissioned in the recent past by The Phillips Collection, as well as William Kentridge (South Africa) and Oleg Kudryashov (Russia), two of the most significant living printmakers who were exhibited together at The Kreeger Museum in 2009. This is an exhibit for contemporary and historically minded viewers, and one you don’t want to miss.

1662 33rd St. NW. RobertBrownGallery.com [gallery ids="100501,118157,118151,118145,118125,118140,118133" nav="thumbs"]

Renegade DC


Picture the statues of soldiers at the Korean War Memorial. Nineteen stainless steel troops, each one a modest giant over seven feet high, poised and erect, caught in a still moment between the tumult of battle, their faces weary, cautious, but brave. Each figure weighs 1,000 pounds, and their cold weight shows, as if they were heaved begrudgingly up from the earth. They wear full combat gear, dispersed among strips of granite and juniper bushes, mirroring the rugged Korean terrain.

Now picture a gaggle of children playing ‘war,’ dressed up in plastic helmets, wearing oversized shirts and wielding toy guns, urgent and sincere in that way only children can be. Of course, as with all children’s games, it’s not just boys. There’s a girl there, too. The frilly poof of her ballerina dress and flower-laden headband are too tempting to forgo, so of course she wears it to battle. This doesn’t make her any less formidable of a soldier; on the contrary, her eyes are filled with a grave and startling glare powerful enough to face any boy she encounters. She holds her plastic pistol straight, pointing it firmly and directly at anyone who crosses her path.

Imagine these children playing ‘war’ in this field of looming, steel warriors, bounding through them like trees in a forest, peaking their heads around sculpted kneecaps to check for signs of the encroaching enemy.

Haunting? Yes. Grim? You bet. Heartrending? I’d say so.

Jodi King took a picture of it.

Actually, King not only photographed this event, she conceived it, recruited the children, put together the production and flat-out photobombed the Korean Memorial to get the shot.

However, it’s more than just the Korean Memorial she blitzkrieged with her camera. Jodi has been doing this all around the city, selecting historic, cultural and industrial landmarks in Washington and using them as the stage for her no-holds-barred conceptual photo shoots. And she usually gets them done before security arrives to kick her off the premise.

Part photography, part social activism, part artistic battle cry and entirely original, this is the Renegade DC project. Spawned from a number of personal and professional issues she’s harbored with the District’s professional arts scene, King took to its famed public spaces and local mainstays to speak out on behalf of creative expression. “There seems to be a lot of red tape around this city,” says Jodi. “It’s just hard to break into any of the good creative jobs around here. If you’re an already established artist, DC is a good place to be. But there are a lot of young and emerging artists who are struggling and under the radar because of what they want to do. And with a lack of grassroots support, artists grow timid to push the envelope a little bit.”

A commercial and editorial photographer with an enviable resume, King seems to have undertaken this project in some degree to coax the young artistic community out of its shell—to tell them that it’s okay to take risks, to march to their own beat.

A merchandising major raised in Alexandria, Va., King attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and landed a job with the now defunct Hecht’s department store chain. Unhappy as an assistant buyer, she applied for an opening in the photo studio for “an all around assistant—to the producer, stylist, whoever—and started hands-on assisting the fashion photographer for about a year.”

Quickly promoted to fashion producer, her new position found her scouting locations, booking models and crew, setting up shooting schedules, budgets, and everything in between—in effect, supplying her with all the tools she would later employ with Renegade DC.

When Hecht’s merged with Macy’s in 2006, she decided to get back into photography and began working freelance. “My business built as a word of mouth kind of thing,” she said. “I’ve been working freelance for about five years now, all in DC.”

Eventually she got into editorial work with some major local magazines and was hired for fashion editorial shoots by many of the major magazines, including Washington Life. “It’s still more on the safer side,” King says. “And as an artist, it can get a little frustrating, having to do everything the client wants. And so some of the reason we started Renegade DC is because we didn’t want to be told what to do anymore—at least for this project.”

When she talks about Renegade, Jodi says “we,” never “I”—she adores the collective nature of the project, and her team is an invaluable component to its realization. She has been working with Tyler Larish, her Renegade partner and a by-day hair stylist, on editorial shoots around DC for a number of years. “We started working together a lot,” she says, “and had all these discussions about how work in DC goes in this industry. The conversation drifted to how we wanted to push the envelope around here. We decided we wanted to do something that excited us and utilized our creativity. Stuff that we want to do.”

Being in Washington, they decided to use its nationally recognized landmarks and tourist attractions as the backdrop for their creative energies, reinterpreting the significance of these cultural markers and reinvigorating their relevance through a prism of contemporary language and expression.

With Renegade DC, King and Larish have employed members of the DC arts community and produced an invigorating perspective of our nation’s capital. It is a blend of architecture, landscape and fashion, placing models and performers in specific historic environments to create daring, fun and imaginative scenarios that do not conform to conventional expectations. Among the locations Renegade has enlisted are the Washington Monument, The National Cathedral, The Korean War Memorial, Ben’s Chili Bowl and the Wonder Bread Factory.

But don’t expect these to be your standard tourist snapshots—these photographs look like alternative realities of Washington, ala Planet of the Apes, a Humphrey Bogart flick or a psychedelic post-apocalypse. You might have trouble recognizing the locations at all.

A lesbian Goth wedding outside the Cathedral. The DC Rollergirls taking over the roundabout in front of the Capital. The Baltimore Aerial Dancers defying gravity outside the Wonder Bread Factory. Dancers from the Washington Ballet adrift amidst billows of cherry blossoms.

“We had about 15 locations over the last two years,” King says. “We wanted to do something with each location that brought it out in a unique way. Some are straightforward beauty, like a fashion story. Others are quirky, a little bit strange.”

“Tyler comes up with things so outrageous that it’s almost foolish,” she laughs. “And I would scale it to fit a fashion-oriented concept. For instance, he came up with Muscle Beach on the National Mall, and I produced a very vintage, retro body builder -type image. We wanted each picture to tell a story with a concept that went along with each location.”

Of course, it was a slow process because of all the preliminary work that had to be done. First, King and Larish would mock up inspiration sheets, figuring out makeup and wardrobe. Then they would book the models, “or whoever we could think of to fit the characters—friends, family, even each other. It really became more about the characters we were creating than anything else.”

King and her team would go to the location, do a quick test shoot to figure out the physical positioning of the models, and then rehearse and choreograph it in King’s apartment. With the scene in their minds, they ran up to the location of each shoot—literally—and shot pictures quick as bandits.

The children in the Korean War shoot had to hop a fence to get in among the statues. “They stepped over the gate, just enough to get them in the scene,” says King with an air of caution. Despite the ‘outlaw’ nature of the shoots, King does not disrespect the locations where she works. “I looked online, and tourists hop that fence all the time for photos. Just Google it. I didn’t do anything that everyone wasn’t already doing—I just did it with costumes and makeup.”

“Everyone volunteered,” says King of the project. “We had virtually no budget. We had to make our own props, and we had food and beverages for our team, but that was the only thing we put real money into. Everyone who worked with us just wanted to be involved. I think that fresh, penniless mentality really turned the project into something special—we were focused on the art, not the job.”

To exhibit the Renegade DC portfolio, King found a perfect collaborator in Theo Adamstein, founder and executive director of Foto DC, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to make photography accessible to audiences through provocative and inspiring exhibitions and collaborations with the local and international community (which is just the icing on the cake of a ridiculously cool guy with a hell of a fascinating resume).

King already knew Adamstein, and when she approached him about showing the work—and showed him some of it—he jumped at the prospect of exhibiting it. “But this show is off the record,” King clarifies. “This really isn’t a Foto DC event. Theo is more supporting us as a friend by letting us use his space. And we seriously appreciate it.”

For the future of Renegade, King has some big thoughts. “We were thinking we really love this so much, we might take it on the road, sort of see where it goes. We’re really open with it. Obviously, New York City would be a clear next step, because there’s so much there. Tyler and I also had the idea to do all 50 states, and hit one major landmark within each capital or major city. Vegas might be fun. But imagine what we would do in Fargo…whatever it is, it would probably be awesome.”

Any place that keeps the Renegade saga going is where King wants to take the project, as long as it stays true to her original message of creativity and cultural expression. “Wherever there is a story to be told,” says King, “we’ll be there.”

Renegade DC will be available for viewing Thursday, May 10 from 7–10pm, at Foto DC’s FotoSpace, 1838 Columbia Rd., NW.

Event Features Full Renegade Cocktails by Atlantico Rum, Sounds by DJ Keenan Orr, Napoleon noshes, and after party sounds by DJ Adrian Loving.

For more information, email Jodi King at JRKingPhoto@gmail.com.

[gallery ids="100780,123738,123698,123733,123705,123727,123713,123721" nav="thumbs"]

The Art of Japan At The Textile Museum and the National Gallery

May 3, 2012

When taking on the art of an unfamiliar cultural tradition, it’s difficult to know where to start. There are immediately questions—namely, Do I understand what I am looking at? The aesthetic terrain, symbolism and subject matter are foreign, often incongruous to our own knowledge. For instance, as far as everyone in America and Europe is concerned, a hexagram is synonymous with the Star of David (the Jewish Star). However, in ancient Indic lore, the hexagram was a symbol of creation, the overlapping triangles representing “the divine union of male and female.”

When dealing with a culture as deeply rooted, multifaceted and intricate as Japan’s, there is almost no way to take it all in. Japan has a cultural and religious system of symbols and an artistic tradition as unique and fascinating as any in the world, and to know it would require years of time and effort. However, in the same way Picasso found revelation in African tribal masks for their raw aesthetic radiance, it is sometimes enough to admire the beauty and facility of cross-cultural artisanship.

Right now, The Textile Museum and the National Gallery of Art are hosting monumental exhibits of Japanese art, both of which expose the sheer beauty of the country’s sophisticated craft and artistic traditions.

The Textile Museum’s “Woven Treasures of Japan’s Tawaraya Workshop” (Mar. 23 – Aug. 12) display the Japanese textile traditions of the Tawaraya, a still-operational silk workshop over 500 years old, that has woven fine silk garments for the Imperial Household for centuries. The National Gallery’s “Japanese Bird-and-Flower Paintings by It? Jakuch? (1716 – 1800),” on view only through the end of the month, exhibit Jakuch?’s thirty-scroll series of nature and wildlife, proving him to be an unprecedented innovator in style, technique and aesthetic. Both exhibits are a master class in composition, color and design, and both beg to be viewed live. In photographs they are impressive, but in person they are breathtaking.

(It must also be noted that the Sackler Gallery, on the National Mall, is hosting an overwhelming exhibit of printmaker Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), perhaps the most acclaimed artist in Japanese history, titled “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.” However, this exhibit demands coverage all its own, and thus is not included in this article.)

Based in Kyoto, Japan, the Tawaraya silk workshop is perhaps the oldest and most illustrious workshop in the country. While popular among the public for producing fabrics used in traditional theatrical costumes, Tawaraya is renowned for their production of yusoku orimono—garments of fine silks in patterns, weaves and color combinations traditionally reserved for the Japanese Imperial Household. On display in The Textile Museum, they read like an installation work, speaking of harmony, balance and serenity.

In a peculiar way, they are reminiscent of Sam Gilliam’s hanging fabric installation at The Phillips Collection, which closed almost a year ago. The Japanese fabrics of vibrant and subtle colors and ancient symbols, whose aesthetic is rooted in a centuries-old practice, become suddenly and hugely contemporary. This is a little ironic, as the man behind Tawaraya’s operations today, Hyoji Kitagawa, is the 18th-generation successor of this family-run workshop, who has painstakingly maintained silk weaving techniques passed down over a millennia, right down to dye recipes from the tenth century.

One remarkable aspect of these designs is the length that is taken in pursuit of subtlety and understatement. Where it is more familiar in the Western tradition for the elite to be wearing louder, flashier clothing, in Japanese aristocracy it would seem that bold symbols and wild colors are considered crass and unsophisticated. The Emperor’s yusoku orimono is composed of but pristine white and earthy brown ochre silks.

The patterns and symbols are similarly more nuanced. On the garments of a regular citizen, the symbol of a tortoise—which represents long life—would likely be a large, obvious and rather literal interpretation. On a yusoku orimono, the creature is represented by a pattern of hexagonal blocks, each one an individual shell, that stretch monochromatically across the silk. You will see cherry blossoms, cranes, pine trees, phoenix, bamboo and butterflies, each of which carry their own meaning and significance, but all of which are independently beautiful.

These symbols carry over to the National Gallery, where the 30 scrolls of 18th century Japanese painter Jakuch? might actually bowl you over. The expansive scrolls are intricate and effusive: a pair of chickens embroiled in a dynamic mating dance, feathers ruffled in exacting detail and eyes wild among a craggy hibiscus plant; an adumbrated landscape of seashells, crabs and starfish on the ocean’s floor; a wild goose in the reeds, hurtling toward a pond’s icy surface; a rooster amidst a plant of small, piercing red nandina berries. Yet within the paintings there is a fluidity of composition, a pristine sense of geometry and an unquantifiable harmony of color that link them to the same tradition as the Tawaraya silks.

Both offer an otherworldly glimpse of tradition, discipline and aesthetic near-perfection. The Japanese history is rich in artistic life, and Washington is lucky to have such resplendent exhibitions of their works to appreciate and compare.

For more information on “Woven Treasures of Japan’s Tawaraya Workshop,” on view through Aug. 12, visit www.TextileMuseum.org. For information on “Colorful Realm: Japanese Bird-and-Flower Paintings It? Jakuch?,” on view through April 29, visit www.nga.gov. [gallery ids="100740,121552,121541,121549" nav="thumbs"]

Mount Fuji’s Fleeting Immortality


The epoch of ukioy-e encapsulates the final phase of traditional Japanese history and a time of flourishing cultural arts from about 1600 through the 1860s. Due to the country’s policy of national seclusion (starting in the 1630s for fear of the impact of European colonial expansion on native culture), Japan was a world almost entirely unseen by foreign eyes until the late 19th century.

During this period of isolation, Japanese art acquired a singular character with few external influences. The style of ukiyo-e, which means “pictures of the floating world,” blended the realistic narratives of ancient picture scrolls with inspiration from the decorative arts and observation of nature. When these artistic traditions finally reached Europe and North America, their radical approaches to space, color and subject matter shook the Western tradition, revitalizing graphic design and penetrating the consciousness of painters from Monet to van Gogh.

Katsushika Hokusai (1760 – 1849), the ukiyo-e’s most prolific and renowned artist, produced an estimated 35,000 works during seven decades of ceaseless artistic creation. His images have matured into icons of world art, most famously his woodblock prints of Mount Fuji and its relationship with the surrounding villages and countryside. At the Sackler Gallery through June 17, “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji” exhibits the full collection of Hokusai’s original prints, showcasing the intricate beauty, intimacy and grandiosity of these masterworks. They will leave you swooning and weak in the knees, enraptured by their ephemeral delicacy like a cherry blossom’s silky petals caught in spring’s first light.

Mount Fuji occupies a special place in Japanese culture. The ancient Japanese were sun worshipers and in the bustling city of Edo (modern Tokyo), this 12,000-foot volcano, resting like a lazy giant in the distant landscape, was the first piece of earth to catch light from the rising sun. A lifetime resident of Edo, Hokusai was intimately familiar with Mount Fuji’s snowcapped crest when he finally immortalized it in his print series at the age of seventy.

As a teenager, Hokusai apprenticed with a woodblock engraver, but quickly shifted his efforts to drawing and painting. Like most ukiyo-e artists, his career began as an illustrator for yellowbacks—cheap novelettes named for the color of their covers—before moving into illustrations for the major novelists of the day.

Hokusai’s work spanned the gamut of ukiyo-e subjects: album prints, genre scenes, historical events, landscape series, paintings on silk and privately commissioned prints for special occasions called surimono. Well regarded throughout Japan, his model books for amateur artists were very popular, as were his caricatures of occupations, customs and social behavior. From age twenty until the year of his death, Hokusai illustrated over 270 titles, including several books of his own art.

“But nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention,” said Hokusai, who envisioned his artistry maturing well past his centennial. Indeed, in the last two decades of his life Hokusai produced his finest work, unrivaled within the genre as the apex of the ukiyo-e tradition.

What Hokusai manages to capture in these prints precedes Impressionism in capturing the fleeting wonder of natural phenomena, realizing the texture and mood of atmosphere, seasonality, temperature and light. (It’s worth noting that Hokusai was actually rather familiar with European and Chinese art when he made these prints, as his country had by then opened international trade relations in some capacity, allowing glimpses of foreign artistic traditions.) In studying the mountain and its relationship to the surrounding world, Hokusai shows us the serenity and violence, the danger, mystery and allure of our natural world.

Perhaps another aspect of Hokusai’s genius was in bringing the tonal reservation and transient effusiveness of painting together with the bold, clean linear image-making and stark visual clarity of prints. The prints perfectly depict the external appearances of nature and symbolically interpret the vital energy forces found in the sea, wind and clouds.

In “The Waterwheel at Onden” and “In the Mountains of Totomi Province,” the sinewy legs and worn bodies of the laborers give way to serene facial expressions, a common thread throughout the series, as if the physical burden of the land is but an inevitable accessory to the life it sustains. The agonizing labor plainly and literally depicted, inconceivable in the reality of its strenuousness, goes almost unnoticed in the works’ overwhelming peace and inner beauty.

This cosmic push-pull between man and the larger forces of nature is fully realized in the breathtaking “Kajikazawa in Kai Province,” where a fisherman stands dwarfed atop a craggy rock jutting out from a violent sea, his fishing lines taut against the ocean’s current and caught in a heavy fog from which Mount Fuji barely emerges in the background.

One of the show’s last prints, “Sunset on Ryogoku Bridge,” shows a pale grey sky, with the wine-hued boldness of an unseen sun saturating the Prussian blue waters and glowing green bridge. Mount Fuji hovers like a deep, luminescent shadow behind a cluster of dim houses. An old man stands in his boat, leaning on his oar and staring at the distant mountain, as if overwhelmed by the site. It is a beauty he cannot resist. It is also a feeling that viewers can associate with: a sense of floating in time, in a reality beyond what we see before us.

Above all, Hokusai’s prints are studies in reservation, balance and ritual, mirroring the sentiments of his culture in his ceaseless, patient pursuit of Mount Fuji. The confluence of life, labor and the natural world press on, immortal but impermanent, much like the woodblock engravings from which the prints were forged, worn down with each unforgettable printing until its sharp-edged clarity vanished into but a vague impression of its past self.

“Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji” is on view at the Sackler Gallery through June 17. For more information visit Asia.SI.edu. [gallery ids="102450,121126,121120" nav="thumbs"]