Elatia Harris‘ post Monday on one of my favorite sites, 3 Quarks Daily, is a long reminiscence on her fascination, beginning at age 9, with things Japanese. Her mom had already introduced her to western art at Boston museums and galleries, but delving into aesthetics Japonesque, she was on her own. Harris’ report on books that helped her explore her interest is evidence that children need adult books as much as adults need children’s books. Through her beloved childhood books and her own imagination, her nascent multicultural awareness led to a profound and lifelong appreciation of art. Here’s an excerpt from her post, but please don’t miss the treat of reading it in its entirety.
I needed a guide to that universe of art and taste that drew me in, and it could not be my mother…”
“Enter Elise Grilli – a woman whom I suppose I never knew, although it does not feel that way. I first encountered her name on the cover of one of my most beloved childhood books, Golden Screen Paintings of Japan. You can see the scan of my personal copy below left – it’s dog-eared the way a book gets if you sleep with it for many years. On the upper right corner, there is ink I spilled from copying something inside it. Akiyama Teruzawa’s big book from Skira, Japanese Painting, was similarly pored over by me, and is now obviously distressed, like the Modern Library edition of The Tale of Genji, written by the world’s first novelist, Lady Murasaki, and translated by Arthur Waley. Nobody in this bunch wrote for children, but in fact they all wrote for me. Especially Elise Grilli.
Here’s Eliata’s description of her growing aesthetic awareness–a great example of the natural (untutored) capacity of a child to resonate with art that arises out of profound awareness:
Trying to find the right way to draw things, I was instinctively attracted to an individualistic painter of wide-ranging genius [the 16th century painter Hasegawa Tohaku], and my first sensations of wonder and bewilderment have stayed with me always. They are the correct response to the daring and naturalism I saw, that I was too young to know I could not as an artist aspire to.
Harris then discusses a Hasegawa 12-panel screen, his early understanding of abstraction, and a one-brushstroke tree trunk that demonstrates how form and content are one!