Heaven is Eternal, the Way Distant, Uragami Gyokudō

Exhibition Label: "Nature/Natural," Feb-2011, Kris Ercums Famed as a koto or zither player, Gyokudō’s recognition as a painter is a relatively recent phenomenon. Rather than following the footsteps of established masters, Gyokudō pursued an individual style characterized by short, repetitive, and spontaneous brush strokes. After his wife’s death, Gyokudō embarked on an itinerant existence, traveling extensively throughout Japan and eventually settling in Kyoto. Most of his major paintings were done during these years of retirement. In this composition, rather than painting an actual fan, Gyokudō has sketched out the shape with his brush. This eccentric format demonstrates how Japanese painters creatively engaged Chinese literati tradition. The composition is animated and widely panoramic, with trees, mountains, and houses all extending toward the semi-circular sky, reflecting Gyokudō’s deep grasp of literati notions of nature. The inscription, which references a Chinese poem by Li Bai (706–762), “heaven is eternal and roads are distant” 天長路遠, eloquently describes this spirit. Exhibition Label: “Transformations,” Feb-2006, Mary Dusenbury and Alison Miller A samurai who served the feudal lord of Bizen (present-day Okayama prefecture), Gyokudō was also an accomplished musician, painter and poet. At fifty, he left his position to spend the next seventeen years wandering through Japan, practicing his arts. Although based on a study of Chinese models and close observation of the world around him, the lively, rhythmic modulations of his brush express the internal power and energy of the landscape more than their outward form. This painting was done wh Gyokudō was in his seventies, near the end of his life. Archive Label 2003: My soul can’t fly to you for the road is distant and the mountains craggy under the expansive sky Li Po (China:701-762CE) The title of Gyokudō’s painting, inscribed along the top left edge of the fan shape, refers to this poem by Li Po and perhaps captures the essence of the artist’s seventeen years spent wandering through Japan with his qin (zither) and brush. Born of an eminent samurai family, Gyokudō served the Ikeda clan in Bizen (present-day Okayama) until he was fifty. He resigned his post when the government issued regulations forbidding any but a strictly orthodox interpretation of the Zhu Xi school of neo-Confucianism. In this work, painted near the end of Gyokudō’s life, the artist has expressed the power and compressed energy, the ‘life-force’, of the mountains by creating spatial ambiguities and by severely compressing the scene into a small, roughly fan-shaped enclosure. Gyokudō was one of the first major literati painters to adopt the Chinese technique of layering brushstrokes to achieve rich, dense surfaces. His large vocabulary of brushstrokes ranged from dry, crumbly lines to lustrous black dots layered over rubbed ink. At the bottom left, a sage pauses on a bridge. A solitary pavilion, symbol of the scholar recluse, is perched high on the cliffs above him. Man and hut are insignificant within the thrusting mountain forms that surround them. Archive Label date unknown: Gyokudō was one of Japan's greatest landscape paitners. Retiring from his official position at the age of 50, he spent seventeen years wandering through Japan, developing his music, poetry, and brushwork. He transformed his impressions of nature into rhythmic modulations of brush and ink, utilizing texture strokes ranging from dry, crumbly lines to lustrous dots over rubbed ink. In the bottom left of this landsacape painted in a fan shape, a tiny sage pauses on the bridge to admire the scenery. Gyokudō has represented man's humble role amidst the thrusting mountain forms around him, a reflection of his own reverence toward nature.