Sketches from Japan

Rating:
Summary: Cultural and Aesthetic Delight
Review: There is a long tradition among artists and writers of maintaining a journal to record observations and impressions. Many writers use journals to write informally, often spontaneously, to describe real or imagined people, places, and events. Artists and naturalists as well fill sketchbooks with both words and images to help focus their observations. Frank Ching, the author of this sketchbook, not only records the optical reality of what is seen; he uses these drawings as a means of gaining understanding, insight, and perhaps even inspiration. His drawings stimulate the mind to think and can even make visible aspects that cannot be seen by the naked eye, or captured on film by a camera.

Frank Ching made most of the drawings in this sketchbook in or around O-okayama, a town southwest of downtown Tokyo, where the Tokyo Institute of Technology is located. The subject matter ranges from street scenes to traditional construction details, from temples and their sacred precincts to stimulating juxtapositions of old and new. He has successfully captured the sights, sounds and even smells of vibrant metropolis Tokyo, enabling the reader to feel the humid heat of the day or the cool rainy mist that fell as he drew. In addition, there are scenes sketched during the author's brief excursion to Kyoto and the mountain village of Takayama

All the drawings were executed in a pure contour-line technique with a fountain pen and black ink. There is a crispness and finality to an inkline that is both daunting and exciting. The process not only fostered the careful observation of details; it also required seeing how they fit into the larger framework and pattern of shapes, and noting which details could be omitted. The shape and extent of the white spaces are as important to a composition as what is delineated.

Francis D.K. Ching (1943- ) completed a month in the spring of 1990 as a visiting scholar at the Tokyo Institute of Technology which he spent producing this sketchbook.