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Text of the page (random words):
ession of a personal experience art moves us compels us delights seduces mesmerizes whatever it makes us feel something my girlfriend has spoken many times of jewelry looking delectable tasty indeed this bracelet looks like candy or cake every time i see paintings in the museum i want to touch them feel the movement of the artist s brushstrokes through the layers of paint one of the most gratifying elements of painting for me is the feel of paint leaving my brush and trailing over the canvas i have not been arrested or escorted out of a museum yet i can taste the saltwater running down my nose as my head submerges and my muscles ache for the surface in this painting can you not and don t good bonsai do that to you don t you want to delicately feel the bark stroke the needles of an old white pine am i the only one who occasionally tastes the sap of his trees the point is that these trees call to us they move us my sensory exploration of bonsai or painting is not simply an odd appreciation of tree sap in my gin and tonic it is an interrogation of the tree are you real it is formed by an immediate disjoint between what my eyes see the size and apparent age and the tree in front of us and the reality of it so small and fit into such a small pot bonsai display forces that ocular contradiction further such an old tree in such a thin pot hovering over the air as if someone has simply summoned a slice of the planet into this small pot the question is then what gives you this experience what makes you yearn for a tree to feel the shari that stripes its trunk inevitably our first bonsai efforts are crude fumbling technically insufficient and perpetrated on mallsai with no hope for achieving what we see in our dreams this will likely never become this in an appreciable human time scale more importantly it would take the care of an expert to achieve these results mallsai are simply funky plants they do not grant access to that experience of bonsai now you might say hey nimrod they totally do which i will use as a departure point to discuss the difference between an appreciator of art and an artist the bonsai artist is not simply concerned with his personal experience he is attempting to influence the experiences of others to do that we need honest criticism about what works vs what doesn t work and simply put the elements of a mallsai don t do any work so how do we figure out what works and what doesn t work years ago my girlfriend put a book in my hands and twisted my arm until i read it the book was on intelligence by jeff hawkins i cannot recommend it enough rather than get his hands dirty in the biology and neuronal firing rates and such hawkins attempted to set out to come up with a larger overarching theory of intelligence his claim was that the brain is essentially a very sophisticated pattern recognition system it takes in patterns understands them and then synthesizes them in reality i think of this as kind of a neo platonism with plato s forms describing more how we see the world rather than what the world itself is our brain relies upon limited amounts of information to very quickly come to conclusions about the world and what it is from the movement of ten points we are able to see that it is a person walking now that s really remarkable for three pounds of meat this pattern works in that we are able to recognize that it shows the movement of a person walking this one sort of works if you come to it already knowing what you re looking at perhaps you can still discern that it is a person walking but to the naive or uninitiated it does not appear to really be anything at all the same is true of bonsai they either work or do not referring back to my post about fractals there are certainly patterns that determine if a bonsai screams tree or does not how do we learn about those patterns how do we speak the language of tree how do we learn what screams and what mumbles if the brain is a pattern recognition system you must feed the machine we have lived our lives watching people walk and inferring spatial relationships from two dimensional images to effectively understand what works and what does not we must look at thousands of bonsai but critically we must study trees in nature such that a drive through the woods is an inspirational experience one caveat you must learn what you are seeing and what your brain tells you that you are seeing your brain is a trickster and will tell you this is a square when due to perspective what your eye sees is a rhombus the whole thing reminds me of pre perspective art where you can almost feel the artist s pain as he attempts to carve space out of the picture plane the painter here simply did not know how to convincingly trick the eye into perceiving space we see this in bonsai as well when a tree for all its virtues simply does not convince us that it is a tree how many trident maples have you seen styled to look like a pine they might be very nice bonsai as this is a very nice painting something of an understatement but they don t let us know that they are trees effectively go to shows examine the trees in person do not lick them though that is too far talk to the artists about their goals with each tree silently assess whether those goals have been accomplished but before all that feed the beast consume bonsai and trees dissect them with your eyes and look far afield for the exceptions the departures and the radicalisms that nevertheless still work most importantly stay hungry feed that strange beast that is your brain can a bonsai be a text february 5 2015 february 5 2015 jerozek2014 3 comments when we say text most of us think of typeface individual letters i d like to broaden that definition to include messages that are encoded by abstract symbols so for example hieroglyphics are a text even though these are a series of pictures they still inform us as to what rites to perform for the dead the identity of their kings etc etc but let s go even further could the stained glass windows of a church be a text of course as you walk through the galleries of a gothic cathedral you see stained glass after stained glass picture the light of god streaming through it illustrating the lives of the saints their works and histories more than that they give us a sequential order of prayer they form a cohesive narrative to follow a hypertext of stories within stories one acquainted with his or her religious stories and the history of the land would be able to read these would know the significance of these images each would call to mind a particular story with moral instruction respect the ruler who built this place remember your ancestors this is what happens if you aren t christ like etc etc but how abstracted can the nature of text be malevich was a kiev born russian artist who painted simply a black square as a new kind of artwork the first painting that wasn t a painting of anything at all simply color that was itself malevich s square while underwhelming in terms of sheer technical accomplishment was a creature of its time a product of the russian revolution and ww1 it is a russian icon that does not iconize anyone only nothingness we are delivered though not spoon fed commentary through this one singular abstract symbol what i think that all of these examples of text illustrate is the fact that for the signal to be transmitted successfully one must understand how to extract that signal from the code without a rosetta stone the hieroglyphics are simply a series of pictures walk through sainte chapelle naive to catholicism and you will simply see some pretty glass without a background in russian history and modern art you might think malevich was simply a precocious toddler so what do we say about trees and text i m not opposed to the idea of plants as text victorian flowers were so heavily codified that you could deliver a marriage proposal in a vase and reject it with another bouquet but bonsai in many cases are a contextless art they invoke no narrative at least not one that can be shared a tree will tell the story of its growth windswept trees will look like they blow in the wind driftwood trees like they ve been struck by lightning but these are not coded if such things were text every mountain every wave every cloud would be text we would spend our years continuously reading our definition must be broad enough to include malevich s square and narrow enough to exclude rocks simple naturalism in bonsai does not suffice to be a text they must channel a narrative and that s where i see an opportunity to rescue bonsai from contextlessness some folks at this point might be asking why does it need a context why do we need a narrative can t bonsai be something more like a rothko where we simply have a feeling in response to the work to which i say i really don t like rothko that much my personal feeling is that art great art creates a private world between the viewer and the object it sustains in that world a space where for just a moment fantasy becomes reality the unimaginable becomes possible the emphasis on naturalism within bonsai is because that naturalism helps build that world but narratives also do so we are a storytelling species our most powerful messages are our stories i couldn t tell you how a greek man built his house but i could easily give you a summary of the odyssey we would be fools to not utilize this power in bonsai i grant that there may be very many meanings behind bonsai in japan china indonesia all of the countries in which bonsai began but we have taken bonsai to america and we did not bring its context with us we must invent our own stories for them so how do you inhere meaning and textual symbolism in trees by invoking other stories by creating a rosetta stone of features that a tree tells us look at trees from folks like walter pall or nick lenz the importance of fairy tale bonsai is not that it allows for the display and rehabilitation of ugly trees but that it gives purchase for a narrative here is where the trolls live this is where the children hide from the witches that is where mrs mouse raises her family these narratives and stories are shared allowing us to read the tree as a text we know well what stories these trees belong to because we have been hearing the stories since childhood but this is not the limit to bonsai what other worlds can we create stories can we tell can we have bonsai from another planet can we have root over crystal bonsai the interaction between adventures in fantasy and naturalism will be delicate and each person must necessarily say where their cutoff is does the tree work for you does it tell you a story does it make you feel these are the questions we should ask in a bonsai critique not how well it adheres to this or that rule maintenance pruning a classy japanese maple december 29 2014 december 30 2014 jerozek2014 2 comments i wanted to take this monster to be styled in walter pall s class unfortunately that just wasn t possible this year the tree is probably my largest bonsai simply due to the fact that it is the only one that i simply cannot fit into my little accord there s no way that guy is going in the back seat my wonderful girlfriend chose this bonsai about a year ago and gave it to me as a birthday present i didn t really do too much with it in that time besides appreciate it after spending a year with the big guy i m pretty confident that he will be displayed during the spring when he looks like this very delicate yellow and red leaves make me a happy camper so fine you say what else needs to be done with it the tree looks finished well there s some problematic areas that need to be refined the tree is in a quality state already but places like this really need some attention if the tree is to stand up to close scrutiny first though some music https www youtube com watch v y0ycmfvlvqi spfreload 10 this will get us in the mood for this spooky halloween tree so given the utter profusion of branches how do we get started on a beast like this i would first separate if only in your mind the branches that simply must go and those where you ll need to make a decision the two pictures i just posted are a good illustration of each in the first the tumorous inverse taper needs to be taken out unless you make an interesting feature out of it for this tree i don t believe that would be effective so it is chopped in the second picture though it s better to take our time and select which branches we keep after we ve trimmed out what else must go so what must go well tumorous inverse taper of course but also these see how the tree has a tendency to run with its branches these long leggy twigs do not look like tree branches pruning them back to buds that are closer to the trunk induces back budding and encourages ramification i ve got another japanese maple that i haven t been pruning on one side to thicken its branches there and it has put out meter long shoots with no branching whatsoever then we need to get rid of some of this interior branching it s a mess in there branches in trees search for the light those that don t find it die off so that the tree can shunt energy to other more productive branches finally although to my chagrin i don t have any good photos of it at any nodes that have three branches one of these must be trimmed off when there are more than two branches the tree will produce ugly knots and knobs these can be great features but should not be encouraged at every twigging branch the great thing about doing this during the tree s dormancy is that you can see the branch structure as a whole unobscured by any leaves so let s get hacking time for more music https www youtube com watch v v4rwjxkumxw spfreload 10 hell yeah ok so we go through and cut out all the bits that don t look like a tree what s left alright doesn t look bad it might not look like i took off too much but well that s all twigs as one of my teachers told me if you wind up thinking ah shit i ve taken off too much then you ve taken off just enough this spring will see the tree in a new pot as well as with some design decisions i like this front better it has some interesting ugly crooks and hollows to it you won t find deadwood on a traditional japanese maple but this is not a traditional japanese tree i fear that trying to make it into such would rob the tree of any character it has and leave me with a bare stump the central tall trunk is giving me a bit of trouble i m not sure i like it as high up as it is i m contemplating grafting some scions lower down on the trunk and regrowing the apex that might take quite some time but maybe it would result in a better tree honestly i think that wiring the whole thing up in march or so will make all the difference i think something like this would do fine deadwood features will be carved and i m going to need to create some cuttings to graft to the trunk and create a better nebari oh well much to do much t...