CPM is pleased to announce its exhibition of Japanese ink drawings made by Ōtsuki Chōzaburō, a recently discovered artist and craftsman who worked in Kyoto the late 19th/early 20th Century. This collection is being exhibited publicly for the first time and represents two related bodies of work: Kamon pattern drawings and naturalistic drawings. Pattern drawings of Kamon (family crests):
Kamon originated in the mid-Heian period (900–1000) as a way to identify individuals and families among the nobility. Kamon motifs can be broadly classified into five categories: animals, plants, nature, buildings and vehicles, and tools and patterns, each carrying their own symbolic meanings. In the Kamakura period (1185-1333), Kamon also became an established custom among the samurai class, and this type of heraldry was used on flags, tents, and equipment in battle. Slowly, these symbols of classification became used more widely in Japanese culture, and by the Edo period (1603-1868), Kamon were fully established among the general public.
The works in this show are predominantly from the Meiji period (1868-1912) and depict intricately drawn patterns of Kamon. Some of the drawings are densely populated with the same Kamon iterated many times, while others are more free form, incorporating combinations of different Kamon, color, and marginal text. Nuances in line quality, shading, and peripheral sketches permeate these drawings and invite close inspection.
Naturalistic Drawings:
The second body of work on view, made during the same period, is a group of ink drawings depicting naturalistic forms—plants, flowers, fruit, and people. Presented as a counterpoint to the more densely detailed Kamon drawings, these works are sparsely marked and reduced to what is most essential about the forms that they depict—a mountain landscape composed of a few thin floating lines, a watermelon with scattered seeds emerging from a vast empty space, speckled marks creating a field of flowers, a seated figure skillfully expressed with quick stylized brush strokes. While the naturalistic drawings are clearly meant to be personal explorations of things observed in the world, the Kamon drawings take natural forms (such as flowers or animals), and express them in a more technical and methodical way.
It is likely that Ōtsuki Chōzaburō was employed to create Kamon for clients in Kyoto and these are process drawings that work out those designs. These two bodies of work use different languages to describe the same things. Forms that present as highly stylized in the Kamon, reappear in more fluid iterations in the naturalistic drawings. Presented alongside each other, the drawings exist at once as historical artifacts, works of art, and the visual documentation of a master refining his craft.
