Arts & Crafts Forever – Artisans on Hand https://artisansonhand.com Tue, 19 May 2020 17:14:43 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7 https://artisansonhand.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/cropped-Untitled-4raw-2-32x32.jpg Arts & Crafts Forever – Artisans on Hand https://artisansonhand.com 32 32 178037507 Where Tea meets Art & Story https://artisansonhand.com/?p=881 https://artisansonhand.com/?p=881#respond Thu, 14 May 2020 17:04:14 +0000 http://artisansonhand.com/?p=881 …]]>

Brewing aged Pu-er tea, courtesy of Kenny & Yshel

Fabula Tea, created by Kenny & Yshel, specializes in creating one-of-a-kind tea experiences & blending small batch connoisseur-grade teas with stories, people and art. Each canister tells a unique story through the artwork on the label and the origins of the tea discovered within, unifying the healing powers of tea, story and art.

Poetry, Tea and Tao

By Henrik Barth

In 1908, New York merchant Thomas Sullivan packaged tea samples into hand-sewn muslin bags, intending for his customers to empty the leaves into hot water. Some though, unsure what to do, submerged them in their tea pot and the tea bag was invented. Sullivan developed a machine to package tea fannings into gauze sachets, marketing and shipping them around the world, just in time for modern industrial progress.

Lady in a Chinese Silk Jacket -Bernhard Gutmann (1909)

But the real story of tea began 5,000 years ago. Shen-Nung, the “Divine Farmer”, was boiling water in his courtyard, when leaves from a Camellia tree fell into the pot. Shen-Nung drank it, and said “It quenches thirst. It lessens the desire for sleep. It gladdens and cheers the heart”.

In the course of centuries, Chinese tea culture developed formal rules for tea preparation and drinking. A complex ceremony required twenty-seven pieces of equipment, and this ritual element calmed the mind, brought an awareness of the moment, and heightened the perception of beauty and nature.

The culture emerged simultaneously with poetry genres, brush and ink painting, calligraphy, lapidary, alchemy, and metallurgy. During the Han Dynasty (200 BC), arts of cloisonné, silk painting, porcelain, lacquerware, and paper making, were gathered into the tea ceremony.

Poets and priests gathered in tea rooms, surrounded by gardens, rich furnishings, textiles, and paintings, to recite poems. The elaborate design of the tea pot, or the way one held the tea cup, expressed an awareness of the consistent and rhythmic harmony of nature

While dark oolong, delicate green and white teas were becoming a status symbol among the upper classes, tea was becoming one of the necessities of life for the Chinese people, along with rice, vinegar, and soy sauce.

In farms and villages the informal method of tea preparation was adding leaves to a pot of water that had been drawn from a well or river, heated on a wood fire, and steeped slowly to allow the fragrant oils to extract. The rural tradition of enjoying a pot of tea while writing poetry is clearly evident in references in classic Chinese poetry. 

DIPPING WATER FROM THE RIVER AND SIMMERING TEA

Living water needs living fire to boil:
Lean over Fishing Rock, dip the clear deep current;
Store the spring moon in a big gourd, return it to the jar;
Divide the night stream with a little dipper, drain it into the kettle.
Frothy water, simmering, whirls bits of tea;
Pour it and hear the sound of wind in pines.
Hard to refuse three cups to a dried-up belly;
I sit and listen—from the old town, the striking of the hour.

Su Tung-p’o (tr. Burton Watson)

In 1168, My?an Eisai, a Japanese Buddhist priest, traveled to Tiantai mountain in Zhejiang, to study Zen. The slopes of the region provided an ideal habitat for growing tea. When Eisai returned to Kyoto he planted tea seeds. In his treatise “Kissa Y?j?ki”, he wrote “tea is the perfect mental and medical remedy to make one’s life more full and complete”.

Tea culture arrived in Europe as a rare and expensive luxury by way of Venetian traders in 1560. With an expanding silk and spice trade, Holland and France became the largest tea consuming countries, until tea came to England in 1650.

Shen-Nung noted tea’s piquant fragrance, brilliant color, and complex aftertaste, and in the Divine Farmer’s Herb-Root Manuscript he gave instructions for drying tea leaves to preserve their potency. Tea aficionados believe loose teas make a superior tea, because the oils fade away when the leaves are broken up into fannings and packaged.

Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (517- 600 BC) regarded tea an elixir, which improved health and promoted longevity, and the tea ceremony as a distillation of the experience of y?nyáng, its contrasting and complementary energies and patterns, moving according to a principle, or “tao” –meaning “the way”.

The essence of “tao” was an understanding that every experience produces its opposite in an endless cycle of reversal. Tea drinking was symbolic of living in harmony with nature; it improved alertness, and kept the mind from getting in the way of “tao”.

The art of brewing tea –steeping loose whole leaves in a tea pot of boiling water –induced a meditative stillness, which was a powerful reinforcement of “tao” –distilling the experience into its elements: awareness of moment, beauty, and quietness.

The tea ceremony lent itself to all disciplines of art, but especially to the musical, patterned nature of Chinese lyric poetry. Wang Wei (701-761 AD), painter and poet of the Tang era, revealed “tao” of inner landscape in concise poems.                    

DEEP IN THE MOUNTAIN WILDERNESS

Deep in the mountain wilderness
Where nobody ever comes
Only once in a great while
Something like the sound of a far off voice,
The low rays of the sun
Slip through the dark forest,
And gleam again on the shadowy moss.

Wang Wei (tr. Kenneth Rexroth)

In Wang’s poem, “tao” was rarely what it appeared to be. Images of landscape –trees, mountains, sunlight –probed the interconnection of nature and human life, but the poem’s “tao” becomes a voice within the poem, describing another landscape.



Four hundred years later, during the Southern Sung era, Lu Yu (1127-1209 AD), celebrated the quiet joys and experiences of everyday farm life.

IN THE GARDEN: WRITTEN AT RANDOM

Late blossoms left on the ground,
       shoots of bamboo poking up the mud;
the tea bowl, the poem bag—
       I took them wherever I went.
My dim dream just taking shape,
       who calls me back to waking?
By the window half in slanting sun
       a partridge cries.

Lu Yu (tr. Burton Watson)

Teapot, Wang Bing Rong -Zhi Guanxu Period

The appeal to our poetic sensibilities is simple and alluring. Images of an autumn garden, blossoms on the ground, etc are simply the body where the “tao” is free to move around. Indefinable and nameless, “tao” does not move well in non-image.

“Tao” does not define or explain; it points beyond itself to a meaning that is darkly divined yet still beyond our grasp, and cannot be adequately expressed in words.

It takes time to make a good cup of tea, steeping loose leaves in a tea pot of boiling water, approaching the experience of the moment, the perfect moment to enjoy life.

CHÜEH-CHÜ

My medicine’s crude, yet the old farmer
       swears it really works;
my poems are shallow, yet the mountain monk
       has immoderate praise for their skill.
Cakes in pockets, with packets of tea
       they come to pay me a visit.
What harm if in the midst of loneliness
       we have one little laugh?

Lu Yu (tr. Burton Watson)

The poem goes beyond its words  –the subject is common, nothing much happens, there is no desire to invest it with symbolic meaning, and yet, it speaks to all people and all times. Like a good cup of tea, it takes time to savor its essence.

]]> https://artisansonhand.com/?feed=rss2&p=881 0 881 Originality and diversity https://artisansonhand.com/?p=258 https://artisansonhand.com/?p=258#respond Mon, 20 Apr 2020 21:03:00 +0000 http://ottersans.com/?p=258 …]]> The artisan crafts represented here are works of art, jewelry, glassware, cutlery, textiles, pottery, furniture, decoration, clothing making … In order to guarantee a high quality of “handmade” pieces and choice selection, we have chosen experts in their fields, selected exhibitors according to very specific criteria: craft production above all but also originality and creativity.

]]> https://artisansonhand.com/?feed=rss2&p=258 0 258 Gifu Wagasa https://artisansonhand.com/?p=123 https://artisansonhand.com/?p=123#respond Tue, 14 Apr 2020 22:35:00 +0000 http://ottersans.com/?p=123 …]]> By Claire Ann Wellesley

Gifu Wagasa is the traditional Japanese umbrella, which has a sense of ornament, ritual, and design.

It was a period of poetry and painting, and has occupied a central space in Japanese ceremony, and fashion for a thousand years.

Kikugawa Eizan

The sunlight flowing through translucent and colorful washi paper reproduces the feeling of a skylight.

Traditional Wagasa artisans from the village of Gifu, draw on a range of influences to create this impression.

A Gifu Wagasa is made of bamboo from the Kiso River, and Mino-washi, a paper crafted from bark and plant fibers, and coated with flax oil and natural lacquer.

The rib structure is made from a single bamboo cane, which, when closed forms the original shape of the cane. When opened, the wagasa silhouette is an arrangement of geometric design and elegant color.

]]> https://artisansonhand.com/?feed=rss2&p=123 0 123 Sanctus Luxurri By Dana Phayul https://artisansonhand.com/?p=111 https://artisansonhand.com/?p=111#respond Mon, 30 Mar 2020 12:00:00 +0000 http://ottersans.com/?p=111 …]]> Against a backdrop of pristine landscapes, forests, and vast skies, what mattered most was protecting the nomadic spiritual odyssey, which had existed since the beginning… 

As they set about following the migration paths that had been trodden for centuries before them, setting up camps and providing for the necessities of life, ancient people managed to surround themselves with sanctus luxurii, an ensemble of colorful and elegant furnishings, bedcovers, clothes, and jewelry, which animated the nomadic being, protected families from the realities of nature, and laid the groundwork for symbolic art.

Nomadic being was not measured in time or wealth, but in the laws of nature, which were formed at the origins of nomadic experience, when visual patterns were in a pristine state, and form and color were at their fullest and most intricate. Journeying beneath vast landscapes of stars and across immense valleys and deserts, repetitions of color, texture, and shape, formed a coherent pattern that appeared to represent the laws of nature.

The expression of visual patterns in talismanic kilims, sacred textiles, symbolic tent ornaments and furnishings, gold and silver dowry jewelry, glass beads, wedding clothes and bedcovers, had an instinctual clarity that was part of the natural order of things.

Natural elements of design created a complex material and symbolic environment that animated nomadic existence and reinforced the sense that life is not an object to possess but a temporary state of being, a spiritual odyssey that is handed down by the ancestral spirits, to be embraced for a time, and passed on to the next generation.

Traditional hand-work was an essential and dramatic element in the development of an artistic perspective, which focused and organized cycles of light, shadow, color and repeating geometric pattern, into a spiritual and symbiotic relationship with nature.

Images that moved suddenly and dramatically into consciousness presented nomadic hand-work with its motifs, which clearly described the laws of nature –twisting leafy stems, curvilinear waves, jagged lines, octagonal sun discs, intricate stratifications, flowering wreaths –and attested to the origins of nomadic experience.

Cashmere -John Singer Sargent (1908)

Traveling cyclically, in union with weather patterns and migration paths, survival depended on practical life working skills like weather prediction and direction-finding, and the ability to produce shelter, bedding, tools, and weapons, which could meet the strenuous requirements of a highly mobile lifestyle.

The artisan skills, complex tools, and hand-eye coordination, required to represent nature’s visual patterns, were also critical in the design and fabrication of horse trappings, tent fabrics, blankets, bed covers, and furnishings. 

Making their way from one geographic area to another, nomads would come in contact with tribes who could be sociable or hostile, and the accessories of nomadic costume served as tokens of status and power. Beads, earrings, belt ornaments, pendants, and brooches, were designed to express an indeterminable number of traditions, subliminal perceptions, and accumulated symbols, interwoven into nomadic life.

Against a backdrop of pristine landscapes, forests, and vast skies, what mattered most was protecting the nomadic spiritual odyssey, which had existed since the beginning. In this journey, nature and being emerge as one continuous pattern, representing stages in an endless correspondence of form and spirit, entwined in symbol and art, and encoded into nomadic life through hand-work.

Sanctus luxurri was created, used, and passed on by one generation after another. It was the common thread that held the tribal family together. Its mere existence within the context of generational responsibility, personifies its ancient energy.

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