Reflections on Sumi-e Meditations:
Night Walk, Kyoto Temples
chiru o mide
kaeru kokoro ya
sakurabana
mukashi ni kawaru
shirushi naruran
—Saigyō
This frame of mind
lets me go back, even without
seeing the blossoms fall;
maybe it's some sign I am
no more the one I used to be.
In late November, 2019, while traveling in Japan with a dear friend, we spent a long evening walking in Kyoto from temple to temple on the occasion of the compounds opening their enclosed gardens to the public for night contemplation. It was a quietly profound experience, lingering in my mind during the weeks that followed. Returning home to Los Angeles County, in my studio at the edge of Angeles National Forest, I unwrapped paper I had purchased in Kyoto, opened an antique inkstone and handmade brushes I had purchased in Xi’an years earlier, gathered bottled Sumi ink from Japan, and entered a sort of meditative fugue-state, grinding and pouring and rolling and dripping and smearing and brushing ink freely and without objective on the concrete floor of my studio. Soon my hands and bare feet were black and the floor stained—echoes of this making. It was reminiscent of the somatic dance-flow rhythms of my early large abstract work. Forgetting the self awhile, as Dōgen did, allowing the ink works to drift via unconscious interrelationships, each one begetting another, until, after several winter weeks and into the new year, and just before Covid arrived to change the world, I completed 189 sheets, stopping only when the paper I’d purchased in Kyoto ran out.The musical sound of the grinding, the beauty of grays and blacks—sooty ink born in fire reminiscent of the wildfire-charred oaks near my studio door—the absorbing clarity of the mulberry paper, and the engaged focus of spontaneous gestures—all leaving traces of experience and merging my travels with the lived wild nature of home.
—Daniel Barber
*Note: each Sumi-e sheet is 13 × 9½ in. (33 × 24.1 cm)