Another entry for
ART EVERY DAY MONTH
days 3 & 4
The Kabuki obsession continues here, and thanks to Kimberly Anne's comment on my last post (THANK YOU MUCH KIMBERLY!!!), I'm also finally on the trail of O-Iwa-San, the Kabuki Ghost that seems to have visited my musings recently.
First up today, the image left -- click image to see it larger size -- is the inside, front cover of my Art House Coop sketchbook. I had been hesitant to do the inside covers of the front and back covers of the sketchbook. Mostly it was because they aren't blank pages. This front cover has the card holder and card for the library card. The card you see there now is the card with direction for me as participant on it. But I imagine after I send it in for the exhibit and library collection, a card will go in there for indexing. So anyway, I wanted to do something around it or over it or incorporating it. So anyway, this is what I came up with. I'll have the back cover one to show you later.
And then I had been sketching, just b&w line drawings of the Kabuki faces, with that tilt and somewhat look that I seem to be carrying over from my GRRRRLS series. Decided I wanted to watercolor a few of them. Though I know red is a prominent color for Kabuki, I have also seen other colors on the actors. So I started researching a bit about the colors. Found this great story about Kabuki Make-up. About half way down the page, you'll find a table with information about colors, shades, meanings, and you'll see there that the light blue color is for coolness or calm. So this is what came from my musings on that idea:
Now, as to O-Iwa-San's ghost mythology. I'm finding lots more images now, and with her name and the name of the play Yotsuya Kaidan, it is easier to find information about the play, versions of it from centuries past all the way thru the modern day horror film, complete with special effects! Interestingly, the thing that caught me most about her, that fact that she carried her ghost baby with her, seems to be barely touched upon in most versions, especially the modern.
I did come across a CNN travel article about the two shrines and O-Iwa-San's gravesite saying that when productions of her story are done, the actors and director go there to make offerings, to ask for her blessing. At the gravesite, it is said that there is a sign saying O-Iwa_San will grant blessings to anyone who leaves a wooden stupa tablet made for her. And reading this made me think maybe I would look up what a wooden or paper or drawing of stupa might look like for her, you know, to make one dedicated to asking for her blessing as I explore her story in my art. And then I found a most interesting thing!
In researching what a stupa is, I discovered that it can be as simple as wooden tablet with characters written on it, but also can be as complex as an entire temple building. Even pagodas or cairns are a version of the stupa form. And then in one of the stupa sites, I found an illustration that gave great detail about the levels and elements of the temples you see in Buddhist tradition. The bottom three levels are made up of a square, circle, and triangle. When I was pregnant with Dakota, I dreamed of those shapes in a pile configuration, and I was told it was a Kota Lion. There have been many versions of it, but this is the one Hawk worked up 3D style for the KotaPress site:
Maybe I'm just making meaning of everything. But, heck, isn't that what an artist does? Make meaning of the muses that cross our consciousness!? Something about having Kota's symbol be the base of stupa form. Something about being told it was called a Kota Lion and then the Lion character is prominent in Kabuki plays. Something about O-Iwa-San's images of her with her baby ghost. Something about the Jizo temples and gardens where the baby ghosts can be seen peeking out of the folds of his robes. It was Jizo who sent me on the path of 1,000 Faces project. And when I lost half of them with the zapping of my computer in Spring, I hit upon the fact that I would just do another 1,000. And then reading that many quest to make 1,000 stupa structures as a way to enlightenment. Something about how I've been dreaming in a myth format since summer - see Magic Pea Myth I posted in August.
???
All of it feels like a pointer, indications for where this new series of pieces is going. I want to make a stupa offering to O-Iwa-San to ask for her blessing to write a new version of her myth. My version is something about the baby being ghost of a stillborn. The ghost mother being the part of the mother who also dies when her baby is stillborn. The ghost mother taking a quest to find Jizo who can protect and lead her baby the rest of the way into the afterworld. The ghost mother can't take the baby the whole way because the ghost part of the mother is only part of her -- there is another part of the woman who is still alive in the physical world, trying to figure out how to live again after her child's death.
I want to write the story in detail and do illustration for the story, too.
But I somehow feel that this all came from the glimpse I got of O-Iwa-San in my dream or snippet on the radio when I was waking the other day -- I can't say exactly where that first glimpse came from exactly. Anyway, since I feel it came from her -- and since a stupa offering is asked for to gain her blessing -- well, I guess that will be next in my series. Along with continuing to explore Kabuki and O-Iwa-San imagery in general.
We'll see what unfolds!
Miracles...
k-
Hawk got full shots of the Kabuki paintings for me, too, this weekend.
You can finally see how I'm using my hand-carved stamp to make signature hand for each of the Kabuki canvas pieces. It's been an interesting experiment to make myself include it in each piece. We'll see if that keeps up! :)
miracles!
