With But a Single Kettle One Can Make Tea

When the 16th century tea master Rikyú, with beautiful concision, suggested the wealth of possibilities inherent in the most simple means, he initiated an esthetic that still inspires many artists. In the United States, the tradition known, sometimes pejoratively, as Japonism, has a long history. The Harvard-trained American, Ernest Fenellosa, initiated his countrymen to the splendors of Japanese art in the late 191 century, and his student, the Japanese scholar Tenshin Okakura, who became a curator at the Boston Museum, extended Fenellosa's mission with tremendous energy. Since the turn of the century, generations of artists have been lured to the special characteristics of Japanese traditional arts, and some, like Gloria Garfinkel, have managed to salvage the richest elements without succumbing to the mannerisms that Gilbert and Sullivan pilloried when they poked fun at the "blue and white young men" haunting British galleries.

Garfinkel has been drawn to things Japanese in a quite natural evolution. From the beginning, her temperament was apparent in the sensuous ways she selected her means and materials. Long before she ever visited Japan, Garfinkel was seeking ways to express her vivid response to color, pattern and texture wherever they occurred. Her earlier work as a print maker, in which she experimented boldly with saturated color and simulated textures, prepared her for the extravagant undertakings these large tondos represent. In them, she has generated various experiences from a single kettle, so to speak. As in her earlier experiments, she has worked in a series, making her own rules to limit and emphasize the unforeseen, the unexpected effects that emerge as she collages and paints. In this working procedure, Garfinkel's understanding of the principles of the unique Japanese poetic form, the haiku, is apparent.

Garfinkel's long adventure with color, pattern, and texture was surely heightened by her travels in Japan where those three elements are visible in raked sand gardens, food displays, textiles, bamboo fences, pavements, and the marvelous variety of ancient arts available in Kyoto, and elsewhere. What could be more startling to the modem artist's eye than the checkerboard pattern in the pavilion of pine and harp at Katsura Imperial Palace, or the elegant bamboo fences in the meanest of Japanese farms? And still today, there are countless indigo textiles visible in the countryside homes. These elements of the Japanese experience served Garfinkel no doubt as a confirmation of her deepest instincts as an artist. They are keys to a sensibility that expresses the unique joys of the senses, above all that inexplicable joy in the clangor of high color. "Color," says that marvelous thinker of visual language, Rudolf Amhein, "is the most capricious dimension of visual imagery." Garfinkel, in balancing caprice and the rule of the painted picture plane, has found the appropriate means of expressing the range of her bountiful responses to the seeing of the world.

Dore Ashton

September 1998