Spring Greens Window display at Cycle Heaven

Please follow the link to find the article on  the window display at Cycle Heaven (March to April 2011), using Tanka Art.

http://www.yorinspired.com/?p=1611

Green Smoke Rising, Tanka

Green Smoke Rising, 2006

Print on photographic paper, edition of 100, 1000mm x 605 mm.

£265 framed, £200 unframed

Tanka are an ancient form of Japanese Poetry still used today.  The Tanka Seasons and Green Smoke Rising artworks are a response to Japanese Tanka poetry written about a thousand years ago, between 1250 AD and 850 AD.  The poems are ancient but the imagery expressed in them is still true today.  I linked the old poems with contemporary imagery and technology to produce digital prints.   Their content resonates across time and space from the Far East to the West.

I discovered the Tanka poems and oriental aesthetics while studying at York St John University in 2005 and 2006 under the guidance of  Dr Hisashi Nakamura.  Dr Nakamura is a founder of the Anglo-Japanese Tanka society (www.tankasociety.com)  and originally translated the poems into English.  He later published them in a book The Floating Bridge: Tanka Poems in English (ISBN 978-1-85072-360-8).  

Alas!

How sad to think

That my body will end in pale green

After all,

A mist over the fields.

Poem by Ono No Komanchi, c.850, translated by Dr Hisashi Nakamura.

Tanka Seasons

Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer from the Tanka Seasons Series, based on Japanese Tanka Poetry, a ancient form of poetry with a rigid format of 31 syllables divided over 5 lines (5,7,5,7,7 syllables per line). The symbolic images used in the poetry is often based on nature and closely related to the seasons, something which seems lots in our urban 24/7 society.

Layered digital photographs, 2005

Prints of these are available upon request, 585 x 470 mm.

£145 each framed, 10% discount for the set of four

£85 unframed, 10%  for the set of four.