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By Sophie Wednesday, June 20 2007 @ 10:05 AM EDT Views: 282

By Michiko Baribeau
June 10, 2007

It's been ridiculous. How beautiful the bushes are this year. Trees are so thick and emerald green every where that I feel almost intoxicated when I drive through the tree-oned roads. Although some people had suffered the flood a month ago, including me, the huge rain storm obviously contributed to this beautiful sight. No pain no gain, as they say. The tradeoff is magnificent.

Prof. Kato's workshop

How is everyone? We just finished the spring workshop with Prof. Kato from Kyoto headquarter. We had such wonderful classes with the enthusiastic participants. The best turnout among the recent workshops it was as well.

The first day's workshop is on Shoka San (means 3) shu-ike and Free style.

Shoka lesson was particularly important to us because it is like the life drawing. Kato-sensei taught us from history of Shoka to how to make this style more contemporary using emphasis or exaggreation and abbreviation or elimination. Especially the explanation for a design approach was very insightful, along with out usual naturalistic approach. All of sudden, this old Sanshu-ike has come out to be so modern and exciting.

Free-style lecture was another interesting class. Her strategy to attack this style is to avoid getting lost in the vast sea of freedom. She explained how to make total shape of arrangement corresponding with the Kaki (container) first, and moved on to how to approach this style. She suggested to set the theme of your arrangement with using the main material 60% of whole volume, which could be the number, or the color, or the texture, etc. of the materials. 20% of the volume would be the contrasting materials, and the remaining 10% would be some accent materials. Her analogy is to compare this as getting yourself dressed. Choose your dress for that day, and choose your hose to correspond to it. After that you put on the necklace as an accent to enchance the total look. After her lecture, I feel as if I am an expart of this style, and so eager to try it. As a rule-bound typical Japanes, I have always been uncomfortable about Free-style, but not any more.

The second day's class was on Rikka Shimpu-tai.

Here, again, she used the exaggeration and abbreviation method. She suggested to use 70-60% of Shu material, and 20-30% for Yo. For Ashirai (only if it is necessary) 10%.

I understand why Rikka Shimpu-tai is considered to have more free-style element compared to Shofu-tai, although it requires to have Shoshin-like, Maeoki-like, and Ushirogakoi-like parts. One more thing we learned was about "Tsuyo-mono". We vaguely knew that it was the plant between Ki(tree)-mono and Kusa(grass)-mono, such as bamboo or hydrangea. When she asked which category Roses fell into, we all thought (at least I did) they are Kusa-mono. How could they be Tsuyo-mono with such grass like apperance, but they were according to her explanation. She taught us that Tsuyo-mono was the plant which wouldn't die off during the winter like Kusa-mono does. It is true Kusa does, and comes out from the ground in spring. They also have a hollow stem, not like Ki-mono, which has solid core.

She was not only gentle teacher with generous suggestions, however, at a same time, very strict and firm teacher. She doesn't compromise to the students' insisting on their inaccurate ideas. Her wonderful sense of humor brightened our fruitful two day workshop. Thank you, Kato-sensei.

Please pray for Helen's comeback from her ill health. She is an anchor of our club. We need her strength and wisdom.

Sa-yo-o-na-ra! O-genki-de (Be well).

Michiko Baribeau
7 Millis Lane
Stansfordville, NY 12581
baribeau@bard.edu

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