Cross-Stitch Symbols Enrich the World
Preconceptions About Painting
Looking back now, in my adolescence in the 1990s, the music industry was at its height.
Instrument sounds brought by advances in electronic technology, visual information from music videos, songs played repeatedly through the media.
Meanwhile, the impression of painting—even of historical painting—felt quiet and dull compared with the overwhelming emotion of music that sears the senses; it did not move the heart in a large way.
I knew I could not draw it myself, and I could tell when it was skilled. Yet it felt so quiet that it did not seem worth spending money to view or buy. I never clutched a museum ticket with excitement and went regularly.
Emotion Arrives from Unexpected Places
On a day off soon after I started working, I traveled to Niigata Prefecture with a friend from university.
It was an unplanned trip, so there was little to do, but a nearby museum was holding a Monet exhibition, and we decided to go.
At the museum, audio guide about Monet in one hand, I peered around feeling somehow embarrassed at myself looking meaningfully at a considerable number of Monet paintings lined up, even though I did not understand painting.
Then, before a picture of a Dutch landscape whose title I have forgotten, I suddenly felt as if Monet wanted to lock light onto the canvas.
From boyhood on—on days I was scolded, hot summers, cold winter days, days when something good happened—light that strangely and richly illuminated, showing many faces.
It was terrifyingly expressive; even a single tree had almost infinite hues.
It seemed he was trying to lock that light onto the canvas by combining paint on its surface.
From that painting, light truly overflowed from the canvas.
I had never seen a painting like that.
Raphael and Rembrandt each had their themes, painting fleshiness, human charm, light and shadow.
Yet I found it mysterious that, even as paint and canvas absorb wavelengths of color, light was overflowing from the canvas.
At the same time, for reasons I did not understand, I had a premonition that Monet’s later paintings would fall into disorder. Having reached the limit of the labor of “locking light onto the canvas” into which he had poured his life’s blood, had he not been assailed by the doubt that the path itself was wrong?
Indeed, looking at the changes in Monet’s later work, and though there was also eye disease in his final years, the paintings seemed to become greatly disordered.
Within the infinite possibilities of natural landscape, does not reproducing a picture through a certain interpretation diminish the charm nature holds?
Is there no way to reproduce on canvas that terrifying charm nature possesses?
Monet’s anguish seemed to come through; I felt he may have sensed that every pictorial form he staked his life on creating was unsatisfactory—a defeat.
Yet somehow, to me, it felt like a victory. I simply did not know why.
True emotion arrived the next day.
From the back seat of the car my friend was driving, gazing at an endless expanse of sea, the sea began to look like Monet’s paintings.
It was a face of the sea I had never seen in nearly thirty years of living.
The light reflected on the water’s surface ceased to be infinite complexity and seemed composed of a few colors and simple contrasts.
It was as if the cipher of nature’s beauty had been decoded, the way planets had their natural mysteries decoded by Newtonian physics.
Yet strangely, even with the cipher decoded, charm was not lost through loss of secrecy—the sea began to shine more.
Perhaps the whole cipher-decoding framing is a dull metaphor, and that is not really the issue.
In any case, certain emotion arrived.
But if I talked about this to anyone, no matter how I explained, it would end with me being the tiresome type who pretends to understand painting. In the end, pretending to understand would remain the same.
Still, quite apart from such personal circumstances, Monet—among countless talented painters whose names do not remain in history—through talent and some measure of chance as well, floats in society packed with meaning as a symbolic sign within humanity’s inheritance and development of aesthetic sense.
Kirameku Japan
Looking at the “Kirameku Japan” series, I recalled seeing Monet’s paintings some twenty years ago.
Monet tried to express complex nature with limited paints and canvas. He did not simplify light. He replaced the richness of light with signs humans can express.
Cross-stitch is a little like that. Cherry blossoms cannot be copied as cherry blossoms. Autumn leaves, waves, snow—all are replaced by combinations of limited thread colors and small crosses.
There,
“What color is this petal?”
“What color does it become in light?”
“Is shadow really gray?”
Without noticing, one thinks such things again and again.
It seems to simplify the world, but truly it is the opposite.
By translating once into the signs of thread in the right way, one comes to see the real world more richly than before.
Mathematics and physics are the same. Nature itself is not a formula.
Yet by replacing nature with the signs of mathematics, humanity came to understand its laws, and eventually could launch satellites and send rockets into space.
It was not that we understood because we simplified the world.
Because we translated the world into signs, thought through their structure again and again, and rebuilt it, we could understand reality more deeply.
Cross-stitch is a little like that.
The “Kirameku Japan” series replaces flowers, birds, wind, and moon with the signs of limited thread and small crosses.
Nature’s charm, merely by being there, does not become culture. When humans translate it into signs and fix it as expression, it first becomes humanity’s shared heritage. The “Kirameku Japan” series, too, is a practice of bringing such new charms of Japan into this world.
Kirameku Japan Seasons (Autumn in Kyoto)
Kirameku Japan Seasons (Mount Fuji and Cherry Blossom Viewing)
