Week 11

Discussion

Gourds and Still Lifes

This week's subject is gourds, specifically the bottle gourd. The context of this week's painting demonstration is a painting genre known as still life. In this unit, bottle gourds are discussed first, followed by a still life painting discussion.

Bottle Gourds

There are a considerable number of gourd types. They all belong to the Cucurbitaceae family which has about 965 species, including watermelons, squash, pumpkins, zucchini, and cucumbers along with gourds.

Many gourds have hard shells when mature, but some don't. They also have a variety of shapes, and some cultivated varieties can be as much as a meter long.

The specific type of gourd focused on this week is the calabash or bottle gourd (hyōtan in Japanese). It is also known as the white-flowered gourd, long melon, New Guinea bean, and Tasmania bean.

Immature bottle gourd fruit:

The bottle gourd is a vine, grown for its eatable fruit and other purposes. It is an annual with harry stems and long forked tendrils. It has a musky odor. The sizes of the vines, leaves, and flowers vary greatly as does the size and shape of the fruit. Bottle gourd plants are named for the shape of the fruit, among them club, dipper, dolphin, kettle, and trough. At stated above, some varieties grow fruit that is more than a meter in length. Plants can be grown from seeds but require a long hot growing season to mature. 

Bottle gourd flowers open at night:

Bottle gourd leaves.

Notice that the leaves have five lobes with hardly any indentation separating them.

Bottle gourd fruit is widely used for food or food ingredients around the world. In Japan, dried marinated strips called kanpyō is used in makizushi, spiced rice rolls with various goodies on top. Nutritionally, the bottle gourd has very few calories and is a modest source of vitamin C in addition to other vitamins and minerals. Its leaves and tendrils are edible and have even more nutrients than the fruit.

When allowed to mature, the fruit has a hard waterproof shell that can be used to store liquids or other material.

Probably because of that, it is one of the earliest plants cultivated by humans; possibly beginning as long as 13,000 years ago. Remains up to 8,000 to 9,000 years old have been found in archeological excavations in China and Japan. It was cultivated in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus. Genetic researchers think it is more likely to have arrived here by floating across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa than by having been carried here by humans from Asia.

Bottle gourd used as a canteen:

Besides containers, carved bottle gourds have been used as tools, musical instruments, art objects, and eating utensils. They have even been used to make the kind of meerschaum pipes that Sherlock Holmes is often depicted as smoking. Meerschaum clay is used for the inner lining.

 A famous Japanese Shōgun, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598), used an image of a golden gourd as his battle standard.

Still Life Paintings

Still life paintings are artworks depicting mostly inanimate objects, typically commonplace things that are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells, etc.) or man-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, etc.). Artists have considerable freedom in how the various objects are arranged in compositions. They have been around since classical antiquity, like this 2nd century Roman mosaic.

In Western culture, still life art emerged as a separate professional genre in the late 16th century.

Juan Sánchez Cotán (1560-1627), was a Spanish artist. The 1602 painting below is on display at the San Diego Museum of Art.

A hierarchy of figurative art that included still life developed in Italy in the 16th century and was formalized and promoted by the art academies in Europe between the 17th century and the modern era. The hierarchy is:

Wilem Claesz Heda  (1593/1594–1680/1682) was a Dutch artist. The still life below was painted in 1658.

A painting technique called trompe-l'œil (a French term that literally means 'deceive the eye')  was used in both of the paintings above. It creates the illusion of a three dimensional space within which the objects depicted are arranged. It is not a technique used in Japanese art.

The following examples of Japanese still lifes are all ukiyo-e, Japanese woodblock prints, of a type called surimono.

Most ukiyo-e were printed in large quantities for sale to the general public, but not all. Never designed for public distribution, surimono were exquisitely printed works of the Edo period privately commissioned by wealthy individuals and intended solely for an exclusive group - perhaps special friends, perhaps members of one's "poetry circle." Artwork combining image and poetry was common. The top-ranked artists and craftsmen were hired, and only the highest quality pigments and washi were used. Some contained special features like embossing. Most surimono were fairly small; roughly 7.5 x 8.5 inches was common. 

Surimono were most popular from the 1790s to the 1830s.

The surimono below, produced sometime between 1804 and 1813 is by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Hokusai was prolific in many media.

This surimono was by Kubo Shunman (1757-1820). His works include some ukiyo-e prints, book illustrations, paintings, illustrated novels, and poetry. He was the most prolific producer of paintings in the Kitao school. More than 70 of his paintings survive. He stopped designing commercial prints in 1790 to focus on surimono and provided poetry for the prints of Hokusai, Utamaro, and Eishi.

Little is known about Ryūryūkyo Shinsai other than that he was an art student of Hokusai's and designed many surimono. He flourished between 1799 and 1823. The print below commemorates New Year's Day.

The surimono below, also by Ryūryūkyo Shinsai, is a calendar print. During the Edo period, only government-licensed printers were allowed to publish calendars. Surimono artists got away with violating that rule because their work had limited and exclusive distribution. Their artwork also avoided directly featuring calendars; instead hinting at them instead. The calendar print below is a prime example.