Punk Ikebana

Roebuck Louesa Roebuck

Description

Floral designer Louesa Roebuck shows you how to make transcendent eco-luxe compositions with seasonal flora foraged from the West Coast "The way of the flowers" has been studied for centuries, but as acclaimed author, artist, and floral designer Louesa Roebuck demonstrates, one needs to understand the rules in order to bend them. In Punk Ikebana, Louesa composes stunning arrangements and installations that unite the cultural traditions and elegance of Japanese perspective with exhilarating freedom from convention. Working with seasonally foraged, gleaned, and sourced flora from various regions of California, Louesa reveals how cinematic floral sculptures can be created by embracing the abundance right outside your door. Inviting nature's often-overlooked treasures into your space means improvising in a moment of time, in a particular place. Exuberant compositions are created with what is on hand, establishing a harmonious dialogue with the flora, space, color, vessels, and textiles readily available. Aligning her deep commitment to the environment with her love of foraging, gleaning, and sourcing regionally, Louesa inspires you to cultivate your own vision and invite the wonders of the natural world into your home.

Sujets

• Asian art
• Japan

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 08 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781647008024
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 12 Mo

Extrait

When you find that your soul, your heart, every wisp of inspiration Every speck of the vast blue sky And its shining star blossoms The mountains, the whip-poor-will, and the bluebells Are all tied together with one cord of rhythm, one cord of joy One cord of unity, one cord of spirit Then you shall know that all are but waves in the cosmic sea CSF We always were Always

CONTENTS
FOREWORD: EIGHT CONVERSATIONS by Obi Kaufmann
INTRODUCTION
IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS
TINY AND SWEET
SISTERS COTTAGE
SUN-DRENCHED GEOMETRY
FIRE AND REGENERATION
BLACKMAN CRUZ
VIRGINIA ROBINSON GARDENS
BEE HERE NOW
CRAZY WISDOM
RAVEN S NEST
SOLSTICE OSECHI
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
STOCKISTS RESOURCES
FOREWORD: EIGHT CONVERSATIONS
BY OBI KAUFMANN
I will gush. When asked by Louesa to write the foreword to this dangerous and monumentally beautiful book, I howled a perfectly contradictory mix of terror and delight. I ve been bewitched by the magic that is Louesa and her art for years. I identified her long ago as the very best kind of revolutionary, and I signed up. As an intrepid peace punk, Louesa presents a world to her audience that heals as it wounds. In her writing, in her ikebana, and through her punk ethos, she reverses the polarity of so many expectations, and the effect is effortless, aesthetic alchemy in which the silent is transformed into the loud, the ugly is made to be beautiful, and the empty is found to be surprisingly full.
In the weeks that followed being asked to write this, I thrashed like a willow in a windstorm. Was my contribution to this important work going to be a high-minded philosophic essay or something akin to a fever-dream sketch with a possibly tenuous connection? To understand the voice I finally present, let s begin by examining what had come before. In a published review of Louesa s previous book, Foraged Flora , coauthored with Sarah Lonsdale in 2016, I wrote a passage that also applies to this book, as both works share common genetics:
This is not an art book like any other. This is not a coffee-table book like any other. There is a universe of beauty laid out here that amounts to something new and ancient, full of love and life (but also of death) that is comfortable to sit with and do nothing, and yet reminds me of everything. It is Zen, but it is rooted in the world of form and growth, reveling in both. It is fine with its contradictions. It thrives there, dynamic and at times angry. This is not a book about flower decoration; this is a book about love, and it can hurt, and it can make all things bare their truth. This is a book about witnessing reality and forcing oneself to be okay with what happens next.
Finally, then, I had to divorce myself from my appreciation of Louesa s genius and engage with the work itself. What follows in eight paragraphs (written over eight days in the California winter of 2022) is a conversation with the spirit that is Punk Ikebana as a willful agent of its own volition. In this series of poetic meditations, I address punk ikebana as an abstract spirit, a character, a god of time, beauty, and death. The conversation is not direct. I am not writing fiction; I am exploring a metaphor. We move first through what it is to feel anything, as born by the appreciation of punk ikebana. From this particular kind of attention, I present my own practice in the mirror that punk ikebana holds up and what the meaning in beauty actually becomes.
01. ATTENTION
How many senses are there? We divide up the traditional five senses into categories of function . . . but I propose that there is a sixth one as well. We should call it attention , and it exists in the realm of the aesthetic. Together, the senses flow down from their mountain peaks as rivers pregnant with information on their way to join the other liquid senses inside the mind s vast watershed. Receiving the poetry, can we let them converge-beautiful, tender, and open? Punk ikebana insists on it. Landscapes become bouquets, smells carry memories of old wounds now healed, and you begin to only be able to hear these words by moonlight. Punk ikebana holds mountain faces whispering of antlered trees that were one thing and now become something else. All things are permitted to be all things. Secrets are revealed, and in our sense-making, we are also making sense. We learn that the rivers do not flow over the earth, but the earth moves under the still water. The horizon is a circle of beings holding hands, and your death is their death, and both are illusion. At the great confluence there is one sense, and its name is attention.
02. GRACE
Punk ikebana is the coupling of attention with grace. Grace is turning to the sun to feed on the light. Punk ikebana is a contradiction; in it we are called to participate in a peaceful revolution in which every arrangement becomes a political act. The hours of practice that feed my life when I am most unaware of being at my most aware-painting, hiking, or reading-I am as close as I can be to this core power. I know things that I don t know otherwise. I see that the current sprawling industry of modern human activity is not where the world presents its most stupendous glory, but that treasure of existence rests in the effortless functions of the natural world. Punk ikebana offers an antidote to the poisoned drumming of industrial fundamentalism s rhetorical dogma and gives daylight and space to what matters most to me: peace, mental health, family and community stability, the value of skilled work, ecological connectivity and health, and economic and racial justice. Every day in the climate revolution, the anxious decisions like hot rain, keep me guessing at the fantasies that drive the illusory limitlessness of our Faustian economic system. I need punk ikebana because I can t help but lay awake at night and fear the evil of wasted land and wasted obligation. While I attend to so many hollow duties that could implicate me as not living to my truest calling of serving only the earth, I hear the soil whispering that grace is not punitive. In the first rays of dawn, the old flower exists to attend to its own grace.
03. SILENCE
Punk ikebana has its own relationship to sound. There is silence of a kind. It s a silence that only exists in a few places on this planet. You find it in the deep heat of the desert, where the air is made of a glass and the wind crawls over the sand. You can find it listening to the new winter mushrooms covered in snow on the edge of the frozen-over creek that wants to crack from any tiny pressure. You can find it in the springtime carpet of flowers turning the hills into an ocean of green, punctuated with distant shocks of purple and orange. Punk ikebana also allows the cries of the hawk to echo and break the reverie; it allows the dam to break, releasing the flood; it allows drums. Between the silence and clamor, might I be just still enough to participate and to receive the transmission of the greater envelope in this precious fold? In this space, I am challenged to see something today. I wish to be open enough to feel the value of the wealth hidden in the sensorial breeze-the breeze that does not blow.
04. TIME
Inside my mountain moment, in a small cabin at the center of the world s morning light, I reset my diurnal clock to zero. The seconds tick by and hang in the air warmly between the freeze and the thaw of the coming winter day. Renewal is everywhere in a daily ritual that the birds know, revealing themselves to be kindred artists. Outside, trees write quiet calligraphy, and even the snow seems literate. I forget about punk ikebana. My boots growl and demand that I end this breakfast dream, but I hold on as long as I can because each tea-soaked breath holds a world of release. You and I will talk about Mars and last night s movie, all the while waiting and hoping for the detonation of this intimate, silent bomb exploding into grace, presenting earth and heaven as the zero-sum game of love that they both certainly are.
05. CONSCIOUSNESS
Virginia Woolf said that A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it . . . And like the tide, the ebb and flow of our capacity to assemble and disassemble sense-knowledge defines the nature of our interaction with the universe. Punk ikebana is the aesthetic vessel capable of arresting the wave for as long as it takes synthesis to override analysis. Finding out more things will not get us to the ethical story of how we live in and with nature s abundance. There is a subtle and yet complete illumination possible of what Wallace Stevens calls the instinctive integrations which are the reasons for living and that punk ikebana, like our own bones, remembers.
06. INTERCONNECTIVITY
In the age of climate breakdown, negotiating the deluge of media-based information while attending to my ability to mediate the existential anxiety that now seems a core facet of my mind s software is the primary measure of my career, not only as an artist but as a citizen. I am as sure as I am about the beauty of the sunrise that my attention spent on the constant reporting of emergencies; the noise from whatever computer monitor is closest is at least as damaging as it is valuable. Meanwhile, punk ikebana knows what it is and what its limits are. The tree knows how to be beautiful. The self-feeding nature of punk ikebana s nutrient truths builds inside of a feedback loop not unlike the workings of the global ecosystem-a system of energy that, when unbroken, feels virtually inexhaustible. The interconnectivity of the living world is so complex that it appears and often behaves as one single circuit.
07. BEAUTY
Saint Thomas Aquinas defined beauty as that which pleases when seen. Harmoniously composed and displayed botanical arrangements are universally known to please, but the practice of punk ikebana goes much further. It offers a broad and satisfying definition to the philosophical problem