Natural-Patterned Art

In this series, wataboku’s drawing of a girl, printed on acrylic, meets one of the oldest materials of Japan: urushi, the lacquer of the lacquer tree. Where the line ends, the lacquer begins, and with it a pattern that no hand can fully command.

Natural-patterned art is a new mode of expression, born of techniques cultivated over many years of lacquerware restoration and made with one hundred per cent genuine natural lacquer. When lacquer meets foil, the pattern that forms in the time the lacquer takes to dry is wholly its own: it can be neither planned nor repeated. Urushi flowers, bark, shaken and fissured patterns are among its forms. Each of these three panels therefore exists in one state only.

The process is slow by design. The drawing is printed on an acrylic panel mounted on iron, a first meeting of printed acrylic and natural patterns, reached after repeated tests of how ink and lacquer live together. Lacquer is then laid over silver leaf and polished, layer upon layer, until depth appears within the surface; the translucent, amber lacquer warms the silver to gold, and the finest details are added by hand with a maki-e brush.

Lacquer has been part of life in Japan for more than nine thousand years, and overseas the craft is known simply as “japan”. Behind this series lies the wish to bring the vitality and the gentleness of the natural world, in harmony, to people and to the spaces in which they live.

Three works, three temperaments: Mukuro, with a ribbon of gold crossing the face; Saturn, composed beneath a ring of light; Hikari, whose gold has cracked like dry earth. Each is 60 × 30 cm and unique.