haiku tsurezure

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haiku tsurezure - #39
A Conversation Between a Haiku Poet
and a Visual Artist: Yuzo Ono + Lisa Milroy

Yuzo Ono

Lisa Milroy and I come from different artistic backgrounds, in visual art and haiku respectively. Lisa is a British-Canadian artist based in London and Lydd-on-Sea, Kent and her focus is on still life painting. Lisa shared insightful views on haiku in a questionnaire that I composed and that was posted on the International Haiku Association website, after she participated in a contemporary art exhibition “SPLASH! The Haiku Show” at White Conduit Projects, London. The exhibition explored a response to haiku by a group of visual artists. I studied on a Master’s programme at an art school in London and have published several art critiques in various publications over the years, including an essay on the Japanese art movement Mono-ha, which took into account its relation to haiku. I have a deep interest in contemporary art in general from the perspective of a haiku poet.

At my invitation, Lisa and I recently met online, Lisa in her studio at Lydd-on-Sea, and me in my study at home in Kawasaki, Japan. We had a 90-minute conversation exploring the subject of haiku and painting. In preparation for our meeting, I felt that a few concepts were needed to bridge the gap between the two distinct fields of thinking and making - painting and haiku - and prepared several thoughts through which to steer our discussion. However, at the start of our meeting, Lisa commented, "In your invitation to join you in a conversation about painting and haiku, you posited a division between the two art forms and suggested a bridge was needed to link them together. However, over years of research and visiting Japan on a regular basis, my appreciation of haiku alongside other aspects of Japanese culture has come to significantly inform my approach to still life painting. Through this particular cultural mind-set, for me painting and haiku are not located in separate compartments or boxes, as it were. Despite the very different material and structural ways of making and thinking, and outcome, it feels like there’s a natural flow and affinity between them. Just to remind you, motifs in my painting include a wide range of Japanese-based imagery that I’ve developed since the 1980s. My experiences of various Japanese art forms each with a different craft tradition, from Ukiyo-e woodblock prints to tea bowls, kimonos to Ikebana, all of which I’ve painted, have come to co-exist in my mind along with other manifestations of cultural knowledge to shape and enrich my work.”

Black, 2012
oil on canvas
Fukuoka Art Museum

As our conversation progressed, Lisa and I discovered that we shared similar artistic concerns within each category of painting and haiku. We dispensed with a notion of a bridge that separated the two art forms, as well as us as makers, and instead explored difference through our commonalities. At the close of our conversation, we both agreed that my article would not take the form of an interview but rather an essay with ‘we’ or us at its centre, focusing on various thematic perspectives that came up in our conversation.

The Present Moment

Lisa and I both acknowledged that for us a key experience in creating and appreciating any kind of art, be it painting or haiku, is a heightened sense of the present moment, which can generate an exhilarating experience of feeling totally alive.

Lisa said:
"When I’m making a painting, or looking at a painting, a space opens up where I feel very alert to the present moment. It’s as if painting grounds me in a sense of expanding present time where the present escapes its continuous fugitive state of hurtling to the future while leaving behind the past. While I paint within this heightened sense of the present, I feel energized by an amazing kind of creative vitality that is not shaded by any emotion – I’m held by a focus aligned to the act of painting itself. For example, in this state, I rarely feel emotional pain, even if the content of the painting I'm working on addresses things that are extremely painful or disturbing. My knowledge and memory of painful experiences may be at work in my mind, but through my imagination and the pleasure I have in the materiality of paint, I’m totally enjoying and focusing on just what it is to paint – and I think this is what makes me feel so alive and free! I think this charged sense of the present is also characterised by a duality, life sharpened by awareness of non-life, death."

Constant Daylight, 2005
oil and acrylic on canvas
Kate MacGarry, London

I said:
"Your comments bring to mind the haiku poet Kyoshi Takahama, who left a significant footprint on the history of modern Japanese haiku. He famously pointed out that haiku is the ‘literature of paradise’. To expand - novels are good at depicting tragedy as tragedy, that is, the hell created by humans as hell itself. Although a haiku poet may know about and be interested in the condition of human tragedy, he or she writes about it, say, through beautiful flowers that bloom in this very moment. For me, this is the very essence of haiku, and Kyoshi Takahama’s proposition completely resonates with me."

Precision and Touch

In musing over the formal aspects of a painting and haiku in relation to our heightened sense of the present, Lisa and I identified ‘precision’ and ‘touch’ as key characteristics of artworks that we admire. In view of this, we discussed the work of some of our favourite poets.

Lisa said:
"In thinking about haiku along with some of my favourite Western poems, what I appreciate across the board is a beautiful economy of form allied to feeling and conceptual complexity; potent visual imagery; how the work can be playful with elements of surprise; how it involves an imaginative interplay of the physical and metaphysical; and how the work is skilfully crafted, with a deft sense of touch. One of my favourite writers is the 20th-century French poet Francis Ponge, who my mother introduced me to when I was a teenager by way of an anthology of prose poems. In my mind, Ponge’s prose poems and haiku are linked, if tenuously. Ponge’s poems are relatively short descriptions of everyday objects – a loaf of bread, a door, a candle, an oyster, blackberries – usually a couple of paragraphs or so. However brief, the poem acquires a kind of poetic weight through the build-up of description, with the accumulation of words growing dense and concentrated anchoring my absorption of reading. I’m talking here about poems translated from French into English – and it can be quite astonishing to see various translations of the same poem, or haiku for that matter translated from Japanese into English, with its nuances quite different in each translation! The poetic weight of haiku feels completely different to that of Ponge’s prose poems - the sheer number of words in a haiku obviously far fewer than in a prose poem, adhering to a particular syllabic structure. Haiku rests feather-light in my mind as I read through the three sentences, but its hold is nonetheless intensely compelling. And as in a Ponge prose poem, I love the focus on the everyday, on observation and physical bodily sensation. Mentally, Ponge’s prose poems feel like a heavy duvet in winter while haiku, to speak generally, lies over me like a light cotton sheet in summer, both perfectly designed for the season and equally powerful in their impact. However different their sense of poetic weight, to me prose poems and haiku are both underpinned by a sense of precision, the words and rhythm of the lines somehow inevitable and totally needed, and generate the feel of the poet’s ‘touch’. I aim to get the very qualities that I appreciate in all such poems in my own paintings. I love the skilful economy of a written description or painted depiction, no matter how baroque or complex they may be."

Image and feeling

Lisa and I are fascinated by the interplay between an image and the feeling stemming from an experience of the image in both painting and haiku - what is seen or read in tandem with what is discovered and felt, held in the mind and body; how descriptions in paint or words can generate a formal appreciation of a depicted object or setting while simultaneously taking the viewer or reader far away in the mind from the object or setting, opening up to an inner realm of feelings, insights, associations, memories, recollections.

I said:
"Haiku describes concrete things in the world. To the readers, haiku conveys concrete meanings generated by the words. But I think the true message of excellent haiku lies beyond the words and somewhere completely separate from the scene and content established by the words. When I compose haiku while I’m traveling, for example, I try to sense the unique power that resides in the entire vast space of a landscape and aim to translate and embody that feeling so that it’s held within the structure of my haiku. Of course, words are words, signifiers that have literal meaning. But for me the meaning generated by the arrangement of words in a haiku leads to conveying something completely different than what the words themselves signify."

Lisa said:
"This to me points to a notion of space and composition, and what may happen within the space of an artwork. Isn't this something that you’ve also explored in your wonderful essay on Mono-ha?"

I responded:
"It can be said that Mono-ha artists created their works with an awareness of the relationship between the material used in the art object and what surrounded the art object, so at the core was space, activated by the work, energized by the material, rather than the object itself. Kishio Suga, one of the leading Mono-ha artists, called this kind of space ‘surroundings’ while Katsuro Yoshida, another leading Mono-ha artist, described it as ‘in-between’."

Lisa replied:
"This idea of ‘in-between’ fascinates me, the gap between things, when one thing merges or flips to another. How to paint this liminal space? Where and how does it exist in a painting – when hot becomes cold, light becomes dark, near becomes far? Is this transition actually a painted thing or is it something that is more sensed and felt, apprehended through the painting’s composition, that lies in imaginative projection? The paintings of Mark Rothko and William Turner come to mind – I love their work for the way it leads me to ponder transition and change between different states within a painting, and in the world."

Shoes, 1985
oil on canvas
Tate Collection

Lisa continued:
"Your Mono-ha reference to ‘surroundings’ and the importance and value of space triggers a recollection of a huge shift that I made in my own painting at the start of the 1990s. Throughout the 1980s I made all my paintings in a single day - and they were big paintings, 80 by 102 or 112 inches! It was a decade of fast painting. I needed the surface of my canvas to be wet with paint as I worked – it was as if the painting was a single thought, so the elements had to be bound together in a materially cohesive flow. I made these paintings with quick gestural applications of paint, reminding me of calligraphy, and greatly enjoyed the experience of thinking and acting closely held together, the success of a painting teetering on a knife-edge delivery! However, by the end of the 1980s I was finished with this way of working. I wanted to explore what slow painting was about, to spend more time on painting, to paint on top of dry paint, to work with layers of paint, and for this I needed a new set of painting rules. Slow painting introduced me to pictorial space – by painting slowly and layering the paint, I found I could modulate space around an object in a painting, which I was unable to do by painting fast - fast painting always led to pictorial flatness. By mentally navigating space in a painting, new ideas opened up for me about time, knowing and not knowing, things hidden or unseen in relation to the visible (for example, the back side of an object in a painting not being visible or accessible to the viewer, or a depiction of a building with the shutters closed, the interior unavailable), while keying a greater sense of the duality of absence and presence. I remain focused on notions of space and time in my painting to this day, experimenting with what a painting can be through a range of formal approaches."

Freshness

We returned again to explore the question of how an artwork can take a person somewhere in themselves beyond the art object, and how an artwork can touch and move the reader or viewer.

I said:
"Haiku written by beginners tends to appear simple and easy to understand. As the poet progresses from that early stage to an intermediate level, they begin to use rhetoric in innovative ways and adjust the balance of words to create more ingenious mechanisms of meaning and imagery. The meaning and imagery conveyed in the work can take on a broader, more nuanced form and sensation. However, as the poet progresses from the intermediate to a more advanced level, their haiku again assumes a seemingly less complex form. In fact it becomes so simple and easy to understand, it’s as if the haiku says almost nothing at all. At first glance, it can even look as though it’s a haiku written by a beginner. However, by coming to possess experience and knowledge accrued over time, through the sheer simplicity of their haiku, a master haiku poet is able to convey to a reader something completely different than a beginner’s haiku, like a powerful energy. I think Kyoshi Takahama's haiku is a perfect example of this. To reiterate, I believe that the process of the haiku poet improving and evolving their haiku starts with the beginner’s haiku being easy to understand, the haiku then passing through complex techniques to finally reach an easy-to-understand level again. This reversal is, so to speak, the paradox of haiku."

Lisa said:
"Your comments remind me of how I resent seeing a painter’s effort evident in their work - I don’t want to witness an artist’s labour or struggle in getting their painting to work, unless of course the untransformed evidence of labour or struggle is actually a conceptual component of the artwork. Trial, failure and hard work may be a natural part of making paintings, but I don’t want viewers of my work to witness my effort. No matter what the difficulties, my paintings have to appear effortless. Although a painting stems from something deep and personal within me, fuelled by my feelings and my physical touch, my painting needs to be just the painting on its own terms, almost independent from me, from my ego, my feelings, my struggles. My painting has to be fresh! I love the freshness found in gestural painting. In gestural painting, it’s exciting to take note of the way in which a painting is made while simultaneously observing the content of the image. Velasquez, Goya and Manet are some of my favourite pre-20th-century European painters who marvellously demonstrate this quality. Contemporary painters whom I admire for the wonderful freshness of their work include Isabella Ducrot, Lubaina Himid and Aglaé Bassens. Do you think freshness also characterizes the apparently simple haiku created by seasoned, experienced poets?"

I responded:
"I feel a kind of freshness, a certain power, or something like brilliance in haiku by masters, no matter how simple it may look. One master of haiku once said this to me: when you become accustomed to looking at haiku, you can tell whether it is a good haiku or not the moment it jumps out at you at first glance. In a good haiku, I think there is something like that kind of light or brilliance."

About Yasujiro Ozu

We shared many thoughts about the beauty of the cinematic work by the Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu (1903–1963). Although it may be little known in the English-speaking world, Ozu was an avid haiku creator throughout his life, and he said that what he learned from writing haiku or renku greatly helped him in his filmmaking. This was complete news to Lisa, who didn’t know about Ozu’s relation to haiku, and she was happy to learn about this aspect of his creative life.

Lisa commented:
"Scene by scene, I adore the pictorial compositions in an Ozu film, and find the dual relationships located within a single shot very beautiful, two things held together at once – near/far, big/small, inside/outside. I especially appreciate the picturing of stillness and movement in Ozu’s so-called ‘pillow shots’, for example a train chugging across a landscape, a clock ticking in the quiet of a room, laundry flapping on a clothesline against a clear blue sky, people walking up and down the staircase of an office block. The wonderful scene in Tokyo Story comes to mind, where the older couple sits contentedly on a bus looking at views of Tokyo out the window, the still interior of the bus contrasting with the city on the move as observed by the couple. Ozu’s poetic focus on the everyday, on objects, on the pleasure of composition, on stillness and movement, on change and transformation, absence and presence, of searching, deeply inspires my own approach to still life painting. Would you say that in haiku, the relation between stillness and movement, change and transformation, is also key?"

I said:
"Haiku places great importance on the collision of two things within one piece. It does not necessarily mean a combination of motion and stillness, but the contrast therein is extremely important. Haiku discusses the sense of distance between these contrasting things. When two things can be easily connected logically or imaginarily, it is called ‘too close’. On the other hand, when the contrasting things do not react well to each other and fail to create the appropriate heightened emotion, it is called ‘too far’. Haiku poets must find the appropriate sense of distance that is neither ‘too close’ nor ‘too far’."

Japanese Prints, 1987
oil on canvas
Private Collection

I continued:
"Regarding Ozu, half a century ago in Japan, his films may have been seen by film critics as having very mundane themes. The setting was the mundane everyday life in Japan, and the stories all seemed somewhat similar. At the very least, they did not seem to radically pose any philosophical or political questions to the society of the time. So it seems that critics at the time looked down on Ozu's work. However, I think Ozu's works go beyond the surface depictions of mundane everyday life to present a very modern and unique aesthetic sense of space. Through this mixture of the everyday and the modern, Ozu's films give the audience an abstract yet tangible sense of space that goes beyond the direct meaning of the story. This quality of Ozu's films is similar to that of great works of haiku."

Lisa said:
"I first saw Tokyo Story when I was in my 20s and although I can’t recall the exact circumstances, since then, Ozu has become my favourite film director. I cherish a memory of sitting through a festival of Ozu’s films during an artist residency in Tokyo in the early 1990s. The residency took place during the autumn and into January. When Christmas rolled around, aside from a multitude of decorations in the shops, the big day itself seemed to go unnoticed, which I found emotionally unsettling. Christmas back home is charged with family and friends, the table groaning with food, and London completely shuts down for the day. Not so in Tokyo - business as usual. How was I going to get through the holiday on my own, missing everyone back home like mad? An Ozu film festival in Ginza saved me. I spent Christmas and Boxing Day morning to night watching Ozu's films, one after another. As the films were without English subtitles, I could barely appreciate the storylines - but it didn’t matter. It was glorious to immerse myself through my eyes alone in Ozu's films and visually discover his riveting cinematic world!"

I replied:
"When I moved to Tokyo from my hometown to go to university in my late teens, the first film I saw at a cinema in Tokyo was Ozu's Tokyo Story at a classic movie theater in Ginza. I have fond memories of this experience. Watching Ozu's films without really understanding the story, as you experienced, may actually be the best way to appreciate them. To my mind, this is because the hidden core of Ozu's films is an aesthetic sense of space that is constructed beyond linguistic meaning, just as is found in great haiku – and perhaps in painting!"

Hearing this, Lisa laughed out with glee.

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Lisa Milroy
Lisa Milroy was born in Vancouver, Canada (1959) and lives and works between London and Lydd-on-Sea, UK and St Michel de Rivière, France. Still life is at the heart of Lisa’s approach to painting. Her practice is characterized by her ongoing fascination in the relation between stillness and movement, and the nature of making and looking at painting. Lisa won First Prize in the John Moores Painting Prize in 1989 and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2005. She is Professor Emerita at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL where she worked on the graduate programme in painting from 2009 - 2024. Lisa was Artist Trustee of Tate from 2013-2017 and Liaison Trustee to the National Gallery from 2015-2017. Her work is held in many public collections, including Tate, Frac Occitanie Montpellier, France, Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA, Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan and East African Visual Arts Trust, Kenya. Lisa is represented by Kate MacGarry, London, and in East Africa by One Off Contemporary Art Gallery, Nairobi.
website: http://www.lisamilroy.net/

Yuzo Ono
Yuzo Ono is a haiku poet and writer based in Japan. He studied at the University of Tokyo (BA) and the Royal College of Art (MRes, fine arts pathway) in the UK. He won the Modern Haiku Association Award for Criticism in 2002 and the Modern Haiku Association New Talent Award (honorable mention) in 2005. He is a councillor of the Haiku International Association and a member of the British Haiku Society.
website: https://yuzo-ono.com/

All images © Lisa Milroy 1980 - 2024