the moon

spring (inspired by Psalm 89:37)

winter (inspired by the poem by Misuzu Kaneko)

autumn (inspired by the haiku by Matsuo Basho)

illustration friday (stripes)

One of the many things I love about Autumn is the shapes of the clouds in the sky. The other day I looked up at a sky that was striped from edge to edge.

This is a collage made from three different kinds of washi paper. The accompanying haiku by the itinerant poet Matsuo Basho, reminds me that being able to see the moon (or whatever you've set your gaze upon) --clearly and all the time-- isn’t necessarily the only way to enjoy it— or life.

rabbits galore

This is one of the many etegami I painted as a New Year's card for 2011 Year of the Rabbit. The words accompanying this solemn-faced rabbit are a Hausa proverb.

Here's one for people who prefer cute bunnies.

The inspiration for these simple bunnies comes from the bunny-shaped confections that become popular in Japan during rabbit years. I'm planning to post a recipe for these usagi manju later this month on my Wagashi blog.

I also did a bunch of etegami collages. This one was inspired by the lunar eclipse. Whereas Americans refer to "the man in the moon," in Japan, we see a rabbit pounding sticky rice with a mallet. I imagined the over-worked rabbit taking the eclipse as an opportunity to take a brief break. I thought of hanging a sign on the darkened moon with the words "gone fishing," or "out to lunch," but in the end I just labeled it "lunar eclipse" to limit clutter.

Here are some of the other collages I made by gluing etegami rabbits to backgrounds of colored washi, a page from an antique book of singing poems, or pieces torn from an old Japanese-English dictionary. Due to the rabbit-in-the-moon tradition, rabbits and the moon make a natural combination in Japanese art.

illustration friday (satellite)

Many, many years ago in a place far away, my daughter (10 yrs old at the time) wrote a poem that was published in the magazine Highlights for Children.

Sea Creatures, Space Creatures
The squid is a rocket.
And a rocket goes into space.
So that means there must be stars.
Yes, there are stars. The starfish, of course!
And the sun is a sunfish!
And the moon is a moonfish.
The asteroids are rockfish.

Maybe it caught the editor's eye only because it was submitted from Japan. I don't suppose kids from Iowa or Wyoming spend much time thinking about the shape of squid. In any case, I thought my daughter was a genius. I'd never even heard of a moonfish before seeing this poem, but a surreptitious peek in the encyclopedia assured me she hadn't made the creature up.

When I saw the topic for this week's Illustration Friday, I thought of this poem and how the sea and its creatures were a metaphor for outer space. So I drew a moonfish. The accompanying words are from a golden oldie written by Bart Howard (sung by Frank Sinatra) that has been stuck in my head ever since we rented a DVD of the movie Space Cowboys last week.

[oops, there seems to be more than one version of the lyrics to this song running loose on the internet, and I probably got the wrong one. Oh, well...]