Incredible Rembrandt etchings printed from original plates & Matsuzaki tea ceremony pots - GOLDMARK

I'm Rie Day. I'm here today to arrange some Japanese flower arrangements for Ikebana onto Ken's beautiful pot. Welcome back to the Goldmark Gallery. This is just a short video really to update you on some of the beautiful new things that we have here at the Gallery and also a couple of upcoming exhibition dates. Before we get into those I thought I would start with these really extraordinary etchings by Rembrandt and actually first to introduce them to you here's the art historian Nicholas Ushward talking about the significance of some of these prints. I think the first thing to say about Rembrandt, apart from the fact that he's probably the greatest etcher that's ever lived, is that he saw etching as an equivalent role to his painting. In other words they had equal status. Up until that time it had always been seen as a way of reproducing paintings that were already in existence or he wanted to make prints to sell and that kind of thing, whereas Rembrandt had a lot of different roles. He was a great technical innovator, probably the greatest technical innovator that there's ever been. What we now call etching or printmaking now in etching terms, Rembrandt basically reinvented the whole whole technique. Every print that Rembrandt made he meant as a print. It wasn't just a throwaway idea, it was intended and it was a serious thing. So however slight it is, it's not that slight. It always has a reason and an intended purpose and even when you get the very elaborate ones it's absolutely everything is completely meant. I think within that probably it's important to identify, as this exhibition will show, three main areas or styles. There's the very sketchy style which is very similar to the drawings and the etching is a wonderful medium because it has this wonderful slightly scratchy line. The way it actually technically works is that you don't get a straight line. Engraving had been the great medium before that and that's hard straight lines and Rembrandt I think loved etching because he could get this slightly wobbly line in a way which looked very like a drawing, so he could actually make etchings that looked very like drawings and sometimes when you look at them in reproduction it's quite hard to tell whether they are etchings or drawings. Then there's a more worked up idea somewhere, a level above that, where he's experimenting compositional ideas and seeing whether he can, what I think actually were ideas that weren't very much into the painting, so they were trying compositional schemes, light and shade, trying to see, I mean the great phrase that's always used with Rembrandt is chiaroscuro and of course with etching you've got this wonderful ability to get huge ranges from very brilliant light to very dark colour and everything in between and I think all through Rembrandt's career it was a process of extending and expanding that range of contrast of colour, of chiaroscuro, the light, the dark, creating the drama in the scenes. Then going finally to perhaps the third category are these very worked up studies, they're often portraits and these would be commissioned pieces which had to be very, he couldn't in a sense, there was not quite so much room for experiment there, but they have to be very tightly constructed and they had to meet a certain standard of finish. I think there was a way in which many of his contemporaries thought, saw him as being rather a bit too overbold sometimes, that he was seen as, I mean there's a lovely story I've read somewhere in this where they thought he was kind of a magician and that he was got some secret process and that when he died his process died with him and in fact of course he made it look like magic because of the genius that he was, but he was just that he was he was finding new things to do with the medium all the time and he was also in the course of that not just keeping rigid categories, he introduces elements from other the dry point technique where you burrow straight into the metal plate or with the engraving the burin which creates a very deep straight hole, so he was creating whole masses of lines of different textures and shades and possibilities in a way. It was interesting actually in his lifetime, his reputation internationally, I think Gurchino said he was the greatest virtuoso, he lived that's all the way down to Italy, so he was certainly recognized very early on as a great figure and I think most of his contemporaries probably knew him as much for the prints as the paintings. The painting and the prints run very much in parallel so that out of the hundreds of prints there's various discussions about how many there are, I've seen 300, 600, I don't think anybody's, I haven't quite done the sums yet but basically they reflect the range of his subject matter as a painter, so about at least a third of those prints are religious subjects, mostly of the New Testament which was his great passion, about a third were genre subjects and subject pictures of various kinds, then there were whole ranges of figure pictures of peasants and beggars and portraits of his family, self-portraits obviously there's a huge element of it, all of his own family, and then of course unusually too was the other element there which I don't think anybody'd ever used etching for which was to make landscape etchings and for a period from about 1640 to 1650 he made, I'm guessing, I think it's about 35, 40 of these wonderful landscape prints. I think for a lot of artists it's a very good medium for experimenting with, for finding new ideas. In a painting you've got limitations, you can't get too many things wrong, you're a bit constricted by that, whereas in a print it doesn't matter if you get it wrong or, but the other lovely gift about printmaking of course is you can alter it endlessly and without too much trouble, you can rub it out, burnish it, add things, put other layers on top if you don't like it, and Rembrandt was a terrific fiddler wasn't he in that way, he's always fiddling away with things. My feeling is, I've not seen this particularly in books anyway, my feeling is that he used printmaking as a very strong area to experiment with light and shade. I mean I think particularly when he was doing those female and male nudes in the 1640s and 50s that they were terrific vehicles for literally for seeing how he could deepen and darken and get these sculptural contours and so on. That's always the quality that's admired in the paintings themselves as well, so in a way I think one transferred very easily to the other, that skill to build up and make these great massive structures and paint, he found an equivalent means for doing this in the prints themselves. I think it's important to say that these are prints taken directly from Rembrandt's original plates and not copies or reworkings or whatever, they are the real, that's Rembrandt. There's actually quite an interesting story how these particular Rembrandt etchings came to be, because as well as being a fantastic painter, Rembrandt was also a very extravagant purchaser of things, of the kind of paraphernalia that you might see in some of his history paintings. He bought a lot of art, a lot of old antiques, beautiful cloths and textiles. When in the 1650s a major economic depression hit the Netherlands, Rembrandt's debts quickly caught up with him. Hounded by his creditors, he was forced to auction an awful lot of his worldly possessions and made little to no money against them, and when he died a number of years later, he died with really very little left to his name. Fortunately for us, his etching plates were saved from such auctions, in fact they were kept by the print dealer that he knew, Clement de Jong, you can find him in this image here. From de Jong's collection they passed through several hands, until 80 of the plates eventually made their way into a French family, the Bassins. They were print dealers and publishers, but they were also printmakers themselves, and they knew how to print etching plates, and so they took some posthumous impressions. Some of these were worked up, they were retouched where they'd been damaged by the Bassins, or completed where they found unfinished etchings, but some of these they left completely as they are. These were then sold in collections to private purchasers, big band books, and this is where we got our prints from. Those that you see here in front of us are etchings that the Bassins didn't touch, they simply re-inked the plate and re-editioned the plates. And actually you can compare them to the other prints that they come bound with, the ones that have been retouched, those are being worked by the pupils of Rembrandt, and you can tell the difference. There is something about the magic in Rembrandt's etching medium, something about the way that he approached the plates, these beautiful whispery lines, something of the life in them which just isn't quite there in these other plates. So it's really fascinating to see these, really beautiful to be looking at work, which is pretty much as Rembrandt had envisioned it himself some 400 years ago. We've produced an illustrated catalogue which includes all of these etching plates that you can see here in front of me, you can pick up a copy of that yourselves, have a look at some of these, they're now on the website. They are going fast though, so if you like something do get in touch. I'm Rie Dei, I'm here today to arrange some Japanese flower arrangements for Ikebana onto Ken's beautiful pot. I've been just doing more than 30 years and I started from Japan when I was still sort of early 20s, then I have families, then we start again, start teaching in Lincolnshire around almost 10 years ago. Living in the countryside we've got so many beautiful materials and we can plant lots of things and you can appreciate more about natures and the little small, even weed sometimes, make it sort of catch my eyes and some beauties. And that's the difference between the western flower arrangement and Ikebana is we love the almost half dyne leaves or the buds or seapot and because every stage of plants' life has got some beauty of it, so we want to catch that kind of moment of the plant's beauty and presenting it onto the vase and bring it inside the house rather than up, which is now and it means that you're actually focusing one little tiny petal or sometimes a tiny little stig that has got moss in it and that is what is all about Ikebana's essence of arrangement. How do you choose which flowers? It's difficult actually, but you actually think about the shape of the flower container and then you sort of image what sort of final shapes of the arrangement and then you think about the colour and sort of bit in pieces, so I just chose one of those flat containers with a bit of strong branches coming out with a little tiny yellow flowers, so I'm looking for something a bit more stronger impact of material, which is I just not quite find the right sort of things, I just don't. Everything is a bit too fluffy at the moment. Ikebana is like a negative arrangement, so it means that we're not filling the space, we're taking out lots of things and creating a space without anything and then that empty space will create a bigger arrangement and give you a bit more imagination of what is going on rather than showing everything else. Just a little bit brief histories of Japanese flower arrangement. There's so many flower arrangement schools in Japan, around probably more than the hundreds of different kind of schools of Ikebana and I'm following the schools of Ikenobo Ikebana, which is the oldest and original Ikebana schools, which has got more than 550 years of history and it's originally started from the monk in Kyoto called Rokkaku-do and he was very good at just basically offering flowers to the Buddhist temples and he was very, very good at it and every time he do arrangement lots of people in the villages, people coming to see what he's doing today and that's how he start teaching more arrangement to the other peoples and originally taken up by the very high aristocrat and people and then now is ordinary peoples and not many young people unfortunately, so I think that Ikebana, Ikenobo try to encourage more young people to do this arrangement and then I think this is basically, lifestyle has been changed and they felt that Ikebana is a little bit old fashions but on the other hand that's why they're sort of these kind of, I'm doing the freestyles and freestyles are kind of no rules and no regulations because we got different kind of arrangement, we got Rika style who's originally come from Buddhist temples arrangement then Shoka styles and these are all freestyles at the moment and Shoka styles and Rika styles are very strict rules, lots of diagrams to follow and it need to be particular place to place it properly, I'm just going to take that one off and I think that's, I think that's all we need. A couple of other things that have recently come into the gallery, Anjou Koon's paintings are so incredibly popular really at the moment that it's very difficult for us to get our hands on any and normally when we do, they come into the gallery and they're immediately out the doors again to a new home. We've managed to source a number of Koon's paintings from a lovely lady who used to buy work, apparently Anjou Koon's wife was very happy to see her when she arrived because it would mean that the baker and the butcher that week would get paid as she brought more work back home with her, so they've come from a wonderful collection, some really beautiful paintings. We've also got two fantastic new drawings by Kerry Richards, an artist who's really very under-represented, very under-celebrated here in this country, a fantastic Welsh artist, hugely important and actually I think a really quite profound thinker and draftsman. These are two beautiful drawings, one of his sister Esther and another sketch, very reminiscent of some of the work that he made after Dylan Thomas's work. And something else just to remind you of, upcoming on the 4th of September, that's the Saturday, we've got a fantastic exhibition of paintings by Oliver Brancroft. Now we've known Oliver for I think some 20 plus years now, in that time he's become a really feted filmmaker, he's shown works in places like the Pompidou Centre, he's been selected by people like Tassadar Dean for curation, but this is I think the first time he's shown some paintings in a very long time, and a really really special painter, some really beautiful interesting works, drawing on all sorts of ideas, areas of inspiration, you can see aspects of Renaissance painting in something like this, but a really eclectic and interesting show. We'll of course be doing an exhibition walk-around for that, but now's the time to book that date in your diary, come and see the show yourself, there's some fantastic paintings coming up for that. And through the magic of film we should appear upstairs with our Ken Matsuzaki exhibition again now. So we're now back upstairs with our Ken Matsuzaki exhibition, Toukaiseki, and we've had a fantastic response to this show. I think it's been by the numbers just about the most successful Matsuzaki show we've ever had here at the Gallery, and considering this is his seventh, that's quite something. We've had a really fantastic reception to his new work as well, which I think must be wonderful for him, but also great to know that we've got a real appetite out there for new things for people to see, and new work that these potters are coming up with. We've still got a number of these beautiful Toukaiseki vases, chawan, various shapes. This is work that, as I explained in our exhibition walkthrough, Matsuzaki has not thrown but rather cut from blocks of clay on the wheel in front of him. He's been tearing, cutting with a knife, using a twisted wire, all sorts of different prying and cutting methods to get a beautiful range of textures and surface qualities in these pieces. There's also an emphasis still on tea ceremony wear in this show, as there often is in Ken's work. A tea ceremony is one of those funny things, sort of debate goes on and on about what the most important parts of the tea ceremony are, whether it's that calligraphic scroll that's hung to sort of set the theme for the event, whether it's the chawan, the tea caddy, the vase that holds the flowers. Of course, a tea ceremony is not complete without all of those components, but if you were to compare say a Hollywood blockbuster, really it's the chawan and the chaira, the tea caddy, that are our two main characters, our best actor and actress, if you will. We've got a beautiful black chawan up here in this black clay, something new from Matsuzaki that we've not seen before, but also a couple of really wonderful tea caddies. There's one over here in this lustrous golden shino, and also another one here which has got very sort of thick, heavy natural ash that's fallen on it during the wood firing, an eight-day firing that Ken has. There's something quite special about these pieces, they're much smaller than a lot of the other work in this exhibition than some of the vases, and they've still got that same kind of sculptural quality to them, the clay's being sort of cut and torn and worked in a way that gives them that kind of emphasis. But there's something really pleasing about this beautiful, rugged, natural surface, this sort of feeling of something that's been sitting there for years in the mountainside gathering moss and snow and rain, or maybe something that's been unearthed from the ground itself. Seeing that kind of rough, beautiful, natural quality next to the very sort of precise work that's gone into making this beautiful little lid, which is just a little corner out of the top of the pot. I love that sort of combination of the very considered and the very natural, the very rough and textured. So there's still some fantastic work in this exhibition. If you've not seen it yet, head online, most of the pots I think are now available on our website, but also do get in Do book an appointment, come and see us. It's been lovely to have more of you here at the gallery wandering around, seeing the different exhibitions we've got on. It's always lovely to show people working the flesh. Keep an eye out for our upcoming exhibitions, September the 4th, Oliver Bancroft, then later in the month, the 25th of September, it's another Saturday, more Japanese pottery, Koichiro Isazaki, bee zenware, unglazed wood fire work, really fantastic show. Do look out for that, pot's coming soon. We hope to see you soon.