art and poetry

Since becoming a father I have not had the time to work so much on my own art and poetry. Well that was a bit of an understatement – I have been too busy nursing our son, taking care of the house, moving from Tokyo, trying to find some daily time to study Japanese, that almost the only creative work I have been doing for this past year is this blog. I can miss sitting on a bench under a Japanese maple writing a little poem. I can miss spending a whole day in front of the computer fine tuning the colors of an image I want to show at an exhibition. The time will come when I can do those things again, but until then I find myself enjoying the art around me even more.

If I for this little piece narrow down the concept of art mean expressions of beauty, I find art every day everywhere I look. The most striking way is the naturally occurring beauty in nature around here. Since moving from Sweden, being used to living a few minutes from the forest and ending up in Tokyo, I have been longing from closeness to nature. So coming to Fukuoka made me finally feel connected with nature again and being so different from Swedish forests I sometimes think of myself as a child, anew exploring all the impressions that is fresh to my young (although with age rapidly deteriorating) eyes.

The past week I have been particularity enjoying one piece of art and one piece of poetry I have been enjoying the past week. Since my post poetry on a mountain was one and a half years ago, I feel it is long overdue to share another piece of mountain poetry (you can also catch up on poetry and humor if you like). Last Sunday we climbed a nearby mountain (or I should say my wife and I climbed while our son was sleeping on my back all the way up).

We started our walk following a path lined with torii gates, leading steeply uphill through a forest with ferns and Japanese cedars. About a third of the way up, we came to a crossroads where we were met by a sign saying 山頂はこちら, something I would translate as meaning the mountain top is this way. However Google translates it as click here for the summit, and Google seems to be what the sign maker made use of when creating this sign. In an era of social distancing, work from home, zoom-conference calls and online-everything, I found this to be a beautiful contemporary installation making nature and technology fuse to become one on a sign on a mountainside.

Below the mountain is an area with many rice fields. Every year there is a little art festival called 田んぼアート, tanbo art, meaning just rice field art. People (I wish I knew who to credit) are transforming the fields into giant canvases that this year also had a very contemporary tone. On one big field it was written (or maybe I should say cut out) end corona. And standing looking at the installation, I could not agree more. Please end to corona. Let me enjoy nature again without wearing a mask. Life is so much more beautiful when the scents of nature also can participate in the art work that I am living in.