“A Bird Thing IV” Table Runner

Description

“A Bird Thing”

When you eat alone. When you eat with your partner and/or with kids. Or when you eat with family or friend. A Table runner with a print depicting birds based on the old Japanese woodblock printing technique called Ukiyo-e will elevate the event. You and your guests will appreciate the great craftsmanship and artistic value and experience it will help to forget your daily struggles and share quality times. Bon appetit!

Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art during the “Edo-era”; a period from 1603 til 1868 when the Tokugawa shogunate was in power and had its seat in Edo – nowadays Tokyo. The art contains mostly woodblock prints and paintings and became very popular in the European art world at the end of the nineteenth century. At that time there was a transition from the “Edo-Era” to the “Meiji-Era” in which Japan opened up to the West and modernized. Western artists were intrigued by the original use of color, outline, realistic rendering and innovative asymmetrical compositions. “Japonism” had influence on impressionism and Jugendstil. Van Gogh had a huge collection of Ukiyo-e pictures.

Edo’s rapid economic growth gave the lower merchant class the option to indulge in the entertainments of kabuki theater, geisha, and courtesans of the sole licensed red-light district, the “Yoshiwara”. Originally Ukiyo is a combination of uki – which means sadness- and yo – means life. It reflects the Buddhist concept of life, involving a cycle of birth, suffering, death, and rebirth. However, during the early Edo period, another ideograph similarly pronounced as uki came into usage, which means “to float”. So, while one still can see the Ukiyo philosophy as “going with the flow in a floating world”, for many it evoked through the years an imagined universe of wit, stylishness, and extravagance, which the connotations of naughtiness, hedonism, and transgression. Ukiyo-e (the “e” stands for “picture”) depicted female beauties (bijin) in their daily life: they brush their hair, make themselves beautiful, walk, think, etc. Other subjects are kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers, but also scenes from history, folk tales, travel scenes, landscapes, flora, fauna, and erotica (shunga).

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858)
The prints used for the table runners are made by Utagawa Hiroshige, who was considered the last great master of the Edo period that ended in 1868. His death marked according to conneseurs the beginning of a rapid decline in the ukiyo-e genre, especially in the face of the westernization that followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868 (modernization and westernization, restoration of the original power of the Japanese emperor.)

.: Available in two types of material: Cotton Twill and Polyester
.: size 16″ × 72″
.: Hemmed edges