Dried Fish, the Past, the
Present and the Green Mountains
Watercolor and Ink on
Mulberry Paper (74cm x 44.5cm)
John Shrader, 2013
Rambling Thoughts of the
Artist
Dried Fish is
the first painting of my Green Mountains series. It did not start out
with any intended meaning, but rather a collection of images I thought looked
interesting. As I painted, ideas and meaning started to develop, which I
carried on through the others in the series. Dried Fish was not
completed before work on the others of the series began, so the final painting
is both a rough start and a full embodiment of what I'm attempting in this
series, namely looking at the questions of contentment and romanticization via
traditional media and images of the past, the present, and folk art.
Dried Fish began
with the titular dried fish. It was a snack at a small Korean pub, about as
thick as my thumb, length from the base of my thumb to the tip of my pointer
finger. While I had had plenty of fish, dried or otherwise in Korea, that was
my first, and so far only time, to have that fish. I'm sure I'll come across it
again on the future. I found it interesting and snapped a few shots of the
fish. It's unique look up close made me think it would be quite interesting to
portray it much larger.
As other elements started to
fall into place, certain meanings started to concretize for me. First is the
presentation of time. On the right there the past reminds us of a seemingly
better time. The jangseung (Korean totem) and duck sculptures are
romanticizations of when we were more connected and had stronger communities.
On the left we see a monochromatic city from which emerges a giant dried fish.
We often see our lives as dull, lost midst the mundane homogeneity of the
modern city, our lives with as much purpose as an emaciated fish.
Another important feature is
the frame and mountains. The mountains are nature, which we are always a part
of, and always have a relation with. But they also can be dreams of a simpler,
better life, as expressed by circa 9th century courtiers:
Let's live, let us live
Let us live in the Green Mountains
Let us eat wild berries and herbs
And live in the Green Mountains!
Yalli yalli yallaseong yallari yalla!
-Song of the Green Mountains
This call is echoed by romantics
throughout the ages; W.B. Yeats likewise expresses:
I will arise and go now,
For always night and day
I hear lake water lapping
With low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway
Or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
For always night and day
I hear lake water lapping
With low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway
Or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
The mountains are found on
the other side of a frame. This may be a window frame, suggesting the better
life is just beyond the walls we construct for ourselves. We only need leave.
The saying 'the grass is always greener on the other side' comes to mind. On
the other hand, the frame may also be the frame of a painting, suggesting that
perhaps we construct our own happiness. We only need create it.
Whether we need to go out and
find happiness or we need to shape it, the rest of the painting needs to be
reexamined: the structures of the past and present are not the only things
found in the foreground. Firstly, we find pine branches reaching for the
heavens. In both Eastern and Western cultures, the pine is a symbol of life and
longevity, because they keep their leaves and survive the harsh winter when
other trees appear to die. We too are hardy, flourishing through the good and
the bad, and while our ancestors were also hardy, the tree on the right is
dead. They are not with us any more; for better or worse, their struggle is
over.
Likewise, while the light of
the past shines with us even today, we shine even brighter. Our lives and
thoughts are diverse and growing, allowing for a flourishing of culture our
ancestors could never have imagined. Yet the problems of our day are close at
hand while the problems of our past is not. Contrary to Shakespeare, the good
of people often lives on, the bad is oft interred in their bones.
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