Shunmyo Masuno - Zen and the Art of the Garden

ISHIDATE-SO . . . the title given to Zen priests of days gone by, who as part of their ascetic practice,expressed themselves through the art of landscape gardening with great importance given to rock placement. Shunmyo Masuno of Kenkoh-ji temple is a modern day Zen priest who through this art form, strives to express his spiritual self.

 

The gardens of Japan remain among the country's spellbinding emblems. Created to be looked at, not to be walked through, they are living pictures.

In their most evolved form there is always a place, often a turn in a path or a small teahouse, for a visitor to stand at exactly the right angle.

Earth, trees, stones, water, moss, ferns, flowering shrubs, paths, light and shade all play their parts, none loudly.

"Each component is important, not only the stones or the trees, but sometimes the way a twig is blown with the wind. Each component gives tranquillity and space to visitors and that is where I find peace and success," he says.

If there is a star in the Japanese garden it is the rock. Whole chapters in landscaping manuals are devoted to matters of selection, alignment and character. The world's oldest book on gardening, a treatise called Sakuteiki: Visions of the Japanese Garden, was published about 1000 years ago and began with "the art of setting stones" as its first words. Placed properly, designers say, rocks in a Japanese garden should look like a calf playing near a seated cow or a pack of dogs crouching near the ground.

Scattered like that, they defy symmetry, another clue to success in a Zen garden. "The crooked tree leans at the top of the cliff," he says, in an eerily Carradine-esque moment. "You might think it will fall but it will not and in the garden we can create visual and physical balance."

Mr Masuno, who has created gardens in Norway, Germany and Canada, was this month commissioned to build one in Latvia. In his 350-page manual on creating gardens outside Japan, he despairs at how "extremely difficult" it is to find elegant stones for the garden in foreign countries. He recounts futile field trips to quarries where there are only the cracked, broken or pulverised variety. Even for a Buddhist, life is too short to live with bad rock.

View More Garden Design by Shunmyo Masuno

The Art Project by Google

 

Google Art Project offers gigapixel images of art classics, indoor Street Views of Museums

 

 

Google's been hard at work over the past 18 months on something not many of us have been paying attention to lately: art. Specifically, the search giant has hooked up with 17 art museums around the world to offer tours of their internal galleries, using its familiar Street View tricycles, while also doing high-res images of 1,061 artworks that may be viewed on the newly launched Art Project web portal. Also there, you will find 17 special gigapixel images -- 7,000-megapixel versions of each participating venue's proudest possession. The resulting level of detail is nothing short of astounding and we've got videos of how it's all done after the break.  

 

 

The Art Project Features Include:

Explore museums with Street View technology: using this feature, people can move around the gallery virtually on www.googleartproject.com, selecting works of art that interest them and clicking to discover more or diving into the high resolution images, where available. The info panel allows people to read more about an artwork, find more works by that artist and watch related YouTube videos.

A specially designed Street View 'trolley' took 360 degree images of the interior of selected galleries which were then stitched together, enabling smooth navigation of over 385 rooms within the museums. The gallery interiors can also be explored directly from within Street View in Google Maps.

Super high resolution feature artworks: each of the 17 museums selected one artwork to be photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution or 'gigapixel' photo capturing technology. Each such image contains around 7 billion pixels, enabling the viewer to study details of the brushwork and patina beyond that possible with the naked eye. Hard to see details suddenly become clear such as the tiny Latin couplet which appears in Hans Holbein the Younger's 'The Merchant Georg Gisze'. Or the people hidden behind the tree in Ivanov's 'The Apparition of Christ to the People'.

In addition, museums provided images for a selection totalling more than 1000 works of art. The resolution of these images, combined with a custom built zoom viewer, allows art-lovers to discover minute aspects of paintings they may never have seen up close before, such as the miniaturized people in the river of El Greco's 'View of Toledo', or individual dots in Seurat's 'Grandcamp, Evening.'

Create your own collection:
The 'Create an Artwork Collection' feature allows users to save specific views of any of 1000+ artworks and build their own personalised collection. Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared with friends and family. It's an ideal tool for students or groups to work on collaborative projects or collections.