Abe-no-Nakamaro Writing Nostalgic Poem While Moon-viewing 1918

Tomioka Tessai painted this landscape, Abe-no-Nakamaro Writing Nostalgic Poem While Moon-viewing, with ink and colour on silk. The fluidity and lightness of touch in this piece, for me, speaks to an understanding of artmaking as a process, a response to the world, rather than a product. Look at how the ink bleeds and pools in certain areas, creating depth and atmosphere. You get a sense that Tessai is interested in the materiality of the paint, the way it behaves on the silk, and he really lets the paint do its thing. It is possible to see the type of brush used, the marks are so deft and assured. I keep coming back to how the artist plays with light and shadow, especially around the moon. It seems to me that this piece has a lot to do with the ideas of longing and distance, the moon a symbol of something that is both present and impossibly far away. Tessai's contemporary, Yokoyama Taikan, was also working with similarly evocative ink paintings at the time, perhaps he also was influenced by these ideas. For me, it all speaks to the way art is an ongoing conversation, an exchange of ideas across time.