Notan

A few new books streamed in today. Some of them will best serve as reference but this little book is all about doing, a series of exercises to open one to the interaction of dark and light. I will try at least the first exercise once I collect the needed materials.

Googling "Notan" provides many tutorials, images, web sites, and blogs. I will try to focus mainly on this little book. A few select quotes from this book's forward:

"Notan is a Japanese word meaning dark-light. The word, however, means more than that. The principle of Notan as used here must be further defined as the interaction between positive (light) ad negative (dark) space."

"The Western culture thinks in terms of opposed dualities and attaches the moral values of good to the positive, and bad to the negative. Or we seize upon the positive as the only reality and dismiss the negative as invisible and nonexistent."

"To understand Notan, therefore, requires a special effort on our part; it demands a totally new orientation to seeing."