Tuesday, January 18, 2011

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."

2 comments:

  1. I'll definitely have to spend a bit of time reading up on this- it will be of great value especially when I dabble with my block printing. Gotta keep cross-training!
    Can you believe there are people in this world who say they are BORED!??! I worry some times that I won't live long enough to explore just the things I already know about, let alone all the things that I have yet to become aware of!
    ~ gretchen

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am slowly and with great pleasure building my wonderful library, one that will keep me going for a long, long time. Some books are for now; others I say are for later when I have more time.

    ReplyDelete