More lacquer ...(Current and coming)(exhibition of works by Shibata Zeshin)

Trained from the age of eleven, first as a lacquerer and later as a painter, Shibata Zeshin became nineteenth-century Japan's foremost lacquer artist. His extensive body of work spans nearly the entire century and includes inro, netsuke, tiered boxes, trays, screens, and panels. A superb technician he studied hundreds of different lacquer finishes, reviving some techniques that had not been used since the sixteenth or seventeenth century and creating some of his own. He used a wide variety of different materials to create images in lacquer, such as crushed mother-of-pearl to depict birds flying and gold powder (makie) for slender grasses. He also simulated bronze, pewter, rust, and various woods on lacquer. His revival of the blue wave (seigaiha-nuri) was accomplished by thickening lacquer with egg white or clay and applying it to a surface and then combing it with a bamboo brush to give the appearance of waves or some other pattern. He even developed a technique that made lacquer pliable enough to paint on paper and silk scrolls that could then be rolled up without harming the surface--a process now lost.

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Zeshin spent his whole life studying the ancient techniques and preserving them; at the ...