Poetry

Today is Wed, meaning still life. Continuing with the apple and shell, I think they came out very well. My biggest difficulty was with the shell. It's mostly white, so in order to have depth to the image you start with some layers of base color, then white on top. Nihonga is all about the layers. My problem is with the detail, I don't know when to stop with the depth and draw the prominent cracks and lines of texture. It will come in time.

A Japanese man came in today, all dressed up in a suit and looking official. He went around looking at the students work, then talked to Sawano-sensei for a bit, during which I overheard them talking about me (America, Boston, etc etc). Then he came over, crouched down and posed next to me for a picture. It was kinda odd because he didn't really talk directly too me, he just came up while I was seated there painting. After he left I found out who it was, turned out he was the University president.

Midori Abeさん also came in today. She is a fiber professor, speaks good english and was our contact at the school through most of our application and preparation. Abeさん came over to me with a student from the class, said the student was a little too shy and would I help with a translation. It was a poem, written in Japanese, which the student had tried to translate into English. The wording was funky, not only poor grammar obviously, but it was a poem, so used a lot of imagery and creative phrasing, making any translation extremely difficult. Especially when I couldn't read the original version and only had the translated version to work from. Without knowing what a line was supposed to say, wasn't a whole lot I could do to, even just trying to fix grammar! But I did the best I could.

Later in the evening went out for food. Had a dish sake chazuke. Sake means salmon, which was the topping for chazuke, a dish consisting of rice with green tea poured over top. The tea was very mild, but the whole thing was tasty.