Six Poetic Immortals 1909 - 1910

Kamisaka Sekka made this fan painting of Six Poetic Immortals, probably with ink and colour on paper. It's like a party of faces, a cluster of cartoonish big heads wedged into the shape of a handheld fan. Look at the flatness of the picture plane. I can imagine Sekka at work here, playing with a brush, testing the opacity of colours to create these figures. The red cloak is so bold, so flat, it’s like a big arrow pointing to the other faces. It’s like Sekka is saying: “Hey, look over here!” I wonder what Sekka was thinking about while making this? Was he thinking about other fan paintings? What about the Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints popular at the time? It feels like he's riffing off this tradition in his own playful way. Painters are always talking to each other across time, answering each other's moves in an ongoing, visual conversation. We can all learn from looking at the way Sekka embraced uncertainty and kept the possibilities of painting wide open.