Inspiration can be such a fickle thing and strike you when you least expect it. Recently I went to a beautiful exhibition on how Japanese art influenced western European artists like Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet and Henri Rivière. (Initially, I intended to name this post Japonisme, which would have been equally fitting but probably too pretentious as a second French title in a row.)
I was mesmerised by all the colours, interesting structures and simple but effective compositions. It was strange too look at those prints and canvases and to realise that many of the things a modern eye is used to must have been completely new and unusual to a contemporary beholder. To the painters then, Japanese art was a fresh impulse, something different and stirring, exotic and fascinating. So they included some techniques they had seen in the Japanese art into their own work and created something new. When I left the exhibition after several hours, still intoxicated with all of the beautiful artwork I had seen, my head was buzzing with ideas and I wanted to experiment with the subject myself, even though I would make use of a different medium. I decided to focus on seven of several techniques mentioned in the exhibition.
- A steep perspective on the subject with the horizon line vanishing.
- The division of the picture by diagonal lines such as branches or twigs.
- A radical clipping of the chief motive.
- An asymmetrical arrangement of elements in the picture.
- Big, uniform patches of colour with strong contouring.
- Extreme vertical or horizontal formats.
- Serial representation of one motive in different ways.
Some of these techniques are quite common in photography these days, while others are harder to achieve or would need heavy arty editing. Some of these presets I had imposed upon myself kept literally and heavily pushing me out of my comfort zone. I went to a Japanese garden, in Germany on a gloomy day in February, in the freezing rain and stubbornly tried to apply all of those seven concepts, or at least those that could already be dealt with before editing. Sometimes it really felt odd to suppress the impulse to shoot a certain motive the way I would usually do it but in a way it was also very liberating, just an experiment. The same feeling kept creeping in while editing. Such bright colours for such a gloomy day? Really?
In the end I didn’t regret leaving the well-trodden path and I really feel I made some progress, in composition especially, since I usually fall back to shooting details and discarding many landscape shots in the editing process. So whether or not I succeeded in putting the principles into practise is probably not even my place to judge and maybe not even the point, but pushing my comfort zones was definitely instructive and fun. It might be easier to think outside of the box every now and then at least and follow the same inspiration that struck painters more than a century ago.
