It has been an eventful tournament so far and the sumo in the last few days has been riveting stuff! Very unusually, Yokozuna Hakuho has been having an unfortunate time, losing four matches whereas Ozeki Kisenosato has been doing great, with nine wins and one lost. He won today against the Bulgarian Ozeki, Kotooshu (usually the popular yoghurt maker Burugaria Yogaruto!). Last time they met, Kotooshu won. So hopefully Hakuho won’t become Kuroboshi (black star, for a loss) and head towards being makekoshi which might jeopardise his career – the top level Yokozuna retire when they weaken. There are quite a few other wrestlers who could move ahead so will see what happens. The sketch is trying to work out how many Kisenosato has to win now to take his first tournament – three more I reckon. Ganbattene!

In the last week I’ve been wondering around the urbanscape continuing and trying to develop my recent series of more free drawings. The Sketchbook Monster is on the loose. The semi forgotten and overlooked, overgrown spots with the combination of the tattered British infrastructure dynamics, weeds, foliage and graffiti provide an excellent outdoor workspace. Quite a few of the sketches are around the motorway, plus today I was on the south side of the Clyde River in Glasgow experimenting with the pens again. Shopping centres, car parks and industrial areas (or a combination of all ideally) are also interesting with lines, lights, curves and various materials glinting under the sky.

The drawing below is an older piece showing the development from a more literal way of working I guess. This was also building up the work more with inks.

The Natsu Basho is up and wrestling! I’m quite into the whole Ozumo experience and have been watching since it started on Sunday. There are six tournaments per year, three in Tokyo, plus Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuoka in Kyushu. This one is in Tokyo in the imposing spaceship like architecture of the Ryogoku Kokugikan, the home of Ozumo. Here are some shots from my visit there. This is a lively downtown area and not far from the Sumidagawa river and various flyovers so good for sketching too…

The large hand print in sumi ink is that of Hakuho, the top Yokozuna at the moment, a supremely skilful Mongolian who has had a bit of a shaky start, losing his first match for the first time in three years. So it could be a chance for Baruto, known affectionately (I think) as the Estonian monster, to try hard to win his first basho. Follow the link to stream live, the most exciting time to watch is the final matches at 5-6pm Japan time (9-10am GMT) but you can watch the other levels before this too if you are an enthusiastic fan. It runs daily until Sunday May 20th. Goyukuri douzo.

Go to the official Goo Sumo page

Down with the pens for a day and had fun experimenting with tablet drawings! Working partly from memory but keeping in mind a factory visit I drew at. Looking for rhythms, negative spaces and colour too. These are a few fast studies. I’ve also been looking at the photography I made there and considering developing such works into a series of works for the Tokyo Omotesando show. The way things are moving I’ll probably have multiple series of smaller pieces, dynamic and experimental in nature, as I’m seeing a lot of relationships between the drawings, paintings and digital work… pieces are shifting too between a vivid, raw experiential immediate way of capturing the world and more distilled, mysterious abstractions like filtered memories of those places I’ve been looking at. I’ll be trying hard to present things a bit differently, with the idea, the world is not what we think it is.

Relatively unknown by many in the UK, I think Kirkeby (born 1938) is absolutely deserving of a look-in! The large scale, complex painterly and abstract work is highly sophisticated, developed over a dedicated career, and is fascinatingly pleasurable to gaze at. For myself, trying to simplify the picture plane and reduce shapes and marks, it is nice to see painting that takes abstract the other way, into a constellation of flatnesses and semi-sculpted planes drifting and buzzing with a geographical mapping quality that makes their titles such as ‘The Siege of Constantinople’ all the more mysterious. The rich, dark palettes of colours are knifed and brushed with a variety of textures, with metamorphic transitions through low-key to higher key colours. Perfectly exemplifying the best of continental expressionism for me, his non-figurative work is gritty, unsentimental and uncontained by the boundaries of representational or pretty work. The brick pieces or bronze sculptures which are almost more intense in their darker simplicity, are also inspiring, and bounce off the 2D paintings and drawings. Check out his work and prepare to be transported on a free floating trip into abstract, intellectual painterly worlds…

Look out for Bruce’s attention to detail in documenting the quirky, bizarre side of the very visual signage and design, plus of course the gourmet shots… Being into other modes of transport and anything to do with modernism heading into post-modernism there are also images of architecture and some of my favourite shinkansen.

Please follow this link to Bruce’s blog.

Reminds me of my sketching trip taking the ferry from Matsuyama in Shikoku to Beppu, Kyushu. Here are a couple of shots from that trip including the delicious cuisine of southern Shikoku!

I made this small visual note after running along the Firth and Forth Canal, the reflections can be so deep, somehow reality is deepened. The space is literally deeper, becoming set further away, almost elusively in another time…

…colour and shape so dense, tinged with toned down silvers, greens – the poignant reality untouchable yet sharply present – visual paradox, toning down, into darkness. ‘Asserting one thing in language is to create an opposite’ (John Fraser). It is the same in visual art and culture: where there is light there must also be shadow. And we can’t avoid paradox.

Artist and film director David Lynch and Japanese Zen Master Eihei Dogen seem to me to share ideas in common, regardless of the ‘gap’ in time since the 13th century. They both deal with paradox and question the nature of our experience, often with really striking imagery and dreamlike visions. Not everything is as it seems! Time and impermanence. Dogen plays around with language a lot, using the flexibility of the Chinese Kanji characters to show that everything is change, taking forward the Hua-yen Chinese Buddhist tradition (from around the 7th Century) whereby everything depends on each thing, the self and the universe are identical. The categories of cause and result are interchangeable.

Lynch, in his movies and short films, which I find really inspiring and fun too, often deals with coincidences, paradox and change – as I’m sure the Log Lady mentioned in the Twin Peaks introductions! Reality is so charged, the characters almost over dense and placed in and out of a ‘common-sense’ time-span. So much of Dogen’s poetry and language reveals a non-linear view of time. Inland Empire (2006) is a superb movie by Lynch that captures such things. The story moves freely from time to time, without feeling forced at all. Here Lynch experiments with the beautiful textures and fresh feel of digital. ‘The Zen Poetry of Dogen’ by Steven Heine has a great collection of free-flowing waka style poems (the precursor to haiku but 5-7-5-7-7 syllables rather) and other pieces by Dogen that illustrate his Soto Zen worldview. If you are up for some heavier reading, Francis H. Cook’s ‘Hua-yen Buddhism – The Jewel Net of Indra’ is tough to read but very illuminating: ‘Everything needs everything else, what is there which is not valuable?’ And this poem ‘Mujo’ (Impermanence) is from Dogen’s poetry collection:

Impermanence

To what shall
I liken the world?
Moonlight, reflected
In dewdrops,
Shaken from a crane’s bill.

These ideas I find very useful in my artwork. Awareness of transience helps to resolve to constantly train ourselves, and of a non-linear understanding space and time helps to build courage for spontaneity, not being confined compositionally, finding the way visually. Also seeing that all things are visually connected without the need to be discriminated into ‘catalogued’ objects and situations, and that I use certain craft to investigate the abstract, changing and atmospheric qualities of forms…