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context: painting > Zen painting > Artists
Nantembo Toju 1839-1925
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some crows |
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the staff |
Some people will tell you that Nantembo was the last major Zen painter, and they have some sort of point. As a priest, he helped support Zen through an extremely tough and dangerous period, and was famed for his bo staff, cut from a nanten tree (thus the Nantembo name), with which he frequently struck his pupils. He also wrote over twenty books of his teachings. As an artist, he claimed to have produced and given away over a hundred thousand paintings and calligraphies.
He invented a new form in the column of begging monks but I guess he was best known for
His Darumas
I really like the balance between violence and subtlety and humour in his best paintings. There's a sense of turbulence and almost noise about the crows, but there is also a subtle hand at work in the way he charges the brush and therefore generates tonal gradations. The painting of his nantembo starts with a violent splatter not unlike that of one of the Darumas linked to above, and I think it's all in one long downstroke from there, stopping for a while at the end, then the tassels are added in much wetter ink afterwards. The dynamism and pronounced verticality of the calligraphy work with it superbly too.