context: sculpture

Enku, 1628/1632-95

a 17th Century statue by Enku

It might seem odd that an individual gets to be on the same level as whole eras and styles, but it's only partly due to my admiration of Enku, and largely because there doesn't really seem to be anyone else worth discussing for centuries before or after him.

Enku was an itinerant (possibly from as young as 23), wandering from village to village and carving religious icons for them. I've seen him described as a Shugendo (mixing Buddhism, Shinto and Daoism) monk, but he seemed to act more like a Buddhist priest with a willingness to do Shinto when necessary. His work was credited with magic powers, but a more realistic power might be that in an age where Christianity was banned and Buddhism mandatory, overt worship was a diplomatically sensible move for any community.

His career and work are like nothing else in the history of art. They were highly frontal, probably because they were religious icons, to be worshipped from one viewpoint. The statues are strange and angular forms, often looking like some bizarre relative of Italian futurism or 1950s American hood ornaments. He deliberately left the chisel marks very visible in his work - we might account for this by the astonishing speed with which he created the works, but we should at least recollect the nata-bori, or 'hatchet-carved', style, starting from Heian times, where the working was supposed to be seen - possibly by analogy with painting, where the whole point of some styles was the brushstroke.

We'll never know just how productive he was, but in his youth he apparently made a vow to produce 120,000 statues. In the over 300 years since his death, Buddhism has suffered persecutions, and temples have been destroyed; his works were made of wood, and were often slight; the works were not signed; and no one cared until a few decades ago. Nonetheless, over seven thousand surviving statues by Enku have so far been identified.

Stories:

• He carved a two-metre Kannon statue from hard cherrywood in a day.
• He carved fifteen statues (the one for which I know the height was 73cm) in one night.
• He carved statues into opposite sides of living trees, then had the trees chopped down and split down the trunk. (Some of these survive, and can even be rejoined.)

Productivity tricks

book about Enku