Photo from Little Things website which has more information on the figurines history and how they became popular collector's items after World War II.
in the USA, many people have one of these figurines: And a lot of people have small collections of them.
but what they might not know is that the figurines were based on drawings by a German nun Maria Innocentia Hummel who was a teacher who drew and painted in her spare time;
The sisters were impressed with her art and sent copies to ...a publishing house in Stuttgart which specialized in religious art, to which Hummel reluctantly agreed. The company decided to release copies of the works in postcard form, which were popular in the early 20th century....
Soon afterward, Franz Goebel, the owner of a porcelain company, was looking for a new line of artwork, and happened to see some of these postcards in a shop in Munich.
One would think Hitler would have been pleased with her art, but he hated it:
Leading Nazis attacked the art, denouncing the depiction of German children as "hydrocephalic, clubfooted goblins". Although the Nazi authorities allowed Hummel to work, they banned the distribution of her art in Germany.
The Nazis closed all religious schools, and she live in poverty in the convent during the war, supporting the sisters left behind with money from her art work.
Sister Maria Inncensia Hummel died after the war of tuberculosis.
more here: https://youtube.com/shorts/ZOgjOM5Sl8U?si=jyP7ooLQAtR6uPg6
The folding fan (Chinese: 折扇), invented in Japan...In 988 AD, folding fans were first introduced in China by a Japanese monk from Japan as a tribute during the Northern Song dynasty; these folding fans became very fashionable in China by the Southern Song dynasty....
While the folding fans gained popularity, the traditional silk round fans continued to remain mainstream in the Song dynasty.
this is a followup of the previous post on the famous Japanese painting (actually a print) of the Wave.
a few videos on how the Japanese woodblock printing of the Edo period made picture books.
the YOUTUBE video has this explanation:
Master printer Keizaburo Matsuzaki visited the Art Gallery of New South Wales in March 2010 in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Hymn to beauty: the art of Utamaro’. He brought the woodblocks to create a print of ‘Takashima Ohisa, the teahouse waitress’, designed by Kitagawa Utamaro (1754–1806) in the 1790s. Matsuzaki hails from Arakawa-ku in Tokyo and has been a printer since he was fifteen years old.
Gallery visitors were amazed to witness Matsuzaki's deft touch as he applied 17 colours with perfect alignment. Each colour was rubbed with the printer's most precious tool, the baren. The final touch was a dusting of mica.
another series on how to make a woodblock print: LINK
and a summary here:
Instructables has a written tutorial of this method but only of a one tone design.
The MetropolitanMuseum has an article on the history of the commercial side of woodblock printing.
each print required the collaboration of four experts: the designer, the engraver, the printer, and the publisher...Polychrome prints were made using a separate carved block for each color, which could number up to twenty. To print with precision using numerous blocks on a single paper sheet, a system of placing two cuts on the edge of each block to serve as alignment guides was employed. Paper made from the inner bark of mulberry trees was favored, as it was strong enough to withstand numerous rubbings on the various woodblocks and sufficiently absorbent to take up the ink and pigments. Reproductions, sometimes numbering in the thousands, could be made until the carvings on the woodblocks became worn.
actually awhile back, we planted seeds in our gardens and kept them until they reached three to four feet high. We then transplanted them to our farm to get larger. We were growing them to use the young trees for poles, not to let them grow huge for lumber, which would take years.
Alas, this being the Philippines, someone "harvested" them one night and took them away. Sigh. So we plan to plant more the next season, when the irrigation water (shut off to dredge the canal this season) is available.
I should add this: Because of overharvesting of trees in hilly regions (which can lead to landslides ), using new lumber is forbidden. So we have to use plywood, or sometimes coconut tree lumber (which is very soft) for poles or longer boards.
sigh.
one reason to use hard woods is that they are resistant to termites, but plywood can be treated to make them termite resistant.
I was going to post a video about mahogany trees here in the Philippines, but the best ones are in Tagalog, or else are discussing growing the trees in other countries.
My relatives who are artists do make paper for some of their projects but I know little or nothing about it.
So I was interested to read today's Global Voices blog, where they publish a report on the Neapli paper plant being grown there.
They note that a plant, Edgeworthia gardneri, aka the Nepali paper bush, that grows in Nepal and nearby areas is now being cultivated by local farmers and exported to Japan to make high quality paper.
This interested me on several levels: First, because encouraging local crafts and plants is important in these days of globalization that homogenizes everything into cheap but shoddy goods.
However economically, the small craft and small farmers will have to export the goods to make a decent profit, and that means a lot of middle men will become rich too (this has good and bad effects on society and the economy).
I'll give an example:
We used to supervise a home craft industry ten years ago here, where local ladies could make beautiful Christmas ornaments and get paid 100 pesos (2 dollars) for each one (minimum wage here is seven dollars a day). The ladies could make several a day at home while caring for their families to supplement the family income.
The problem was that the logistics of selling them mean a lot of money went to several middle men for checking quality control, packing and shipping before the ornament sold for16 dollars in the USA.
The second reason I found it interesting is that eventually it will mean monoculture farming of the plant in that area, which has ecological implications for other plants.
Ah, but as the demand increases, and as people get more affluent, they will devise machinery to plant and harvest it more efficiently and so make more of a profit for the farmers.
This is something we are seeing as our rice farmers were given their traditional plots with land reform: they made a profit, so their kids went to school and had more opportunities to work so left, and the farms are gradually being mechanized.
But the main reason I found it interesting was that it was part of the history of paper. Something I will have to explore when I have time.
One of the sculptures by Ai Wei Wei stolen from a gallery in Hamburg.COURTESY HAMBURG POLICE
this sculpture is about the environmental degradation.
Khan academy discusses his works protesting mass culture, and protesting corruption leading to shoddy school construction that resulted in the deaths of several thousand children when their schools collapsed:
Perhaps the work that contributed most to Weiwei’s current imprisonment and the destruction of his studio was his investigation of corruption in the construction of the schools that collapsed during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, China.
I am old enough to remember during the cold war when the US and the USSR sent entertainers to each other to help increase understanding between countries as a way of softening the hatred of each other. Yes, propaganda, but in a good way.
if you scroll down the blogpost on Matthew Wittman's blog, he discusses the American circus performers who went to Japan (1864) and how the Japanese decided to send their own jugglers to the world to improve cultural understanding (1867).
Atlas Obscura has an article about the history of the rice paddy art in the village of Inakadate: The farmers were aging, the young folks were leaving for better paying and easier jobs in the city, and then someone had an idea.
LINK for the entire story: how it started, and how it is designed then planted by hand to make the design.
we are in a rice growing area, and have the same problem with older folks retiring.
Most of the farmers we subcontract with to grow our organic rice brand are local people who are aging. Thanks to land reform, their kids are educated and work elsewhere. Many want to sell their fields, but the law limits how much land you can own, so we had bought back some of the land that was given to them (yes, I know: sold to them cheap) many years ago with land reform, but we can't buy any more fields due to the law.
But other Balikbayan (returning overseas workers) are buying up the land, including some from Manila who merely want to build a vacation home in a rural area, meaning the good rice fields are being urbanized.
For the land we still own, we hire tenant farmers who care for our land are from Joy's village in the Visayas, but I suspect the answer to the labor shortage in the future is increased mechanization of rice growing, as is being done in Japan and other more affluent countries.
Rice is planted in two ways: broad cast of seeds (for winter harvest, which here depends on irrigation or an iffy rain) or preparing the fields and flooding them, then planting rice seedlings in the mud.
We usually buy the seedlings from the local rice institute, and plant by hand, although in the future it will be done using machinery (I had to laugh at the Clarkson Farm part where he uses an expensive machine to plant his veggie seedling: but this is the way of the future for planting rice seedlings, although probably using a smaller machine the size of a handplow.)
The dirty little secret is that our area grows rice and veggies, but the imported rice and veggies often crash the price, which is why the gov't is pushing organic rice and veggies: More expensive but better quality, but alas more labor intensive.
When I first visited here, much of the hard work of growing and harvesting rice was being done by hand, but over the last 30 years we have increased the use of machinery: handplows instead of waterbuffalo to till the fields and keep the weeds down, renting a harvester/thresher instead of cutting by hand and using our thresher to separate the seed before we sun dry it with our rice drier or on the local roads, etc. Presumably seedling planters are the next step.
But farming is still back breaking work, and not very profitable. And cheap imports from more mechanized countries keep the price down.
Will the covid problems with importing stuff make it better? Maybe. It would be nice if the Philippines was independent in food production, but we still have to use fertilizer, (huge price increase this year) and then the machinery, and the transportation of the harvest requires diesel/gasoline.
Here, the change in oil/LPG/gasoline prices make headlines.
