Landscape Painting and The Zen Garden
The influence of Zen on garden design was probably first described as such by Kuck in the early 20th century and disputed by Kuitert by the end of that century. What is not disputed is the fact that karesansui garden scenery was and still is inspired by or based on first Chinese and later also Japanese landscape paintings.
Though each garden is different in its composition, they mostly use rock groupings and shrubs to represent a classic scene of mountains, valleys and waterfalls taken from Chinese landscape painting. In some of them the view also incorporates existing scenery, e.g. the hills behind, as "borrowed scenery" (using a technique called Shakkei).
Today, ink monochrome painting still is the art form most closely associated with Zen Buddhism. A primary design principle was the creation of a landscape based on, or at least greatly influenced by, the three-dimensional monochrome ink (sumi) landscape painting, sumi-e or suiboku-ga. In Japan the garden has the same status as a work of art.
Read more about this topic: Japanese Rock Garden
Famous quotes containing the words landscape, painting, zen and/or garden:
“The landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in which the woods and fences checkered and partitioned it with new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched away with lawn-like smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely distinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairyland. The world seemed decked for some holiday or prouder pageantry ... like a green lane into a country maze, at the season when fruit-trees are in blossom.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it—a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand—as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it is bad art.”
—Marc Chagall (1889–1985)
“Zen ... does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”
—Alan Watts (1915–1973)
“These are thy wonders, Lord of love,
To make us see we are but flowers that glide.
Which when we once can finde and prove,
Thou hast a garden for us where to bide.”
—George Herbert (1593–1633)