研究所

I first saw it when I went on a walk after work, exhausted of sitting and wanting to stretch my legs. I wandered up past the Yochien where Fiato practices, shocked again that it is common here to have chickens, rabbits, even donkies and peacocks nearby the preschool to give the kids the experience of taking care of animals. Past that point I kept walking, assuming I would end up in front of Kouryou middle school, the school I first biked to in the dark up a giant hill just to explore.



Instead I found a baseball park, and beyond that a very strange building indeed. It had the feel of a school or an art gallery, but also a government building. There was a guest house out front. I couldn't read all of the kanji, but I could read 研究所 - research building. I shyly poked around the sides and looked in a few windows (I saw what looked like art supplies) but was ultimately too lame and left without entering to ask what the place was.



It turns out that Oomori-san, who was previously the sanji at my office, was transfered there and offered to show me around.

Today she drove me there and introduced me to her coworkers before we took a walk down the halls of the big building.

First we stopped into a hall full of antiques and old items used as far back as before the Meiji restoration. It was a good feeling and a good smell being surrounded by items now fallen into disrepair with age- an old boat, a cart made of wood scarred and soft with age, ancient clocks in the western style, even a pair of skis, once bright red but now faded with time. Apparently skiing has been in Hokkaido since the Meiji era, which made it hard for me to keep from laughing imagining samurai-san on skis. For some reason, it made me think of Goemon from Lupin the 3rd <_<;

There were old sake-brewing urns and giant kettles, saddles and horseshoes (some that were really massive), even old word processors. Later, in another room, there were volumnous books and scrolls written so long ago that modern Japanese readers can't understand them. They're so frail they have to be handled with gloves. The researchers are carefully re-writing all of them one by one, to preserve them for the future. Even the printed volumes were created before the invention of photography and are illustrated with painstaking detail.

The building is also apparently used by students of art. Scattered throughout the building were little setups of skulls and bottles as well as larger-than-life busts of greek and roman statues in the rennasaince style. Apparently first grade students all take a year of drawing these things. I was flat out jealous such nice learning tools are common policy over here. "It doesn't matter if the school is small or poor- elementary and middle school kids usually draw these," Sanji explained to me. The skulls, too, were not always standard fare. There were a few I was almost sure were tiger or lion, or some other large feline, but there was also a hippo skull, a few sea turtles, even a whale. I'd never seen a whale skull before, but the complete lack of teeth and the size of it were proof enough. The wild boar skulls were also somewhat alien in appearance, and there was some kind of grazing animal with incredible horns I'd never seen before. My first thought was Yak, but perhaps some extravagant breed of cow or goat. There were two positively enormous bones that looked like the femurs of a giant. All I could assume was that they were some kind of flipper bone in whales, but I knew even that was wrong. Each one was longer than I am tall. All kinds of shells and even barnacles were also collected for the sake of artists taking and using them in still lifes.



One such artist had an exhibition set up and we went to look at the large oil paintings. From the first second I couldn't tear my eyes away from even the very first painting, a skull centered under a triangular block. In the room with the bones, there had been a poster with a photo painted by the same artist and I had praised how beautifully they captured the subtle complexities of white on white. The poster was nothing, a pathetic, dim, flimsy attempt at copying the vibrancy of the real thing. It's true that I've kind of given up on myself as a painter in some ways, but being able to approach the actual canvas and see each brush stroke, to be able to take in the painting from a distance and so close I could see each individual light off the tiny indent of a single nail, almost invisible from a distance, from side to side and from low and high angles was something of a mindblowing experience. I will not lie, I am spoiled by computer art. But I realized with full intensity just how incredible painters who work in physical media can be. The time and skill it would take to mix those colors just so, to apply them smoothly, taking into consideration how much paint was piled on where and so on and so forth... Talking to Sanji I went from painting to painting, wishing I could eat them and bring them into myself somehow.

I resolved that I must try harder.

Lately I've been bored with my own art, and although I've only missed my one a day once or twice, I haven't been posting it online and I haven't felt too fired up. What I realized is that to stay inspired, from time to time I have to dip my toes into a great ocean that I could never swim before retreating back to my own safe pool. I have to encounter artists who are so incredible that my skin begins to tingle and I have to drop my head into my hands. I have to be overwhelmed. Then I need to retreat someplace non-competitive, where I can collect praise and encouragement as I push myself to reach that higher goal. It's not that I will get that good. But I will get better. God help me I will fling myself as far as I can each time. There will be plateaus where I seem to make none or negative progress. But I will continue to shoot myself up to the next platform as soon as I can. I have to. Life is short and my eyes will go bad any day now.