Introduction

Haiku painting or haiga, as it is called in Japan, is a painting with haiku. It combines the Japanese art of sumi-e painting with calligraphy and has a long tradition of poet-painters who have contributed to the development of this unique art form. Poets such as Ryuho, Basho, Issa, Chiyo-ni, and Socho are mentioned throughout the history of Japanese literature and were great poets as well as visual artists.

In this portfolio, Wilfred Croteau, painter, and Raffael de Gruttola, poet, have combined their talents to make a unique contribution to the noble spirit of uniting East and West which has been maintained by Ernest Fenollosa and Wassily Kandinsky from the beginning of the last century.

Modern Japanese haiku developed around the argument whether haiku is a representation of the external world or an expression of the internal world. In haiga, haiku projects mental images with its linguistic signs, while the painting presents pictorial images by means of its graphic signs. We might say mental images are relatively elusive and pictorial images are more tangible. It is usually believed that haiga is a pictorial translation of haiku. The abstract expressionist designs shown here do not represent any objects of the haiku in the ordinary sense. In this latest development, the designs awaken one of the long slumbering issues concerning the objective nature of haiku.

Things in this world are all in arbitrary relations. Things we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel, are just temporary reflections on our mind. What we perceive as absolutely concrete is like the ice on the pond, which will soon be turning into ripples in the spring wind. The reality we generally experience is more or less an aggregate of abstract images perceived through our mind and body. In truth, we can reveal as well as deceive ourselves with our perceptions.

There is no doubt about the fact that haiku is an expression of feeling, which reflects the concrete mode of experience. It is not surprising that the designs collected here can share the same viewpoint in that the abstract method to express something is undeniably concrete in our experience.

No one has put haiku and abstract visual images together before. There is a subtle difference between abstract painting and abstract haiga. Abstract painting rejects objective reference as subject matter. Croteau's abstract haiga, on the other hand, have de Gruttola's haiku as a reference. Even though the picture is abstract, the poem-picture relationship does suggest a correspondence which advances a new approach in the understanding of the haiga art.

Shokan Tadashi Kondo
Professor at Seikei University, Tokyo
Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, Cambridge

NOTE: Japanese translations were done by Shokan Tadashi Kondo and are included with the fine art hardcopy portfolio, a limited edition of 50 copies first printed in 2000 on archival Concorde paper with the artists' signatures on each print.  The portfolio, which is comprised of twenty-six haiga, may be ordered directly from Raffael de Gruttola, 4 Marshall Road, Natick, MA 01760, USA.  The price is $250.00.

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