Unfathomable Mysteries

Unfathomable Mysteries:
An Interview with Gary LeBel

by Jeanne Emrich

cicadas pause
but the long
     dream
        continues
under eyelids
    of stone

Gary LeBel, a Maine-born artist and poet, has pursued over the course of ten years his interest in Japanese literary and visual art forms which he combines with other, more western techniques such as collage and mixed media. He works as an industrial engineering consultant with a firm he co-founded. He is married with two children, and currently resides in Georgia.

How did you first discover haiga and what aspects of it inspired you to start working in the form?

Twin interests in both haiku and painting found me eventually trying to put them together. However, it was not until you, Jeanne, had opened my eyes to the historical form, its aesthetics, and possibilities that I really began making something that might be called a haiga. After contact with your influence, I returned to a tome I had in my collection that I had not completely digested, A Net of Fireflies [translated by Harold Stewart, Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc., 1960], a book of translations of haiku masters with accompanying haiga sketches and occasional text in Japanese calligraphy. I didn’t care for the translations in this book, but the haiga were among the most liberated sketches I’d ever seen. Here there was homeliness, humility, inner tension, reverence, playfulness, beauty, intimacy, spontaneity, and boldness, and if that were not enough, a total lack of ego: all the values I sense are implicit in the haiga.

Do you have a favorite among the traditional haiga masters of Japan?

Continuing with A Net of Fireflies, which still remains a revelation, I am especially drawn to Hirafuku Hayakusui’s Shy Rainbow and the absolutely wonderful pieces by Shibahara Kaizō, Sudden Downpour and Evening Rookery. This book also kindled an interest in “running hand” calligraphy, of which Kikakudō Kiichi’s Pampas Grass is a glowing example and the epitome, at least for me, of the art as the Japanese practice it. Each of these works is animated by a vigorous inner pulse.

You are accomplished as both a poet and painter. Tell me about your background.

I have been involved with artistic pursuits since I was about twelve or thirteen. I’ve done easel paintings and many collages (my favorite medium) since then. However, it wasn’t until I discovered Japanese pictorial and poetic art forms that I came to feel something had been missing in my previous work.

What aesthetics are foremost in your mind when you create a haiga? How important to you is the synergy between the poem and the visual image?

To begin with, the haiga sketch or image should necessarily bring a sense of simplicity and perhaps an unfinished quality to merge with the poem’s brief nature. If it has this quality, it will be able to modulate its volume, so to speak, such that the interplay can bounce continually between the words and thethe picture; when one rereads, that is precisely what can happen. I believe that both forms, the verbal and pictorial, when paired in the haiga, must strive to one common goal, which is the most difficult and illusory of all art: to transmit a shared universal truth, whether it be one of nature or the human condition, or both together. With haiga, the delivery is often quick and loose, and this is its most endearing charm, but more importantly, this quality provides the reader with enough space to let it resonate within his or her own personal experience. If every detail, word, or image is too concrete or personal, it will constrict on itself like a python. Having abandoned many efforts because of this, I enjoy only a slim ratio of “keepers.” The haiga should be simple enough to be pliable, to become for a moment the reader/gazer’s property. It must be bold enough to arouse interest, and loose and spontaneous enough to hint at the essence of an experience rather than any specific detail, which need not be known. Reality is a shadowy thing and art-making is the constant striving to look into the reality beyond the apparent reality. Above all, the haiga should have the built-in desire to convey a feeling that can be shared by everyone.

Your haiga appear to spring from a variety of impromptu activities, including sketching on location. Describe your process. Which tends to come first, the poem or the sketch? Does the poem arise primarily out of a haiku moment you are experiencing on location or does the sketch itself suggest a poem (a sketch-ku!)?

Generally, the haiku comes first after an often long period of gestation and trying words on like shoes. At other times, the image or the idea for the image is clear, but still no text! A piece from last year’s Reeds called “Cicadas pause” took the better part of a year to get just right. I wish I was one who could say that they just flowed out together but that would be miles from the truth. The rarest event of all is that magical time when they both do come out simultaneously. For me this only happens en pleine aire (while sketching or painting outside), not usually at my desk. Haiga I have been fortunate enough to make in this way always appear on the lined notebook paper in the little composition books I use. The lines keep them exactly what they are, sketches with words. As a society, and I’m speaking of American society, we’re much too swayed by the ostensibly greater value of so-called “museum quality” art.

Would you recommend sketching as a way to sink deeper into your environment with the possibility of experiencing a haiku moment? Why or why not?

Sketching is the desire of the mind to touch essence directly through the hands. I’m convinced of this. If you sketch a lot, as a tool for discovery, it can become steadily more natural and fluid and may take many turns you didn’t expect when you began. Rembrandt’s sepia wash and pen-and-ink sketches are the prime examples of what I mean. I return to him again and again for help and guidance. In his work are whole human experiences and truths drawn with just a few extraordinarily loose lines and suggestions of neighboring spaces. And I believe you should sketch, not to duplicate any so-called reality in front of you, but to do as the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé suggested, to “paint not the object but the effect it produces.” There’s nothing more personal than a sketch that springs from the same motor responses as your own handwriting. I always return to sketching as a means of probing and finding.

Your haiga collages incorporate painting, pastels, photography, and a variety of cut-out printed materials. You have even used litter collected during your walks! How do you work with these materials? Do you start first with a haiku in mind and then select the collage materials that might augment it?

As I implied earlier, the poems I want to bring to fruition are always hiding in the soft fringes of consciousness until that day when inexplicably they're ready to come out. Sometimes they bring an image along when they come. Random materials can help them emerge by introducing correspondence that relate on many different levels. I have several potential images, being built all the time, though a large percentage will never work. But I keep working for that small percent that will click. For example, I picked up an empty cigarette box on one of my walks and found in its logo a shape and color that reminded me of certain Kano School folding screens I admire. The gold and blue colors were exceedingly rich and deep. I cut the tiny image out and, by scanning, enlarged it several times until the colors became vivid and the curves dramatic, using coated papers to soak up the maximum of pigment. I assembled a few of them, added a beautiful spiral of grass, a gift the seashore had given me, and it opened the door for a poem I had been thinking about for some time. This became "October dawn" (below). The delight that comes with the surprise of finding new ideas and vessels for feeling in trash and rubble are well worth the preoccupation with collecting them.

October dawn . . .
for a pause in breakers
she waits to speak

To what degree do random materials, such as the litter you pick up from your walks, play a part in your haiga collages? I imagine that surprising juxtapositions sometimes occur during this assembly process.

The work of Kurt Schwitters (and Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Antoni Tapies, and Robert Motherwell) taught me early on of the merits of found objects. I collect them, leaving certain papers out for the sun and rain to season. I dry and flatten others between leaves of books, store them in Ziploc bags (each object is priceless in what it might later yield), and then introduce them to white paper to see if they confer or collide. Sometimes collision is favored. The fundamental driver for most collagists, I believe, is to make that proverbial “silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” When thrown-away or otherwise disconsolate items are found, picked up, carefully washed, and put to work, they hum with a new voice, are reborn as something completely different with a brand-new dignity. Jean Dubuffet said that there is no difference between beauty and ugliness. A very Zen statement. When working loosely and playfully with materials in this way, any manner of directions can result.

Some of your haiga include tanka and even haibun. How do you think these longer poetry forms interact with the image or images in a haiga that might be different from haiku?

I’ve come to the conclusion that they don’t work, not really, not haibun, waka, tanka, kanshi, sedoka, or Western poetic forms in conjunction with images as defined in the form we have agreed upon as haiga. Nevertheless, I still send them to friends in the sense of the cahier, or “notebook” that Picasso often spoke of when he said in his usual nebulous way that ma vie est une cahier, “my life is a notebook.” My intent for them is only as a dispatch to people far away, a casual conversation. Haibun and tanka can be interestingly illustrated, I suppose, but I don’t think they can be conjoined effectively on the same page as a stand-alone work. What I’ve found in my own case is that images, especially joined with tanka, really don’t work together. The reason is this: tanka, when written with excellence, overpowers everything else on the page with its waves and depths of feeling, an arena where emotion more often sets the tone rather than the spirituality implicit in haiku. Experiencing tanka as practiced in the vein of the great women of Japan—Murasaki Shikibu, Ono no Komachi, Izumi Shikibu, or Yosano Akiko (and others both male and female)—is like opening the door to a small room and finding a space as vast as the distance between our galaxy and Andromeda, a space that spreads out before you in every direction. Noumenal lanterns shine here and there beside the blue giants, white dwarfs, and quasars, and these lanterns are the deep feelings interwoven in the thirty-one syllables. Pictorial forms are muddy boots for these ideas because the tanka has no body, is pure feeling in and of itself without need of outside reference. I still try to write tanka; I still try to open that door, which my own lesser mind always finds locked. I do hope in my lifetime it will open, at least a crack.

Judging from your correspondence with me over the years, you enjoy mail art. I have found in my mailbox, to my great delight, many a letter or card from you with a haiga taped to or painted directly on it. Some appear to be the original art itself, while others are copies. Tell me about this kind of sharing of your art. Do you scan or photocopy your haiga in series to send out to friends?

I have no special reverence for anything I do and often give them away and forget to copy them. Discovery is much more important than artifacts. Ideas, when expressed to their conclusions, signal an end to one direction and the gleaming promise of another, the next challenge. It is the process that counts, not the footprints of the most recent. If you constantly strive for “museum quality” renditions destined for pretty mahogany frames, you will never be free to play and discover or find the pulse of the true heartbeat within your verses. Certainly I have an artist’s vanity, but it doesn’t stretch too far. I have always engaged in mail art and have done so for over twenty years. I never send the same or even remotely the same image to more than one person. What would be true and personal in that? I usually send a snippet of a problem I’m trying to solve at the time, along with a simple greeting. What happens, though, in specifically creating mail art for friends, is that a strange and wonderful freedom limbers you up to try new things you might not otherwise have considered. Its casualness makes you loose and a better receptor for the wilder things that may cross your mind.

To what extent do you use digital technology in creating your haiga? What kind of software do you use?

I scan and copy, enlarge and reduce. Sometimes I color on my photographs or my own scanned drawings instead of using fixatives for chalk or oil pastels. Because I feel our Western culture is so saturated with smooth, elegant, and inherently false images, the will to use digital graphics and image-altering software has no appeal. I like the feel of artist’s materials rather than keyboards. I like to get my hands dirty.

Besides your own handwriting, you have used hiragana in your haiga, apparently for conveying content and adding a decorative element to your visual images. How long have you studied and practiced

the most recent. If you constantly strive for “museum quality” renditions destined for pretty mahogany frames, you will never be free to play and discover or find the pulse of the true heartbeat within your verses. Certainly I have an artist’s vanity, but it doesn’t stretch too far. I have always engaged in mail art and have done so for over twenty years. I never send the same or even remotely the same image to more than one person. What would be true and personal in that? I usually send a snippet of a problem I’m trying to solve at the time, along with a simple greeting. What happens, though, in specifically creating mail art for friends, is that a strange and wonderful freedom limbers you up to try new things you might not otherwise have considered. Its casualness makes you loose and a better receptor for the wilder things that may cross your mind.

To what extent do you use digital technology in creating your haiga? What kind of software do you use?

Besides your own handwriting, you have used hiragana in your haiga, apparently for conveying content and adding a decorative element to your visual images. How long have you studied and practiced this form of calligraphy and why do you use it in your haiga?

A year or so ago I began to study kanji and hiragana to include in my haiga. After having been thoroughly swept up in the art of Japanese calligrapher and poet Shinagawa Tetsuzan, I began trying calligraphy. He struck a deep nerve in the same way that the American abstract expressionist Franz Kline had done when I first glimpsed one of his large canvasses; it felt exactly like centipedes running along my spine! I found in Shinagawa’s work a whole new freedom and mystery I’d never encountered before: the incredible idea of painting words alone to speak volumes. After studying his brush strokes by tracing them with my hand, with invisible ink, so to speak, I tried to do my own characters and the “running hand” cursive I so admired in Ryōkan and Onitsura. Attempting this is a very humbling experience. You find out firsthand how free (and also controlled) the great practitioners are. You also get to peek into the realms of feeling that lie in this form of art and its execution. The second reason for employing calligraphy, or at least my own take on it, is perhaps the most important. I feel a great debt of gratitude to a culture that has so consistently helped me give form to my pitiful ideas. Attempting calligraphy is akin to learning enough words in a new language to thank the host. It must be remembered, too, that in each Chinese character whole histories, meanings, human values, and living civilizations are safeguarded. One needs only to look at the countless composites where the character for “heart” is conjoined to sense this.

You have told me of your love of the sea and your desire to live near it. Has your location in Guyton, Georgia, played a significant role in your choice of topics for your haiga? How so?

Every new place you go or move to is an opportunity to find another “ten thousand things.” Here in Guyton, Georgia, aside from the sea being only about 40 miles away, there are palms and palmetto, dark misty swamps, wetlands, white sands in forest paths, Spanish moss like the daguerreotypes of old Civil War generals’ beards hanging from centuries-old trees, the ghosts of Savannah (and there are many), the furious sweat and toil of a port city and the sometimes noisiest but most endearing yellow-green tree frogs. Haiga is absolutely linked with place and season, but memory is a strong source as well.

It is said that haiku is a poetry of discovery as opposed to invention. But haiga, in combining verse and visual images, seems to invite creative juxtapositions. Also, after more than a century of visual experimentation here in the West, the innovative possibilities of haiga now seem unlimited. In what direction do you now see your own haiga going? How important is experimentation to you? And, finally, what elements of traditional haiga aesthetics do you incorporate into your work even as you experiment?

I see no fundamental difference between the terms “discovery” and “experimentation.” To me both are synonymous with “play,” to find the loosest, least-opinionated vehicle for self-expression. I don’t know or want to know what my work will look like in five years. That would destroy the pleasure of the journey. One thing is always chief, that whenever words are added to the picture, the whole, the haiga, should be simple and open enough for another’s eyes to own.

Whose Western haiga do you often admire, and why?

I cite your work first, Jeanne, because your sense of vibrant color often carries the kigo, or the visual season-word equivalent. I am recalling those luscious red peppers of yours and those ice-cold colors of the waterfall. Your text and images always have relationships that are clear and resonant, inviting you gracefully and elegantly in. I also like the boldness in Susan Frame’s brush where you sense that she’s totally unafraid to load it and plunge, like Basho’s frog. To the more classically grounded haiga like yours and hers, to the older Japanese practitioners and to Rembrandt and Picasso are where I go for instruction and inspiration.

What thoughts do you have on “photo-haiga” or other variations on the traditional concept of haiga as a combination of painting, poem, and calligraphy?

I don’t care so much for photographs when paired with text; their space seems photographic rather than poetic. Photos are too filled with subject matter already, even those with a convincingly expressive sense of what the Japanese refer to as wabi-sabi, the homely yet elegant face of common things as they are. Also, there is a distinct loss of the handmade quality in photography that I believe is central to haiga. In combination with other media, they can work as long as no single one takes center stage and overpowers the text. There is always such a delicate balance between text and image!

In the synergy between the haiga’s poem and painting, what would you say could make the relationship fail?

If the image is too fine (too well-executed), too perfect or overwrought, or too balanced, it not only distances itself from the viewer by its virtuosity, it also detracts from the importance of the words as if a sleeve had just smeared their fresh ink. Furthermore, if the words are too confining, too closed off, or too personal, nothing is lent to the image and little is ultimately conveyed, no world is opened up. In the best work I’ve seen, both image and text remain open by talking to one another without interrupting so that the viewer can gain that insight that was the original intention by being “talked to” as well.

What parting advice might you have for the aspiring haiga artist? And for those who are more experienced?

I believe haiga should have a sense of the handmade about it, as I said earlier, and an artlessness that reveals the curious child still inside the artist/poet. Haiga should be simple and tell only a part of the story, inviting viewers to invent the rest out of the abundant pool of their own lives. Above all, I would say that if you don’t have a strong desire to thank the cosmos for having a life at all, with its unfathomable mysteries to wonder about, or fail to acknowledge all those important people who’ve shaped you along the way, you really shouldn’t write a poem or make a haiga at all. And for the more experienced? Since I don’t count myself among them, I’ll take a stab at it and say: Don’t fall into a single mode of expression; change as the seasons do, completely and unrecognizably.

This interview first appeared in Reeds: Contemporary Haiga, Vol. 2, 2004. (Edina, Minnesota: Lone Egret Press, 2004)

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