An American Haiga Experience
                                                                       by Raffael de Gruttola

In 1995 my painter friend, Wilfred Croteau, and I talked together about the unique form of Japanese painting called haiga. He is an abstract-expressionist painter from Manchester, New Hampshire who studied in Paris. We have been friends for more than thirty-five years, and we wanted to explore the possibility of collaborating on the haiga form, but from a Western point of view. We understood the haiga as a somewhat abstract painting containing a haiku that enhances and complements the overall meaning of the visual message.
      Whereas the Japanese calligraphy in a haiga adds to the overall aesthetic quality of the work, in English, a handwritten script would replace it. Wilfred had never used small brushes as in the sumi-e art of ink painting, or ink pens with varying point sizes, although he had used small brushes and other techniques in his own style. As a result, this approach of using linear and calligraphic techniques would be a challenge for him. He was fascinated, and we decided that I would give him fifty haiku from which he would choose those he believed he could render in this style.
      After a few days, Wilfred called me and said that he had completed about twelve examples and wanted my opinion of the results. What I saw was exciting and innovative. He quickly completed another fourteen, and in all, we finished fifty-two haiga in three months.
      Wilfred, however, had certain considerations before rendering my haiku into haiga. One was that some aspect of nature must be present in the haiku. Another was that the images from the haiku would not necessarily affect his interpretation and rendering of the pictorial image. This was most important because his training and style were completely opposite to representational images on a canvas or board. Another consideration was that he wanted somehow to integrate the written words with the image or illustration in the painting so that the final product would be a total experience for the viewer. We also decided to call the final renderings images rather than illustrations.
      I agreed with these considerations. This meant that we had to devise a method to place the handwritten lines of the haiku on the images in such a way as to ensure these results.
      In many traditional Japanese haiga, the calligraphy of the haiku appears in different corners or on the borders of the haiga. In some cases, the text appears almost cartoon-like as dialog coming from the individuals in the paintings. The immediate concentration for the viewer is thus on the painting itself, and the haiku is added as a reflective afterthought that returns the viewer’s eye to the haiga’s particular landscape or character.
      Certain haiga by Basho, Buson, Chiyo-ni, and Takebe Socho present calligraphy in spaces on the scrolls to respect compositional values. For the most part, however, it appears that the haiku were placed after the painting was completed and possibly after the poet-painter reflected on the particular landscape or people in the haiga. In some cases, the artist used favorite haiku from older or deceased poets from another generation.
      Our process in the beginning was different in that Wilfred had the haiku before contemplating the abstract images for the haiga. This changed later as we experimented with the form, and I would receive the images first and then write the haiku for them. It is worth understanding that using abstract imagery could create problems if the haiku images were also too abstract. This did happen in one or two cases, and we saw that the haiga became too abstruse.
      Another consideration was that because we could not use the written English words and phrases in the haiku in the same way as the Japanese models, we would have to devise a plan unique to what we were trying to accomplish. In other words, we had to figure out where to place the lines of the haiku and how to incorporate them into the overall design of the haiga. We decided that they should not copy the typical Japanese presentation of a vertical haiku to either side of the image or as a monologue of the person in the image. With abstract images this arrangement would be impossible to realize anyway.
      Wilfred had never done anything of this kind before, so before he began I left him some books with Japanese haiga models to review. In fact, after I left him the haiku, he had to think through a comfortable strategy so he could develop a process that would be consistent from one haiga to the next. His first thought was to place a border around each image. He had a large four-ply rag board eighteen by thirty-one inches in size that he mapped out approximately to fifteen six by six-inch squares. This would be the size format for each haiga.
      He planned to use black and sepia inks as well as brushes, ink pens with different point sizes, and other means to produce the effects he wanted. He read and reread each haiku before experimenting with his first haiga. He pondered how to incorporate an abstract style from concrete word images. He bought pen points in small, medium, and large sizes to practice the different effects each would have on the rag board. Then he took the following haiku and started to work out different graphic ideas.

in the chapel
the butterfly, lost
in the stained glass

      He realized immediately that he would stay with the large size pen because he could manipulate the flow of the ink and create different effects consistent with his style. He used a small brush and different wet and dry brush techniques. Once he started to work with the image, he then decided he would embellish it the way he wanted, picking up small hints from the words in the haiku to represent certain patterns without making the image representative of the concrete noun or phrase. For example, in the preceding poem, what could he do graphically to represent a butterfly without actually drawing a butterfly? Once he had the process in place and practiced with pens, brushes, and other tools, he knew he had the different techniques under control well enough to do the haiga. The process was in place.
      With each new haiku, the process continued where he would read and reread each haiku, though he did not commit them to memory. Will tried to embed the words in his mind and then proceed with some abstract idea graphically. His mind is very fertile, and he instinctively knew he would not repeat any images. Some word images were more difficult than others, especially where a noun did not signify an object in nature. One of these he discarded because the imagistic language was too specific and was closer to senryu than haiku:

  in the doorway
  wrapped in yesterday's newspaper
  the beggar

      After he completed the first fifty-two haiga, we began the arduous task of transferring words to the images. We bought eight by eleven-inch transparency sheets on which, using a marker, we could write the words and arrange the positions on the image where Wilfred thought the words and image would best complement each other. This meant we could actually see where the words or phrases would harmonize with the graphic images without actually writing them on the image itself. This would reduce the possibility of error if I were just to write the haiku in a three-line pattern somewhere on the image. The easiest approach would be to use the three-line rendering of the haiku as it appears in periodicals and place it at the bottom or side of the image, which we did on occasion. It also meant that I could cut out words and phrases and rearrange them on the image in various positions before we decided on a preferred placement. After some thought and experiment, we decided that the words and phrases did not have to follow any standard pattern of writing the haiku in three lines.
      We also decided that we could place the haiku’s words or lines at the bottom of the image or arrange them any way we wanted, either outside or inside the image. In this way, the viewer’s eye would interact with the images in the viewing rather than as an afterthought or reflective reexamining. This meant that we might arrange some verses sideways on the image, or that we could position the words or lines on either side of the image or within the image itself. The viewer’s eyes would make the adjustment to find the correct arrangement of the haiku’s lines, which in some cases were a single word. The results were a pattern of image and word meaning that we felt the reader/viewer could understand without a problem. This process was difficult for Will because he had to agree with the placement as part of the overall image and complementary meaning.
      At this point, we began to recognize another phenomenon about this new kind of haiga. We saw that Wilfred did his renderings by ink pen, brush, and other means in different sequences. We noticed that each image presented beginnings and endings of particular ideas. This is not new in the history of painting because painters would work and rework their canvases until they achieved what they wanted in a given scene. However, with these small abstract-expressionistic images it became apparent that we could actually see where one idea began and was completed, and where another idea emerged in the total picture. We decided to call the graphic parts of the total image graphemes, which we defined as the minimum unit of meaningful component of a painting, and called the word images imagemes, the minimum unit of meaningful component of the haiku. Together they produce a new approach in the appreciation of a haiga.
      The idea of graphemes and imagemes was the result of conversations that Tadashi Kondo and I had while Tadashi was a visiting scholar at Harvard University from 1999 to 2000. He developed a paper, “Introduction to Abstract Haiga,” in which he described the differences between the poem (haiku), the picture (traditional haiga), and the poem/picture relationship among Basho, Socho, and the de Gruttola/Croteau collaboration. To quote Tadashi from his article: “The difference between the correspondence of Bashō's haiga and that of de Gruttola/Croteau is found in the nature of the vocabulary in their pictures. In Bashō's haiga, the poem and picture are analogously equivalent. In other words, the mental image in the world of the poem finds its equivocal graphic image in the picture. In the abstract pictures . . . the relation between the poem and the picture is characterized as correspondence between the imagemes of the poem and the graphemes of the picture.”
        An example of this is in the haiga, “in the rapids / of the Deerfield River / shimmering sunlight.” The sun grapheme (the disc-like circle) is caught between the graphemes of the rapids (two horizontal brush strokes above and below the sun disc grapheme), while the imagemes of “rapids” and “shimmering sunlight” of the haiku suggest that something is happening in the river. It is worthwhile to understand this relationship in our experiments with abstract haiga.
       To return to the process, when we finally decided on the placement of the verses, I would raise a corner of the transparency and place a small pencil mark on the image to indicate where the handwritten line should begin. This was not an exact position because I would have to write the words on the image in longhand and in my own style. I had to consider legibility, the size of the letters and words, the slant of the line of poetry, where I would place it on the image, and the consistency of the ink on the archival board. Early on, we had decided that a typewritten font would not produce the results as the actual handwritten script. We also realized that a mistake in spelling or a smudge or a miscalculated slant could ruin the image and the total complementary effect of the haiga.
      Wilfred’s style differs from a typical sketched drawing or sumi-e painting. His images have no single brush strokes or recognizable figures. Nor do any lines indicate a landscape, although many people use their imagination to see different representational relationships. As a consequence, no direct reading of the haiga indicates a social or political theme. This was not the case with some of my haiku, which may have had another message in how I juxtaposed the images. I never mentioned any extra meanings to him and in fact was never present when he did any of the images.
      Wilfred also decided that he would use only black and sepia inks because he could obtain different shadings and hues with these two colors without using different colors of ink such as red, green, or blue. Similarly, many Japanese haiga use very little color and often the ink appears more like watercolors or different tones of black or sepia inks, or the paper has different subdued tones common to works on scrolls. We had the images reproduced, but Wilfred rejected one or two of the prints until they had the right combination of colors. Multicolored images sometimes appeared that were accidents when the printer blended different inks to reproduce the originals. One in particular is included in Reeds (page 49).

 in the rapids
      of the Deerfield River
         shimmering sunlight

We realized that when viewers look at an abstract image and read a haiku that could also be interpreted in an abstract manner, they might go to the haiku first and then return to the image. Or the viewer might go back and forth from words or verse to the image. When we did four images, as in a quartet, the viewer had to go from a word or verse on one panel to a word or phrase on another panel and continue this viewing through the four individual panels to understand the complementary meaning. Here the eye becomes a traveler across images in order to understand the sequence for meaning.
      We printed twenty-six haiga of the original fifty-two and decided that we would print a limited edition of fifty copies on archival paper for sale. Reproduction was another problem we had to confront because Will was very particular about obtaining the original colors and shadings for each copy. We would have to find a printer who was sensitive to reproducing, as close as possible, exact copies of the originals. We were fortunate that we had, among our friends, an artist and printer who was aware of the newer computerized techniques in color reproduction and could reproduce true copies of the originals better than the older color-separation techniques used by printers.
      Our printer friend, Deo Tomas, obtained inks from Japan to create different formulas from a large color bank that would match each print. Will worked with Deo on each image until they obtained the exact colors and shadings of the originals. Deo also eradicated the pencil lines from the original mapping on the rag board and cleaned some of the originals where an image might have overlapped the pencil lines.
      What we learned in the process of producing the haiga is that our visual perception, as a direct experience, is closer to the structure of reality than just a word arrangement out of our imagination. We also believed that the Japanese masters understood this phenomenon and that those artists who were disciplined and trained understood the importance of this direct confrontation with nature. The best haiku, which are the quintessential expression of our inner being, convey a picture in the mind of the reader. The haiga experience can be more enriching if we understand this relationship.

Bibliography

Addiss, Stephen. Haiga: Takebe Socho and the Haiku-Painting Tradition. With an essay by Fumiko Y. Yamamoto. Marsh Art Gallery, University of Richmond, in association with University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 1995.

–––––. Zenga and Nanga: Paintings by Japanese Monks and Scholars. Selections from the Kurt and Millie Gitter Collection. New Orleans Museum of Art, 1976.

Donegan, Patricia, and Yoshie Ishibashi. Chiyo-ni: Woman Haiku Master. Tuttle Publishing Co. Inc., 1998.

French, Calvin L. The Poet-Painters: Buson and His Followers. The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, 1974.

Kondo, Tadashi. “Introduction to Abstract Haiga, Haiku by Raffael de Gruttola, Haiga by Wilfred Croteau” (unpublished paper). Boston, 2000.

      Zolbrod, Leon M. Haiku Painting. Kodansha International Ltd., Tokyo, 1982.

      This article first appeared in Reeds: Contemporary Haiga, Vol. 2, 2004.

Return to Reeds: Contemporary Haiga Main Page.