Is Visual Art Music or Literature?

The Peregrines of Manayunk. Mokuhaga by Ken Januski. Copyright 2025.

I have finished the mokuhanga of the peregrine falcons of Manayunk and St. John's Church and wrote about much of their story in my last post.

But you might wonder how I ended up with this picture. I talked very briefly about it last time when I showed the pencil sketch that served as its basis.

Preliminary sketch for the new mokuhanga. Copyright 2025 by Ken Januski.

After doing quite a few field sketches through my scope on two or three visits to St. John's Church I also made some watercolor sketches from photos I'd taken. After deciding to try to come up with an idea for a print I just got out a large sketchbook and came up with the drawing above.

What in the world is it? Well that's where the title of this post comes in. Many people prefer their visual art to be pretty literary, clearly illustrating an object or idea. The purpose of the art is very literal and any deviation from the literal is bad, at least in their minds. Others, especially in western European/American art from the 20th century on thinks of visual art as closer to music. It is abstract but wide-ranging it its emotional impact, like music. It is not limited by facts, visual or otherwise.

Of course visual art  shouldn't be literature or music. It should be visual art, whatever that is. In any case as I sat down to make this sketch I just let a summary of my experiences viewing and sketching the peregrines over a week flow onto the paper. I hadn't really thought about this until recently. But I think this is a good explanation. It is just a visual recording of my experiences.

That means showing all the peregrines(actually 6 in all, 2 adults and 4 fledglings) but also their environment, the church and its steeples and roofs, the surrounding utility structures on which they often perched, and all my sketches of them perched in various locations. Even the food handoff from parent to child of a recently caught European starling.

Having spent most of my life as an abstract artist I feel perfectly free to make real objects abstract or to add the abstract and the more realistic. There is over 100 years of history now of this type of art. Still it probably bothers some. But I can't worry about them. As many people know art is first of all for the artist who makes it, perhaps not in terms of making a living from it, but certainly in terms of artistic satisfaction. So I'm quite satisfied with this. It mixes realistic and abstract as well as flatter more abstract space and deeper more atmospheric traditional space. I like that.

In the long run though it is also quite realistic in the sense that it recreates my experience over the week of watching the peregrines.

This is probably the most complex mokuhanga I've ever done. I'm sure many would say: 'Please, please, please start simple and then get complex. First learn the rudiments of mokuhanga and then get fancy.' It makes perfect sense to me but I just can't do it that way. I need to be motivated to make an image and then hope that I can master the technical aspects as I go.

But I would reiterate what I've said before: mokuhanga is a wonderful medium for making art. It has left me frustrated at some point in almost every print that I have ever made. But the rewards have far outweighed the problems. It is very hard to explain how much freedom you have with mokuhanga. A printing press with a million options right on the small table in front of the you. The main ingredient of the press being a handheld baren that can vary in price from around $50 to over $1000. But it weighs only a few ounces and can be repaired by you yourself. The chisels can last a lifetime. The paints are watered based and non-toxic. And you work on beautiful, often hand-made paper. Did I mention a rich history? I don't want to go on. I'm sure I break as many rules of mokuhanga and that tradition as I do of European/American art especially pre-20th century. But I find it an incredibly rich and enjoyable medium.

I have printed 12 of these so far, all on Nishinouchi paper. I plan to print at least 24 more and then will have to cull out the ones with minor blemishes. When that is all finished I will put them up for sale on Etsy.

 

Illustrating Counts

I've been fairly busy over the last 6 weeks either counting or scouting birds for official counts. In early December there was the Christmas Bird Count. Yesterday was the Philadelphia Mid-winter Bird Census. We generally do our part at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education. But this year I was asked to add the section of the Wissahickon where the Red-headed Woodpecker has been for three months.

That meant scouting the Wissahickon to make sure he was still around and scouting SCEE to see what birds seemed to be around there. Of course there's never any guarantee that the birds you see when scouting will also be there when the official count takes place.

All of which means I've slacking off on my art work. I do try to do sketches while I'm out but it's always a bit harder in cold weather. For instance I just didn't feel like trying to sketch the Red-headed Woodpecker when we found him yesterday. A few bad photos were sufficient. And of course there's just the pleasure of seeing this beautiful bird. That always takes first place.

I would have expected that the woodpecker would be the rarest bird I'd see yesterday. And it was. They're just never in Philadelphia, especially in winter. But it wasn't the most surprising bird. That occurred as I tried to ID tiny birds in the top branches of the two trees in the forefront of the ink, watercolor and gouache sketch at top. As I did so one of the people also on the count with us said 'What are those birds?' When I looked high in the sky I found: Snow Geese!

I've never before seen them in Philadelphia. That doesn't mean all that much since I don't spend much time in areas where they might be possible. Still it was a great shock to see four of them flying by. I later learned that someone doing another section of the count not far away had also seen some, this time a flock in the hundreds. Since they are in other areas of the state right now it's not a total shock. But it's one thing to know that they're being seen in the vicinity and quite another to see them yourself for the first time.

They were here and gone in seconds so I never even thought of any artwork based on them. On the other hand I did look at them hard, even for the very short time that they were visible. Today a day later I still have a mental image of them.

That's what I used in the sketch above. All the rest is made up, though I did try to indicate the many twiggy branches at the top of the trees where I was trying to identify some very small birds. This is done in a now familar manner: ink from a Bic ballpoint pen that runs when water touches it, watercolor and white gouache to try to bring some light back into the dark areas that the runny ink creates.

The ink run so quickly that it's almost like trying to paint with quicksilver. Once water touches ink who knows where it will run? For some reason I like working like this. It seems to lead to quick paintings, rough though they may be.

When I was studying art in college 'illustration' was a dirty word in the art department as well as in just about every art publication I looked at. I was somewhat sympathetic to this view. I think one reason for this is that it's not hard to find art that sells based on its cuteness. The art is valued almost entirely for the 'cute' subject and not at all for either the honesty of the artist in portraying it or for his or her artistic skill. It can seem horribly sentimental.

At the same time though, even way back then, there was something that bothered me about this. Regardless of what anyone says about progress in art in the visual arts there will always be a place for representational art, for art that honestly portrays the world around it.

I deliberately used 'illustration' in the title of this post. This is an illustration, even if only in a very rough manner. I'm portraying an event that occurred and that I found memorable. That impetus will always be a valuable part of art I think. I continue to love very many types of abstract art and I think my own work is fairly abstract. But that doesn't need to be in opposition to illustration. They can readily work together.

I also wanted to continue my studies of Song Sparrows. So today I did a few more, based on photos like those in the last post. The top sketches show a young Song Sparrow that had just bathed. The bottom two are mature birds including one from our backyard. This is the same runny ink style. It's hard to explain. I guess you'll either like it or you won't! I do find it very useful in inspiring me toward more developed work. This as usual is done on one of the heavier Stillman & Birn sketchbooks, this time one from the Delta series.