JLDoggett

Carl,

Bonsai, paintings, sculptures are crafted in may styles, most appeal to some but rarely to all. So too modern arts hip cynicism and cutting irony will lose its impact as society changes. The works of Toulouse-Lautrec, bordered on scandalous when they first appeared, today they are considered mild, quaint, almost sentimental. Diego Rivera shocked and offended many, now his paintings are considered in the same vein as the “social realism” of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, passé, but pretty.

I see irony every time I see a bonsai that is highly sharied and jinned. The irony is that man has often taken a vibrant, healthy tree and decided that to make it “look old” it needs to be grotesquely maimed, usually with little living material left. Yes in nature this does happen to trees, but the irony seems to be, to me at least, the more tortured the tree the greater the artist. I think in the inverse. To my preferences, a smooth, sleek tree, well balanced and looking like a mature ground planted tree would be more artistically satisfying. To replicate a tree I would have cut down as firewood it not what I chose to collect. Others of course are entitled to enjoy what they wish. Bonsai should not be a pastiche.