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Originally Posted by Attila
May be this is a good place to voice some of our questions, musings, opinions about the concept of the formal display. If Carl agrees, here is a question that I have, and not sure about the answer.
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Hi Attila,
I'm all for serious discussion of artistic display and artistic principles. So I think that would be great.
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Since I don't have a japanese-style home, I wouldn't really be confortable to have a permanent formal japanese-style display in my house. I could do it once in a while, but it would allways be looked at as "exotica" or curiosity.
However, replacing the scroll with a framed painting would go a long way to accomodate the taste of my family members.
Would the framed painting diminish the impact of the arrangement? Of course, it would have to be a painting that supports the centerpiece, which is the bonsai. I am not sure about the effect since I never tried it, but I wander what others think. Would that be blasphemy? It would be especially interesting to hear what the purists think?
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I suppose I count as one of the "purists," so here goes. My answer is basically that I struggle with the same thing. I don't have a place for formal display in my house either, and while I could build one I agree it would have this air of "exotica" if I did so.
So what to do?
While I don't have easy answers, perhaps it helps to explain why I have become something of a purist with regard to formal display. I advocate and appreciate formal display because it manifests a set of artistic principles to produce an overall composition that works. I don't feel that formal display is essential in the sense that without a tokonoma and a scroll the display is invalid --- but that said, I've yet to figure out exactly what would work as effectively.
I've thought about using a painting in this way; my feeling is that finding a Western form of formal display is unlikely to be as simple as merely replacing scroll with framed painting. For one thing, the strong vertical lines of the scroll are very important to the composition of the whole (I'm in the process of writing something about this; I'll try to say more soon.) So my guess is that it'll take a more extensive reworking of the display paradigm. I don't know what that reworking will be. I haven't found anything that works nearly as well yet, but I sure do keep looking. A big part of this, of course, simply requires studying formal display and composition theory so as to understand why formal display works in the first place.
Conversely, if your display functions artistically and compositionally as well as a formal display does, I'm certainly not going to dismiss it what for not having the traditional Japanese elements.
Best regards,
Carl