Thanks again, I will be looking for your book. It should be good reading if I can judge by this material.

Glenn

Wonderful! Now I have a much better understanding of these terms and the ideas around them.

Thanks, Walter.

-Carl / OMC

Glenn,
don't look for my book. It is not published. It probably never will.
It is more than 2000 (twothousand) pages and nobody wants to put up the money for such a publication.
Maybe I will publish a CD eventually. The whole book is mainly in German anyway. English is only my second language.
best regards
Walter Pall

Thanks for posting that Walter. I'm looking forward to your book also.

I found this statement especially enlightening refering to Kimura etal :

"He is part of the avant-garde movement in bonsai. This type of expression/style is here to stay. It does not mean that the traditional/classical style will disappear, but it will be enriched by it, as the avant-garde is enriched by the past.”

I think there is another precedent other than painting or sculpture to this whole idea of styles. That is what I consider the "Mother of all Arts".......Architecture.

From the cave, on through the Ages, to the Classical style of the Greeks and Romans and on through the most recent centuries, Architecture has evolved into what it is now using the all of the past incarnations and building upon them as new materials and techniques have appeared.
At the same time, there have been the occasional "geniuses or fools" who have come along and radically brought new untested styles and shapes to the forefront ie. http://www.franklloydwright.org/
and http://www.cs.umb.edu/~alilley/bauhaus.html
among other more modern schools of Architecture http://www.modernarchitecture.com/.

I won't go on because I'm afraid of going off topic here but I wanted to draw the comparison because......well just because I saw it.

Walter,

I'd like to read those 2000 pages but if it's not practical for publishing, couldn't you put out a condensed version of some sort?

I'm sure everybody who takes the time to read your comments, Walter, is going to feel that "Aha" about some part of it. For me it was within the first few sentences about the classical form: "They are usually slightly expressionistic and abstract. This means, the designer does not try to give the impression of a real tree but rather he has an inner feeling for the ideal tree which he expresses." While I'm a long way from experienced enough to catagorize myself into any form or type, the statment eloquently expresses my own goals: to express my inner feelings about an ideal tree.

The problem, as you have pointed out so well, is to do that without simply being a copy cat. Like all art, when it has been done so often for so long, it is almost impossible to be original. I would wonder if it isn't every bit as difficult to create the classical style as neo-classical or contemporary...if you are going to do it well and not just as a copier.

Matt, I hope you can use part of this thread in the FAQ.

Earl

Thanks Walter Pall, that was very interesting.
Al,
I agree with some of your original post, but from the photos I've seen I don't think the naturally styled trees follow Japanese bonsai rules a lot of the time, but I don't see this as freeform and after reading Walter Pall's post it wouldn't be neo-classical neither.

If I'm understanding Walter's post correctly, bonsai art would become stagnant if everyone followed the known Japanese rules as far as possible.
I don't see why trees that might not be following the Japanese rules are just considered freeform. It seems to me that a tree not styled to look natural would be more freeform.

AAHHAAA

WOW great article walter sorry for being late on the "aha"


garys

architecture ,frank lloyed write is my favorite architect i have many books on his work,very insperational and i can see your comparrison

regards

ROBOKU

Walter, and all,

Walter's explanation of the development of bonsai has certainly been an education to me. It has exposed me to a world far larger, grander and more complex than I had previously imagined. I'd say my"Bonsai Mental Model" has been greatly expanded and a great deal of previously unrecognized complexity added to it.

However, with gain comes loss. Somehow, some of the serenity of my previous vision has also been lost. The idea that bonsai was an art expression of the wealthy, noble classes of Feudal Japan has shattered my picture of "small is beautiful" as represented by my mental image of bonsai in the courtyards of Japanese farming villages. My picture of Bonsai as being "in the world but not of the world" is, it appears, a sad misrepresentation of what Bonsai means to most; certainly to most of its formost developers. I guess I've been stuck in a kind of small corner of the bonsai world, imagining that it's Norman Rockwells and Grandma Moses represent what it is "really" all about.

Well, sigh! Thank you Walter for a wonderfully engaging education on the World of Bonsai.

And, oh yes Ouch!

Best regards, Fred

Fred, I don't fully understand how I robbed you of some illusions. But I do understand how you gained more insight.
Since you folks seem to enjoy it, on teh expense of maybe confusing some even more here some addition about this natural style:

Naturalistic: This is the style where trees are formed so that they look as close as possible like real trees. This means that many classical rules have to be broken. Often these trees are looked at as „weeds" or raw material by the audience who is not yet used to them. It seems to be easy to design a naturalistic tree – just let it grow. This is by no means true. A good bonsai in the naturalistic style needs just as much consideration as an abstract one. Otherwise it really is just a weed.
In many discussions on the internet it became obvious that most people find it difficult to accept the term "naturalistic". The general feeling is that it is superfluous because every serious bonsai enthusiast tries to create natural looking bonsai anyway. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most bonsai enthusiasts try to create bonsai which are as ideal as possible, making them quite the opposite of naturalistic; they are rather abstract, idealized trees. Another misunderstanding is that people think a naturalistic bonsai is one that is left as is, without any further design. This is, of course, absolutely not the case. Lynn Boyd proposed to call it "romantic" style. This should be a title which is better understood by most people.
Any bonsai or piece of art needs some degree of abstraction. The naturalistic bonsai has a lesser degree than the abstract one, but it still has the helping hand of the artist. Only the artist wants this to look like it was never touched by human hand. If done well, it it may look to the audience like this should not be so difficult, they could do the same thing. This is similar to people standing in front of a modern abstract painting and saying that this could be done by their child. Well, if this is the case, why is the child not world-famous?
It is interesting to note here that many contemporary artists are either going towards very abstract or very natural trees, to the extreme in any case. It is often overseen that many classical trees of Japan are naturalistic and also most penjings. In the West this seems to be revolutionary. It is only as a reaction to neo-classical design with slavish adhearance to rules which never were meant to be used like a law.
We have to be reminded that style in the context of this classification means the overall spirit of a bonsai, contrary to the form, the shape of a specific tree. One can well take a classical form and design it with naturalistic details, thus creating a naturalistic bonsai, because of the overall feeling. For many tree species and certainly for many individual trees the classical forms just don't fit; at least this is the feeling of some artists. Thus they have started to create new forms with trees that before were not used commonly as bonsai. Vaughn Banting has dared to replicate the natural look of Swamp Cypresses, which have a flat top with several crowns in nature. The author has pioneered the candelabra form on conifers. Very often trees along the timberline are struck by lightening and the main trunk dies. Lower branches develop into one or several new trunks which then look like a candelabra. Another form that has emerged to accurately describe and represent trees that grow in nature is the Banyan "style" for Ficus. Banyan trees grow in tropical climates and typically include air roots that emerge from the trunk and descend from branches to the soil. In nature these roots function to stabilize the tree and to help the tree establish it's "territory". Another example is the Baobab "style" which resembles the rather strange natural growth of Baobab trees in Africa. In South Africa Baobab trees are styled just like they appear in nature, with their enormous branches which look like fat roots sticking into the air.
Charles Ceronio mentions some more African forms besides the Baobab-form which he calls "styles": The Pierneef Form: The acacia is a tree every one knows in Africa. It grows in a typical almost geometrical semi-circle-crown, like open umbrellas. Another form is the Flat Top Form, which again is the typical form of an acacia species which is common in the warmer parts of Africa and there actually is called "flat top acacia". The top is very flat indeed and someone outside Africa might call it grotesque. But it all is just a matter of what one is used to see. Ceronio also defines the Bushveld or Natural Form, which is basically the same as the informal broom form, or Oak Form, which is the most common form of deciduous trees anyway. The Wild Fig Form is mainly identical to the American Banyan "style".
The overwhelming majority of deciduous trees and many conifers grow in the informal broom form in nature which usually has a single trunk with some taper that very soon spreads into several trunks which grow upwards and again spread into upwards growing branches. The trunk and the branches of this form are bent. When they are straight, one speaks of the well documented formal broom form. It is most interesting to note that traditional bonsai rules simply have no term for this form which is by far the most frequent in nature. Every bonsai enthusiast must have wondered at one time why he is not supposed to style his trees just like the ones he sees in his front yard. Contemporary bonsai artists now style in exactly that way. Paul A. Ringo has described this form which he calls "live oak style" and wonders why it is not used more often for western species. One can go further and also wonder why it is not used more often for Asian species.
The informal broom form could make a similar career as the informal upright or mojogi form. It is very hard to believe that as late as 1955 in Japan it seemed to be necessary to encourage the public to use this "new" form. When the natural resources of collected material had shrunk considerably it became normal to create bonsai from nursery grown trees. These were invariable in "ideal" shapes – at the time the formal upright form too often was the only ideal. So the advice in "An Easy Guide To Bonsai" was: "..training the individual tree freely in accordance with its own characteristics, so as to bring out its special flavor to the full". This was aimed at the fashion of trying to style every tree into the formal upright form and thus creating clichés and repetitions which all looked alike and often where not fit for the species used. It seemed to be necessary to make it clear to people that trunks did not have to be straight, they could be bent; branches did not have to be straight and always in the ideal position, they could have bends and kinks.
It is hard to believe today that the informal upright form needed special encouragement not so long ago. It is by far the most common and popular form today. The informal broom form could go the same way. It is nothing more than a variation of the informal upright form, where most branches appear on one level and branches in general have a strong tendency to grow upwards – a form found in most deciduous trees out in nature.
Naturalistic and natural are not the same. A naturalistic tree can be created with very artificial design methods. It is quite possible to have a tree with totally artificial deadwood which was created so well that it absolutely looks natural. It is also common to wire a tree up to 100 % and carefully bring all the branches in position so that the tree looks very natural. This is one of the paradoxes of bonsai.