A fan painter worked out how to stop one colour running into the next, and silk became a canvas.
Until the late seventeenth century you could dye silk, but you could not paint on it: wet colour spreads along the fibre and every edge turns to mud. Then a Kyoto fan painter called Miyazaki Yūzensai found the answer, and it was rice paste.
You draw the design, then pipe a fine line of paste along every outline from a paper cone. The paste is a wall. Colour brushed inside it cannot cross. When the work is finished the cloth is steamed to fix the dye and then washed, and the walls disappear — leaving a painting with a hairline of undyed white along every edge.
The design is drawn on the silk in blue juice that will wash out.
Rice paste is piped along every line from a paper cone, thin as a hair.
Colour is brushed inside the paste walls. It cannot bleed across them.
Steamed to fix, then washed until the paste and the blue lines are gone.
That white outline is how you know it is hand-drawn yūzen and not a stencil copy. It is the paste, remembered.
The washing was once done in the Kamo river, long ribbons of silk moving in the current. It is done indoors now, which is sensible and a great deal less beautiful.
A dorei is not a decoration that happens to rattle. It is a bell — unglazed earthenware, fired with a pellet loose inside, with a sound hole cut at the foot. The note is dry and short, nothing like metal.
Pieces are found one at a time, in Japan, and photographed before they are listed. Tell us what you are looking for, and we will write when something arrives that answers it.
We write when there is something to write about — some months twice, some months not at all.
Noted. We will write when something arrives.