The painting is vertically oriented, mostly grey, 5 feet tall by 3 ¾ feet wide, and the subject is plainly a tree. At least three layers are clearly present in the painting—gold leaf, what looks like a grey paper or paste, and the painted tree—although certainly many more may be hidden behind the surface, considering that Makoto Fujimura usually paints with layer upon layer of handground minerals, inks, and pigments. Fujimura, a Christian Japanese artist, tells us that “‘Ki-Seki’ in Japanese means ‘Tree-Mark’ but also ‘Miracle.’” This raises the question: where is the miracle in the painting?
Fujimura uses gold leaf “to inject the sublime in [his] art.” But in this painting, the gold leaf is mostly obscured. The grey layer of the painting overwhelms one’s first impressions, printed across everything in the shape of uneven tiles. The tiles would be like those on a kitchen counter, except that these are shaggy, uneven, tarnished. The second most obvious layer is that of the tree, growing upward in shapes of watery ink, in a shade of grey just warmer than the tiles. Its leaves are pale, watery green and the blossoms are a white which holds purple, yellow, and grey. Its ink gathers in scaly-edged pools and winds upward in crisp dried lines. But where is the miracle?
The blossom and leaves fight for prominence, bursting occasionally onto the surface, spilling across the tiles’ borders. In the upper right, tree, tile, and branches are mixed to form a little corner of obscurity—a sharp difference from the tree at the bottom where its edges are so clear that it might have been cut out of vellum and laid on top. A very dark blue pokes through in tiny scrapes here and there, but most prominently it gathers in that mass of obscuration. But where is the miracle?
The first thing my eye lands on is the central trunk of the tree, the middle portion swelling out slightly, stippled with green leaves. Then my gaze moves down briefly to see the bulk of the trunk before it begins dividing off into branches, and then following the middle branch upward, I return to the earlier spot with the leaves. But where is the miracle?
If you were to divide the painting into four vertical quarters, the tree trunk barely reaches the first quarter before its branches divide into four. The third branch continues to glide up so that it roughly divides the painting into two uneven halves; the smaller offshoots twist and mingle and branch like antlers, forming a series of loose diamond-shapes. As they turn into antlers, they spread out more and more freely, while one pair of branches twists like a double helix through the corner of obscuration. Watching them wander beneath the murky grey tiles, I’m reminded of following the lines of a tree outside the grid of a library window. But where is the miracle?
Look how, on the bottom third or so, the tree is clearly the top layer, growing on top of the grey. But this is not the case in the upper two thirds of the painting. The longer I look at it, the more clearly all three layers shift from sheets smeared together into three planes separated by depth. The bottom portion of the tree is growing in front of, not on top of, the grey. As the tree rises, its trunk grows backward into the tiles and then behind them, as the grey comes forward. Across the whole painting, the dark grey tiles fall like a veil over the gold we know is there but cannot see clearly. But the tree, growing expansively past that veil, joins the layer of gold beneath. The tree is nearer the gold than we are. It slips behind the curtain, growing toward the light. As it slips away from us, the tree grows gently and naturally. There is no violence in its transition toward the gold layer. Meanwhile, the gold leaf hovers in the background of the painting, filling the air behind the tiles. In fact, everywhere, burning through them, are scrapes of gold.
See the full painting here: Ki-Seki | Makoto Fujimura
