Landscapes


Painting of landscapes

Almost all great artists of the subjective art of ink painting primarily drew landscapes. The love towards nature was inside of the Zen-monks, who united both the spirit of Taoism and Buddhism strongly within themselves. The Chinese-Japanese word for landscape is “Sansui”, i.e. “mountain and water”. These are the two main elements of which Sumi-e artists built their compositions.

In comparison the human being always appears only as a dot in the infinite wideness of the world. All shapes, mountains, water, trees are merely a medium to express the emptiness of the space. So a picture of a landscape painted by an ink-artist is truly a picture of the universe in the eye of Zen-enlightenment.