Well, on Friday March 7, 2009 Pam and I went to the Canton Museum of Art and saw the most beautiful kimonos. It was an exhibit of 40 oversized kimonos made of silk and dyed to show flowers or landscapes by Itchiku Kubota. Thirty of the kimonos were in a seperate room lined up side by side in a "U" formation and where one landscape ended on a kimono it continued onto the kimono next to it - all the way around the room. It depicted the 4 seasons of Mt. Fuji and Lake Kawaguchi which is at the foot of Mt. Fuji. It was breath-takingly beautiful. Mr. Kubota first learned the art of dyeing at 14. When he was 20 he went to the Tokyo National Museum and saw an old silk textile and studied it for hours. It was from a lost art that he was determined to bring back. After fighting in Korea and being a POW in Siberia he devoted the rest of his life to rediscovering the lost art of Tsujigahana that he had seen in the Tokyo Museum 17 years earlier. It wasn't until he was 60 that he perfected the dyeing process to resemble French Impressionism and had a public exhibition in Tokyo. These kimonos were exhibited in San Diego and in Canton, OH and were in this country only once before in 1995 at the Smithsonian.
They are only in Canton until April 26th so if you are in the area I highly recommend that you go see them, it's an amazing form of art.
Then we happened upon a great restaurant and had a nice lunch, it was a good day.
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