ART CLASSES


Wednesday and Saturday afternoons 4pm, please email for additional times and register (single or small groups welcome).


  • Drawing, and dynamic drawing
  • Line, composition and perspective (Western and Eastern methods)
  • Water colours and wash painting
  • Acrylics
  • Sumie basics

Classes

Are tailored to interest and ability. 


As a beginner or near beginner, you might have none now, or so you think. Everything is taught with your experience and current abilities in mind. If you have little interest in Water colours you don't have to learn to use them. Or feel you cannot draw you will soon.   


Experienced Artists are also welcome. Mostly you are working in a group of 2-3 other people.


If you are already attending the zazenkai (meditation group) a $20 discount is available.

Teacher 

Mujyo zenji who is an accomplished Artist in multiple mediums including Traditional Sumie (monotonal painting), western painting, drawing and sculpture (he holds Diplomas in Fine Arts Painting and sculpture), and landscape design, Jizoan's gardens are designed by him, he has also designed and advised on other gardens in Austalia and Japan. He is also an accomplished expert in Japanese Calligraghy (Shodo). 
Much of his art is featured in this Website's design. A number of his painting, calligraphy and sculptures are owed by private collections in Japan.

 Zen and Art

Zen (and particularly Rinzai Zen) has long been associated with traditional fine arts. 'Sho-in' Art in turn introduced from Song dynasty China centered in in the Kyoto Rinzai monasteries and developed great historical flowerings of Japanese art. The contributions of Zen monks to the development of literature, music, calligraphy, painting, tea ceremony, flower arrangement, landscape gardening and so on are immeasurable.

Today Western Art movements of the 19th and 20th centuries such as Impressionism, post-impressionism, graphic design, modernism and post-modernism, Kinetic Art, Beat-poetry, Beat-Jazz, Performance Art, all find a reference in this.

Fine arts are still greatly respected in Zen today. The great value of art from the Zen perspective lies in its potential to express enlightened wisdom in a concrete manner which may then be shared with, and benefit, others.

In the Zen understanding of artistic endeavour, time, space and energy (kokyu, maai, kiai) must be harmonized with and expressed through the medium, whether it be the movement of a brush over paper, the placement of a flower in a vase, or the breathing of a note through a bamboo flute. But beyond this ability - beyond the realm of technical mastery - lies the possibility for art to reflect and express the realization of wisdom. When true artistic skill, attained through endless repetition and training, meets the creative upwelling of enlightened insight, then art can be produced that may be called truly great. It is art that appeals not only to our aesthetic senses: it transcends cultural divides, and expresses the very flavour of the Way. 'Zenki'