"Follow The Brush" by Gayane Matevosyan

From June 20 to July 20, 2019, the Gallery of Fine Arts of Uzbekistan hosted a personal exhibition of the artist Gayane Matevosyan, who has been studying Sumi-e Japanese Calligraphy for many years, as well as teaching and working creating paintings of traditional Japanese life. 

Gayane Matevosyan called her exhibition "Dzuyhitsu - Follow the brush". This is the translation of "Dzuyhitsu" from Japanese. It is a genre of Japanese "short prose", where the author fixed everything that comes into mind. Dzuyhitsu can narrate of some sudden memory, idea in the mind, observed domestic scene. Although this term refers more to literature, it has many common ties with Sumi-e's ideas and philosophy: catch a moment, some episode, part of surrounding life to keep it in the memory of viewers or listeners. 

The exhibition presents a part of this project dedicated to Sumi-e. A series of works, where the author narrates of simple things surrounding us, which we do not notice due to pace of life. This is a cup of tea, a piece of fragrant melon, the unpretentious landscape of the Old Town, which may soon alter beyond recognition. The artist wants to leave these small, but so beautiful in their simplicity details in our memory and make us admire of what we may have missed. 

As a member of the "Uzbekistan - Japan" Friendship Association, Gayane Matevosyan has master classes and lectures telling about Japanese calligraphy and painting, as well as about various aspects of Japanese culture and art. 

This project is aimed at combining the cultural and artistic traditions of Uzbekistan and Japan. The author wants to show the beauty of everyday life through amazing and elegant technique, i.e. Japanese ink painting - Sumi-e.

Sumi-e traditional Japanese painting and calligraphy occupy an important place in art, culture and everyday life. Sumi-e was widely spread in Japan during the Middle Ages and is still popular among the Japanese people as a hobby and devotion involving many people, who are not artists.

The Art of Sumi-e is based on inspiration. This technique provides drawing with no preliminary sketches, and involves the beauty of the contrast of the black ink and the whiteness of the paper. Inspiration itself controls the artist’s brush and leads. 

The Japanese art includes artistic forms combining calligraphy and painting at the same time (for example, poetic lines written in calligraphic type are illustrated with a picture filling the poetic sense up). This provides a great scope for the artist's creativity. 

Since, this art is close and understandable to the Japanese, there was an idea for project: to use the artistic forms to combine calligraphy and painting to familiarize the Japanese with the aesthetics and color of our country, show them stories describing our cultural and everyday life of Uzbekistan.