Product Description
Japanese Garden Canvas Prints
Japanese Garden Canvas Prints
The gardens featured one or more lakes connected by bridges and winding streams. The artificial lakes were surrounded by beaches of small stones and decorated with arrangements of boulders, with natural stone bridges and stepping stones. The most famous garden of this kind, built in 1592, is situated near the Tokushima castle on the island of Shikoku. Its notable features include a bridge 10.5 meters long made of two natural stones. A wooden bridge leads to an island representing a crane, and a stone bridge connects this island to another representing a tortoise. Water is always present, either actually, as in the lake symbolizing the ocean, or symbolically, as in the dry garden where the gravel is raked into patterns representing waves on the ocean. The small waterfalls suggest mountain cascades. Water’s sounds are music in this environment. Waterfalls are sometimes the actual sources of water in Japanese gardens, while in other instances they are dry cascades in which stones simply suggest the fall of water. The waterfall plays such an important role in Chinese and Japanese landscape painting, an art form that probably inspired the creation of many Japanese gardens. Depending upon the size and nature of the pond, gardens that include bodies of water with islands generally include bridges connecting the islands with the shore and often with each other. Rather than the typical garden filled with striking statuary, showy plants and flowers, the Japanese Garden is a monochromatic understatement, in which the viewer is permitted the thrill of personal interpretation and discovery.
