I am pulled towards Colin Brown's Tamaya. It's in the gallery now, hanging with its five sisters, on a black wall with gold frames. What is the attraction that pulls me to it? This is a question an art dealer repeatedly asks. Tamaya is one of the first miniature collaged paintings in Colin Brown's The Spirit of Edo series to be exhibited. I could have chosen one of its sisters too, for they all have a similar quality.
The miniature scale makes the work intimate, to be read like a secret book, a pillow book maybe, because Tamaya in this context refers to the Tamaya brothel in the Yoshiwara district of Edo (now Tokyo.) And Edo Japan! There is a fascinating place. It is recognisable because the people in the prints and kabuki plays are much like us, but it celebrates life in a different way. The courtesans who worked in the pleasure district were respected and seen as an ideal in Buddhist and Shinto faiths. They had their young attendants and understood the floating world of sex, death and politics better than any - and celebrated the beauty of transience, or at least they guided people through it. Lives after all, to a Buddhist, are short and full of suffering.
There are two woodblock prints collaged into Tamaya – Kausagano and Utahama of the Tamaya brothel by Utamaro (1797) and Peony and Peacock by Hiroshige (1844.) Colin Brown reinterprets these for the twenty-first century, in mixed media, energising them with the artistic water that has flowed since the prints were made, which gives Brown’s work a new relevance, a Johnny Cash-style reinvention. The subject matter of peacock and peony are familiar to Colin Brown from his previous botanical series of works that explored Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s watercolours, where nature’s abundance is shown through flowers and birds. This is mirrored in the second woodblock, but here we journey to eighteenth-century Japan. The two are unified through composition – circles and dots in orange, white and red; a background of blue and pink; strange tadpoles of white and flecks of paint like snow. Brown has made this work float… but it is a floating world after all.
