Kamisaka Sekka

Kamisaka Sekka (神坂雪佳)(1866-1942) was a Japanese artist and craftsman of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The final master of the Rinpa school of painting, Sekka also worked in lacquer and in a variety of other media.

In 1910, Sekka was sent to Glascow to study Western art and craftsmanship. He sought to learn more about the Western attraction to japonisme, and which elements or facets of Japanese art would be more attractive to the West. Returning to Japan, he taught at the newly opened Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, experimented with Western tastes, styles, and methods, and incorporated them into his otherwise traditional Japanese-style works. It is easy to see this juxtaposition by looking at almost any of his paintings. While he sticks to traditional Japanese subject matter, and some elements of Rinpa painting, the overall effect is very Western and modern. He uses bright colors in large swaths, his images seeming on the verge of being patterns rather than proper pictures of a subject; the colors and patterns seem almost to 'pop', giving the paintings an almost three-dimensional quality.