The Plants Can Wait: “Rock, People, Chisels” at Kubota Garden

8/8/14 Diamine Chocolate Brown, Red Dragon, Pilot Iroshizuku Take-Sumi and Tsuyu-kusa inks, Zig markers, Caran d'Ache Museum water-soluble colored pencils, Canson XL 140 lb. paper

Scheduling today’s Friday ad hoc sketch outing at Kubota Garden was prompted by an event Kate saw on the garden’s website: “Rock, People, Chisels,” an Ishigaki (stone wall) workshop. I didn’t pay much attention to that event because I knew from a previous visit years ago that the garden itself would be a delight to sketch, and any additional event would be frosting on the cake. As it turned out, I spent the whole time on the “frosting” and decided that the “cake” – the 20 acres of beautifully landscaped gardens – could wait for a future visit.

As soon as we walked onto the property, I realized something big was going on: A huge yellow crane no different from the kind I’ve been sketching at construction sites rose ominously above the gardens. I soon understood that the “rocks” these people were chiseling were actually huge boulders – 500 tons of granite that would be cut and turned into an 8-foot wall built with a 10,000-year-old dry-stone stacking method. Fifteen stonemasons had traveled from all over the country and Japan to work on the project with Junji and Suminori Awata, 14^th and 15^th generation stonemasons and masters of their craft. They use the same techniques that were used to build Japanese castles before the 16^th century. The wall they are building will become Kubota Garden’s Terrace Overlook.

All of that is very interesting, but as soon as I saw the stonemason team at work, I took a “sketch-first,-ask-questions-later” approach. (I learned what they were doing afterwards during a break.) Despite the constant clink-clink-clinking of chisel on stone and the swirls of dust set off by masons blowing excess debris through a straw, I was sucked in immediately by their activity. As their painstaking work continued, a master would occasionally come by to make suggestions or demonstrate a technique.

8/8/14 Platinum Carbon, Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuyu-kusa and Fuyu-syogun inks,
watercolor, Zig markers, Caran d'Ache Museum water-soluble colored pencils

Eventually the crane started rotating into action, moving boulders around, so for my second sketch, I walked around the pond to the opposite side of the site. My sketch viewpoint is just a short distance from the view in the architect’s conceptual image below, which shows what the completed terrace will look like next spring.

We had a great turnout of sketchers on this gorgeous day, including several new faces!

Architectural rendering of the completed terrace.