Boku Arts

I began to study the Boku arts with Japanese brushmaster or (Shihan) Ari Tomita, in 2000. Ari was a student of one of Japan’s National Treasures, Takaka Oishi, as well as Shiryu Morita, who was her mentor. Shiryu became one of the most influential of Kanji masters to inspire the American Abstract Expressionists such as Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline.
Let me describe some moments of practice and you may get a glimpse of its Way. My Sensei (teacher) instructs us to gather our energy as the brush takes its final breath in the gap of silence. Here, the process of “how it is”, no location or two-dimensionality, is the aim. The focus is to enter the three-dimensional place with the whole body movement. The form is a resonance of meaning like a word you repeat over and over until it sinks into the psyche and penetrates the chaos. It is a correlation of mind and heart abstracted into an art form. Paper, ink, brush and empty mind distill as a visual Haiku.